In a classic episode of The Simpsons from the mid-Nineties, Bart gets into an argument about the soul with his friend Milhouse. Bart won’t be persuaded that the soul is real, and to show how serious he is, agrees to sell his to Milhouse. But soon, a series of strange happenings convince Bart that the soul is real after all, and he becomes desperate to get his back. Noticing his anxiety one night, Marge hugs him, then says, “Hmm, it’s not fear of nuclear war.”

By this time, 1995, World War Three had receded as a realistic prospect and the fear of it could be played for End-of-History laughs. But the joke only worked because many of those watching would’ve remembered those years, the early to mid-Eighties, when there’d been real reason to fear nuclear war. That had been a period of renewed Cold War hostilities, in Afghanistan, Europe, Central America and elsewhere. Back then the Reagan administration was very much on the offensive against “the evil empire”. In response to the Soviets replacing their older, less accurate and silo-based intermediate-range nuclear missiles with the new SS-20, a road-mobile missile which was much harder to target, the United States was in the process of deploying nuclear cruise missiles to several sites in Europe. Whatever the justice of the US move it was met with fierce protests, such as that at RAF Greenham Common: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament protestors, almost exclusively women, established a “peace camp” at the base that would persist for years. The fears motivating the action were far from groundless. With their terrain-following flight, cruise missiles could, in theory, be used to launch a sneak attack (although this was also true, albeit to a lesser extent, with the ballistic SS-20s). The president’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which aimed at developing a futuristic space-based ICBM shield (and which, curiously, fringe political figure Lyndon LaRouche and his followers tried to claim credit for), was another threat to the delicate balance of terror.

In addition to all this, there were a number of dangerous international incidents. By far the most headline-grabbing was the 1983 shoot-down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, of which there were no survivors. The Boeing 747, with 269 people on board (including 62 Americans), had strayed into a highly sensitive part of Soviet airspace, near a nuclear submarine base. And these were only the things the public knew about. Had it been privy to the information that Soviet forces were often at a high state of war readiness, had it known about the various near misses and false alarms of those years, then public concern would likely have reached panic levels.

I have a schoolboy memory from a little later, an afternoon in ‘86 or ‘87 — less fraught years, the period of Gorbachev and glasnost. I would’ve been ten years old. In my memory the classroom is bathed in autumn or spring sunshine. We’re calmly discussing nuclear war and underground nuclear bomb shelters with our class teacher. Somehow we kids know that, if the worst were to happen, the shelters would be for rich people and politicians, not for us.

Envisaging the end

Though by 1995 I think I’d still not seen it, some of those Simpsons fans might’ve remembered a shocking, politically charged movie that had captured the fearful zeitgeist of that earlier period. That was the made-for-TV war drama Threads, a film with decidedly fewer laughs than the average Simpsons episode. First broadcast on BBC Two on September 23rd, 1984, Threads was a serious attempt to imagine the unimaginable. The critical consensus is that it succeeded more fully than any other nuclear war drama before or since. But following the Cold War’s end the film, though well-regarded, came to be viewed as an historical curio, an exploration of now-obsolete fears. Few of us in 1995 suspected that within just a few decades Threads, and the handful of other films to tackle this subject (like Threads’ banned predecessor, The War Game, and ABC’s The Day After), would regain all their old relevance, as shock geopolitical developments in Eastern Europe gave the world every reason to fear nuclear war once again. Here in Poland, where a major Russian drone incursion occurred two months ago, ending with the shooting down of the unmanned aircraft by Polish and Dutch warplanes, many are resigned to the possibility of war with Russia in the coming years. Over 40 years after its first broadcast, then, Threads is once again essential viewing.

Though a British-Australian coproduction, Threads feels very much a British film, one in the country’s social realist tradition. There’s an element of kitchen-sink drama, at least early on, which makes the gradual transition to nightmare war movie all the more unsettling. The film is set in Sheffield, South Yorkshire’s biggest city. This county was the home turf of the film’s writer Barry Hines, known for the novel A Kestrel for a Knave as well as for the screenplay of its film adaptation Kes, considered one of the greatest contributions to the social realist genre. Hines, who died in 2016, was a native of mining village Hoyland, just outside Sheffield. Threads’ director Mick Jackson was hired on the strength of the BBC nuclear war documentary A Guide to Armageddon, produced by him for science series Q.E.D.

Although Sheffield was, by the mid-Eighties, well on its way to being a deindustrialised city, it was assumed such a large population centre would still be high on the Soviets’ list of targets, as it had been on the Luftwaffe’s during the Blitz — thus it was a plausible setting for Threads. The proximity of RAF Finningley made it doubly sure Sheffield and its environs would be hit in the event of a nuclear exchange, and most likely hit hard. Another factor recommended Sheffield to the filmmakers: the local Labour-run council was militantly anti-Thatcher and anti-nuclear, and so was happy to give the production every possible assistance.

Threads opens with a narrator — Paul Vaughan, then a familiar voice from many BBC arts and science programmes — delivering a very short monologue over a montage that intercuts shots of infrastructure (power lines, buses etc) with footage of a spider spinning its web:

“In an urban society, everything connects. Each person’s needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.”

Hence the film’s title. Throughout the first half, Vaughan continues to chime in with quietly chilling facts about Britain’s real-life contingency plans for nuclear war, giving the production a docudrama feel. In the second half he eventually falls silent, as the imagery tells its own story.

Threads doesn’t really have a protagonist, rather it follows the fortunes of a number of characters. But the one we spend most time with is Ruth (Karen Meagher), a young working-class woman with much to look forward to at the outset. Having found out she’s pregnant, she’s relieved to learn her boyfriend Jimmy (Reece Dinsdale) is willing to do the decent thing. We see them preparing for married life with the blessing of their families. Here Hines delivers some barbed sociopolitical commentary: Jimmy and Ruth find it funny that Jimmy’s father’s redundancy money will have to go toward renovating a property for the young family-to-be. The elder man won’t be able to holiday in the Bermuda as he’d planned, but “will be glad for something to do”.

Interspersed with these domestic scenes are news reports on a major crisis beginning to unfold in the Middle East: a US-backed coup in Iran has prompted the Soviets to launch a full-scale invasion of that country. It seems significant that Hines has America precipitate events — an implicit condemnation of Reagan’s aggressive posture. As the crisis escalates towards an armed confrontation between the superpowers, the film shows war preparations ramping up at both national and local level. Sheffield’s head councillor is instructed to gather his team of wartime administrators: a handful of people who, if the balloon goes up, will be tasked with maintaining some semblance of a functioning society in whatever is left of the city. We’re told that many of these administrators will be learning of their roles for the first time, and that none of them will be entirely sure what their jobs are going to entail. As war looms, the team enter their nuclear bunker — which turns out to be the basement of city hall, hastily remade into a command post.

A further realistic touch is provided by the inclusion of the Protect and Survive public information films, the audio of which can sometimes be heard in the background. This series of PIFs was put together in the early Seventies by Richard Taylor Cartoons, who (somewhat surreally) also produced the Charley Says PIFs for children. Made as part of a wider government campaign that would also incorporate pamphlets, newspapers ads and radio broadcasts, Protect and Survive was only to be aired in the event the British government believed nuclear war likely in the next 72 hours. However, the series leaked in 1980 and extracts were broadcast on Panorama. The series instructs viewers on nuclear explosions, fallout, how to construct a shelter, ways to dispose of a body and so on. With their strange, stark visuals and eerie radiophonic sound effects it’s hard to imagine these very short films being at all reassuring, but maybe that was the point. They command attention, are disturbing and compelling. The ident and sound effects would’ve drawn distracted, worried Britons to their televisions. Like Charley Says and other everyday PIFs (all curiously unsettling these days), and, in a gentler register, Oliver Postgate’s various series, Protect and Survive was an example of what the late blogger Mark Fisher called “weird paternalism”, an aspect of late Sixties and Seventies social democracy that disappeared in the neoliberal era (unless Threads can be considered an unusual late example of it).

The Old Left eclipsed

Barry Hines’ work focused on left-wing, working-class and Northern concerns, and Threads touches upon these. As the Iran crisis escalates and widens we see protesters taking to the streets in a CND march (most of the film’s actors were in fact members). Days later there’s a moment of black humour as a speaker at a much more fraught protest calls for a general strike, as if that could have any effect whatsoever. It’s tempting to read the scene as a subtle comment on the eclipse of traditional Left-wing politics in an age dominated by the neoliberal Right.

Indeed, the whole film takes on added depth when viewed within that context. Now, Threads is by common consent one of the darkest films ever made. There’s a disturbing sense of logical inevitability about the way the world moves step-by-step toward the precipice. When, after progressively ratcheting up the tension, Threads shows us the actual attack, it is genuinely frightening. There are no heroics, only suffering and death, either instantaneous or slow. Later, the nuclear exchange having run its course, a stark computer readout informs us that 3000 megatons have been exploded globally, with 210 falling on Britain. Needless to say, the second half of Threads is not an easy watch. Many aspects of the grim postwar situation are explored: the hazards of radiation, the search for loved ones in the ruins, shortages of food and water, the collapse of law and order and the shooting of looters, the impossibility of treating the multitudes of sick and injured, the coming of nuclear winter. This last is somewhat controversial as there is no consensus on whether a sharp drop in temperature— caused by immense quantities of soot being injected into the stratosphere by firestorms — would actually occur.

The film also takes us some years into the future. Language is shown to have regressed to a primitive state, as in the post-apocalyptic world of Russell Hoban’s novel Riddley Walker. Almost everyone seems to be under eighteen, the clear implication being that no one lives very long anymore. Technology is at a near-medieval level.

However, I think the film’s darkness has its roots not only in the subject matter, but also in the dire situation all those opposed to Thatcherism found themselves in in 1983/84 (a situation analogous to the one dissidents contend with today). Labour had taken a hard-left turn under Michael Foot, a classic case of not reading the room — hard-left agitation was widely (and not unreasonably) blamed for the industrial strife Britain had been mired in for years. The centrist SDP-Liberal Alliance, newly formed as a compact between moderate ex-Labour Social Democrats and the Liberals, also stood against Thatcherism. Rather than the ”rolling back of socialism” the Thatcherites were enacting, the Alliance advocated a reform of British social democracy that would have brought it closer to the West German model (social market economy, proportional representation). Lastly, there were the Tory moderates, dismissed as “wets” by Thatcher and largely defeated by her in her first parliament.

By 1984 the Thatcherite revolution had been underway for five years; resistance to it had been largely ineffectual. The great dismantling of British social democracy was proceeding apace: disinvestment of industries, crushing of unions, rapid privatisations, selling off of social housing — all enacted according to the dogma that there was no such thing as society.

Thatcherism advanced the South’s interests at the expense of the North’s. Here is the late Ian Jack in his penetrating 1987 book Before the Oil Ran Out:

“Between December 1979 and September 1986 the number of people who worked in manufacturing industry declined by almost two million, from 7,053,000 to 5,128,000. Most of the jobs lost were in northern England, the West Midlands, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; in fact ninety-four per cent of all jobs lost since 1979 were north of a line drawn between the Wash and the Bristol Channel. This is a new frontier, a successor to Hadrian’s Wall and the Highland Line. Above it, wealth and the population dwindle; beneath it, both expand. Of course the division isn’t absolute. Glasgow has Porsches and London poverty. Overall, however, it is difficult (I would say impossible) to avoid the conclusion that large parts of Britain and its population now serve no wider economic purpose than the service of themselves. For many people, their link with history - the functions and behaviour, morality and religion of their recent ancestors - has been snapped.”

The Conservatives were able to push this through because they dominated general elections throughout the Eighties. 1983’s ballot gave the Tories a colossal majority and Labour suffered its worst drubbing since 1931. The Alliance went from 9 to 23 seats — a promising result, but with potential coalition partner Labour in the wilderness both electorally and ideologically, it didn’t mean much. The Thatcherite wrecking ball was swinging and, for now, there was no one capable of stopping it. By the time the opposition got its act together it might well be too late. Many towns and cities throughout the country, but especially in the North, might have nothing to look forward to but terminal decline.

British and Brechtian

Revisited today, Threads startles with its stark modernist aesthetic and bleak, at times eerie mood. It completely lacks the music that mires so many of today’s docudramas in corniness. Barry Hines was reportedly at loggerheads with director Mick Jackson over the latter’s decision to include a narrator. Hines found Paul Vaughan’s narration to detract from the drama, but for me his contribution — delivering information on Britain’s lack of preparedness for nuclear war, the effects of radiation and so on — works superbly. Vaughan was a familiar voice from BBC arts and science programmes, so his lines lend additional authority to the film and, by tying it to a familiar and ”cosy” televisual world, makes it all the more disquieting.

Certain touches in Threads — the lack of heroism, the abrupt deaths of major characters, the wordless montages, the blunt facts delivered in cyan text on a black screen — add up to a Brechtian verfremdungseffekt (distancing or alienation effect). As in Brecht’s theatre, interpreting what is put before us in our usual clichéd, complacent ways is made impossible.

There’s a sense in which the film strikes even at the religious convictions then loudly professed by many in the radical conservative movement. Threads’ modernist vision of the universe is uncompromising: austere, matter-of-fact, devoid of metaphysical consolations. Even the Apocalypse, when it comes, appears to have no religious significance. The Rapture looked forward to by Evangelicals is nowhere to be seen. Life struggles on, but under massively worse conditions.

Docudramas (indeed films of any kind) as accomplished as Threads, so full of dark passion and righteous anger, are rare today. The gravity and urgency of the political situation inspired a superb late example of British cinematic modernism. The defenders of social democracy knew their world was disappearing, but faced an infinitely worse possibility besides: the destruction of the world, tour court. It’s clear this threat has in some measure returned — thanks to war or the threat of war in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Far East — but I have my doubts whether our governing or creative classes fully grasp what that means.

Able Archers

In 2022 I thought seriously about the possibility of nuclear war for the first time since my school days. For a few weeks that year some truly insane things were being proposed, such as a NATO-enforced no-fly zone in Ukraine. In September Putin declared his threat to use nuclear weapons if necessary was “not a bluff”. One of the messages of Threads is that any violent confrontation between nuclear-armed powers can very quickly spiral out of control.

That same year former US intelligence officer Brian J. Morra published The Able Archers, an account of the superpower confrontations of 1983 in the form of a novel. In the forward to that book Kevin Cattani, another intelligence professional and one who had personal involvement with those events, writes,

“It is my firm view that 1983 was the most dangerous year in human history.”

Morra recently noted worrying parallels between then and the present day:

“Today, as in 1983, open communication between Washington and Moscow is too rare. As of October 2022, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin and his Russian counterpart, Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu, have spoken only twice since the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. History suggests more frequent contact would be prudent.”

Morra relates how President Reagan was shocked to learn, in 1984, that his by-then late Soviet counterpart, General Secretary Yuri Andropov, had strongly suspected Reagan of plotting his own Operation Barbarossa: a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USSR. This alarming finding, uncovered by the CIA after the fact, contributed to Reagan’s decision to take a less belligerent approach to the Soviets.

No doubt the problem we face now is that the Cold War is distant enough that its lessons — well understood by the makers of Threads — are in the process of being forgotten. That threatens to make the future more dangerous even than that very tense four- or five-year period four decades ago.

The author is modest about his self-published work, describing it as “an entertainment, a comedy about a fairly inconsequential person, fumbling through life, full of illusions, making mistakes, but also making discoveries and connections and achieving a few things.”

However, as Tyler freely acknowledges, readers of this memoir may well take its author for un fou, a madman. At the time, many associates questioned the sanity of a man resolved to try and forge a country music career in Britain. Furthermore, by the author’s own admission, his is a story in which self-sabotage appears to play a not-insignificant role.

Hailing from Kenton in northwest London, Alan Tyler went from punk experiments and fanzine production in his teens in the late 70s to founding country band The Rockingbirds a little over a decade later. The group was six-strong, with Tyler as the outfit’s singer-songwriter, acoustic guitarist and leader. Hip label Heavenly put out The Rockingbirds’ eponymous debut LP in ‘92; though well reviewed, it didn’t trouble the album charts. Their only semi-hit single was not even their own, being a cover of Right Said Fred’s “Deeply Dippy” recorded for a charity record.

Follow-up LP Whatever Happened to the Rockingbirds emerged in ‘95, with sales still more underwhelming than those of their debut. This lack of commercial success (which to some extent the group’s leader blames himself for), and the band’s split that year, compelled Tyler to take a different course in life. In an echo of John Hartford’s song In Tall Buildings, covered on The Rockingbirds, the singer-songwriter took up office work, continuing his music career as a modest side hustle.

How To Never Have A Hit relates this whole story: not only the compelling, funny, sometimes moving details of The Rockingbirds’ (mis)adventures but also Tyler’s experiences as just another normie on the PAYEroll, first for a small London “media” business staffed by oddballs, later for the civil service under both Labour and the Conservatives. We also learn some melancholy details about Tyler’s personal life, plus a few bright ones.

Despite having been a full-time employee of HM Government, Tyler has had quite an eventful 21st century on the music front: he’s pursued a solo career and managed a popular, London pub-based weekly folk and country event. He’s also reformed The Rockingbirds—this he did in the early 2010s. Of especial interest toward the end of the book is Tyler’s account of how, by closing down his social media accounts, he “cancelled” some of his more tiresome left-wing associates before they cancelled him.

Alan Tyler generously allowed me to interview him about his life and career, and his experience of writing How To Never Have A Hit.

PH: Why country music, an American genre? Does it have another meaning for you, evoking England, the English countryside?

AT: I very much took the punk rock “destroy all rock-n-roll” rhetoric at its word, so after a few years of being into “new wave” that scene quickly exhausted itself for me and in the mid 80s I cast about for other things, something different, ending up in a swingy pop group called Take It. Country proved my next rich “unmined resource” It hadn't really been done before at all by a British group, with fairly obscure exceptions: Brinsley Schwartz, the Downliners Sect.

It could’ve been something huge, like the Beatles and the Stones selling r’n’b back to the Americans. That was the idea, but of course it didn’t happen. More recently, yes, I came to investigate the "English country garden”, as it were. The rural history that haunts the urban present. My song "Somewhere Better” is literally a country song in that it is a song about a country, or more accurately, a kingdom, a nation state, and the lives and aspirations of the people in it.

Which songs are you proudest of?

“The Blue Man” [a late 90s song, which Alan recorded as part of a short-lived duo called Famous Times] is a one that stands out, and so is the Rockingbirds’ Gradually Learning. But both are long and slow to get going, which counted against them commercially. When Sony wanted a shorter version of Gradually Learning for the single and video, I went to the mastering and edited out the middle eight, because I was too fond of the instrumental ending. Producer Clive Langer was aghast!

“Down On Deptford Creek” I am proud of. Descriptive lyrics - a river poem. “Jonathan Jonathan” [a tribute to the Modern Lovers’ Jonathan Richman, which Alan got to play in person to his hero] is probably rightly my best known song. Pointless presenter and million selling author Richard Osman knows all the lyrics, someone told me. Maybe they were twitting me. A Rockingbirds urban myth.

I like my El Tapado electronic album a lot.

Like many musicians I am fonder of my later efforts, while others prefer the old stuff!

I think I’ve a "realistic" take on my strengths and weaknesses. My stuff has merit, but I am not saying it deserved to do better than it did. I can turn my hand to lyrics when I get a strong idea, but my talent as an instrumentalist and composer is technically limited; this I overcome by conning good musicians to work with me. Ha ha.

The title of the book suggests it lays out a recipe for not being a commercial success. You do express some regrets in there and mention a “self-destructive impulse” at work. Is that how you see it?

Yes. With The Rockingbirds we were chasing success, but I was running away from it at the same time, which is what my Agoristo chapter is about [the chapter describes how a mysterious dream Tyler had turned into an obsession]. Even my book title is deliberately “wrong”, it’s a bit of a no-no to express a negative if you are trying to sell something. I’m still self-sabotaging! I did offer "Gradually Learning” as a more positive alternative, but publishers remained uninterested. Gradually Learning can be the film title. Ha ha.

The bits about your “normie” work in the book are no less interesting than the rest. The part about Speedex I found fascinating: one of those small, strange, vaguely seedy enterprises that generally go unnoticed. I didn’t even know that kind of work [recording TV mentions of firms onto VHS and sending the tapes to those firms to get paid] existed.

That's good. Thanks. The Speedex section is one which I am particularly pleased with. I deal with civil service/corporate culture in another chapter.

“It was always Year Zero in the civil service” is a horrifying sentence, though perhaps not surprising. It casts an ironic light on Yes Minister, where Sir Humphrey and pals always wanted to maintain the dysfunctional status quo.

I was too low down to see much of Sir Humphrey’s Machiavellian chicanery, but saw lots of sclerotic corporate audit culture.

Could you say something about W G Sebald and Mark Fisher, who you’ve mentioned to me as influences?

I wrote a diary of a walk I did of the North Norfolk coast, which got featured on the Caught By The River website. Afterwards somebody told me it was reminiscent of Sebald’s Rings Of Saturn, so I read it with great interest along with Austerlitz - now favourite books of mine. My use of photos without captions is straight out of Sebald. In a few places, I have tried to make amusing or strange connections between obscure individuals and places and greater things, historic events, which is a Sebaldian thing, maybe.

Regarding Mark Fisher, I didn’t know anything about him until after he died. I make use of his “Slow Cancellation of the Future” talk in the last “Yesterday’s Chips” chapter to explain how music has lost its history-making, genre generating power, leaving us with endless reiterations of similar things. There is still good new music but not the great movements of the past. The book touches on cancel culture, a subject on which Fisher blazed a trail with his [Exiting the] Vampire Castle essay. Fisher also wrote about the Kafkaesque hell of managerialism and HR in Capitalist Realism, drawing from his own experience in teaching. In my experience the civil service put huge energies into creating the appearance of improvement and value, often with negative impacts on reality. I write about empire building managers in their remote realms of trusted data and expert advice always wanting “more resources”. Paula Vennells at the Post Office was typical of all that, not an aberration, as people want to think.

To be fair, Fisher had no solutions, and now we have a Republican US president and his side-kicks taking over, who are committed to tearing down the bureaucratic anti-production that Fisher criticised!

In the book, though, you relate how appalled you and your friends were by Trump’s shock win in 2016. Would you say your view of him, and your politics generally, have shifted over the past 8 years?

I still think Trump is narcissistic and very post-truth; what changed is I no longer think the opposition is better. Trump’s lies have tended to be capricious and self-serving, but the Democrats and their supporters everywhere are committed to stupid stuff that is institutionalised and culturally dominant, and as CS Lewis observed, it may be better to be ruled by a selfish tin-pot dictator than by legions of politicised people who will never give you a moment’s peace because they are doing it for your own good.

What next for Alan Tyler?

A few Rockingbirds gigs in 2025 are planned. I am also working on a show which will intersperse readings from the book with songs from my career, almost like a little musical.

I must admit, I have no present ambition to make more albums. I am feeling, once again, that my work is almost done, as I did in 1992 after our first album was recorded. I'm feeling a bit Agoristo.. wanting to have my day and disappear.

Leave new music to the youngsters. Good luck to them, they need it. As I say in the book, the up-escalator for bands has broken down. A large part of the eco-system in which bands thrived has gone.

Come to think of it, even the prospect of “having a hit”, a popular song that most people can hum or whistle, is outmoded, something that belongs to 20^th century mass culture – the whole family sitting round the telly, watching Top Of The Pops. It’s over. Hits are things that haunt us from the past. Every Christmas, the same ones! Could AI write a huge hit? Perhaps we will never know. I don’t think so. More likely it will churn out Huxleyan aural wellness balm, on tap as it were, on subscription, or on prescription.

Though music’s been hugely important to me since my late teens, I’ve not paid close attention to the contemporary scene for over ten years. Of course, I’m not unusual. Many if not most of my peers are similarly disinterested. Even prior to the late 2000s my once-strong interest in new music was waning. The Libertines, The Strokes, Interpol and Franz Ferdinand: this hipster crew, the rock idols of the time, were merely doing straight rehashes of earlier styles. These bands were competent enough: you might be listening to The Clash, The Modern Lovers or Joy Division. And that was the problem: their homages were too good. With no real attempt to bring something new to the (mixing) table, why not just stick with the originals?

I’d discovered Mark Fisher’s k-punk blog in 2005, so was familiar with his developing critique of a mainstream pop and rock scene in crisis. Increasingly devoid of ideas and innovation, pop now struggled to generate what had once been its forte, the shock of the new. It was a view shared by dedicated music writer Simon Reynolds, who would later pen a book on the subject, Retromania. Music, even so-called “indie” (by this point a mere genre label, shorn of its original politico-economic meaning), had become conservative and backward-looking. So Fisher, Reynolds and others declaimed, and they deplored how pop musicians were apparently now content to reproduce what had gone before, coasting along on old glories.

Even so, the internet and MP3s made a new alchemy possible. From the early 2000s to the mid-2010s the meeting of this backward focus with the new technology brewed up a clutch of strange and intriguing alt genres. Fisher and co would write on them with interest, even with uncharacteristic hope. Among these microgenres were hauntology, chillwave, hypnagogic pop, witch house and vaporwave. I got into the first of these thanks to Fisher, the Ghost Box label and online music store Boomkat, where I would explore most of the others later. My interest in new music was revived, and for four or maybe five years I kept an eye out for new releases and emerging trends.

Revisiting the Boomkat site, which I’ve not been a regular customer of for a decade, I look back on my early purchase history. My first acquisition dates from October 2010: The Caretaker’s Persistent Repetition of Phrases, one of the key artists, and records, of British hauntology. Some kindred records follow: albums by Moon Wiring Club, The Advisory Circle, Belbury Poly and others.

What was that mini-genre, hauntology? Or rather, what is it, as it’s not dead yet (it’s undead). Given that the early (and some of the later) music of my interview subject fits comfortably inside hypnagogic pop, a microgenre Fisher and others considered an American cousin to British hauntology, it’s a question worth answering here.

Though Britain’s hauntological pop is fairly easy to define, its effects are harder to explain. The Caretaker excepted (whose music samples crackly records from the Al Bowlly era), with this subgenre of electronic you typically get old analogue synths, echoes of the library music of the 60s and 70s, spectral voices from the TV and radio of that era, and a nagging sense of familiarity. The best of the genre transcends mere nostalgia and evokes das Unheimliche, a feeling famously explored by Freud and variously translated as “the uncanny” or “the unhomely”.

It was probably a Boomkat recommendation that got me to cross the musical Atlantic and discover hypnagogic pop. I can’t think of another route that would’ve brought me to Rangers’ debut LP Suburban Tours, released in early 2010 by Olde English Spelling Bee. To my knowledge, Fisher never wrote about it, though he did pen a piece on Ariel Pink, hypnagogic pop’s “godfather”. Fisher’s introduction is serviceable as an intro to hypnagogic pop as a whole:

Credited as the founder of Chillwave, Ariel Pink was also central to hauntology (it’s now often forgotten that much of the initial discussion of hauntology was prompted by Pink’s records) and he is the single most significant influence on hypnagogic pop, which seems to be similarly poised between FM rock, MTV and the avant-garde. In Ariel Pink’s music, the past is simultaneously invoked and obstructed: fragments of what seem to be familiar rock and pop jewels are tantalisingly veiled behind multiple layers of distortion and effects. The name “Haunted Graffiti” perfectly captures the appeal of Ariel Pink’s sound: it is psychedelic as well as spectral, spraypaint-vivid as well as ectosplasm-insubstantial.

As Rangers’ Joe Knight explains below, Ariel Pink’s approach (if not so much his sound) was inspirational for him in his early days. Suburban Tours is at the rock end of hypnagogic, with guitar and bass to the fore, but many of the other features I enumerated for British hauntology apply here. There’s what I recall the Boomkat blurb called “a subtle glaze of electronics” (the album and blurb are gone from the site). One key difference from hauntology is the sound here is lo-fi and the vocals or other elements often distorted, as if heard through an antique radio or at the edge of sleep (hence “hypnagogic”). Another difference is the frame of reference. Like Ariel Pink’s records, ST seems preoccupied with the 80s, in contrast to the earlier decades that o9bsess its British contemporaries. These could be lost progressive rock or New Wave tracks (think Rush or The Passions), but there’s something a little strange going on, something “other”. For me, it’s this haunting aspect that renders ST more than just straight pastiche. I quickly counted the record among my favourites, and to this day I play it often. The artwork, which I’ve always found fascinating, deserves a mention. Depicting the near-empty car-park of what one imagines is a dead mall, the eerie painting underscores the music’s peculiar spectral quality.

In 2011 Rangers released a worthy follow-up to Suburban Tours, Pan Am Stories. Though similarly lo-fi, this record is a little less hard-driving than ST, more wistful and melancholic. A clutch of other Knight records were unleased on the world around the same time and shortly after, with a number of them being collaborations with Peter Berends and put out under various names. A longtime favourite of mine is KWJAZ’s 2012 self-titled release, a purely instrumental, psychedelic affair.

The middle of the decade saw Knight moving away from the late 2000s / early 10s lo-fi sound to something cleaner. But many of the psychedelic and hypnagogic elements—distortion, reverb, vocal samples etc—have continued to feature in his music. Joe Knight is now well established on Bandcamp and Spotify with, as the cliché runs, a modest but loyal fanbase, especially on the former.

But anyway, enough with the preliminaries. On to the interview.

Paul Heron: Hello Joe, thanks again for agreeing. As I said, we exchanged emails back in 2010 or 11 I think it was, after Suburban Tours but before Pan Am Stories. I think you had a website and had some new tracks on there. Then you pulled one or more of them and I wrote asking where they’d gone, lol. Maybe this rings a bell? You replied saying you were reworking some tracks for a new album. I think that was the extent of our communications back then. So anyway, I’ve been a fan since 2010 and now that I’ve a Substack and an audience I thought it’d be interesting to seek you out and ask you about your music.

Joe Knight: Vaguely rings a bell! And sure thing, all sounds good. Crazy how long ago that seems, it was like another lifetime for me.

PH: Yeah, does for me too. But also feels like the time’s passed quickly if you know what I mean. Okay then. To get us rolling, could you say a few words about yourself?

JK: Sure. I was born in Houston, Texas in 1979 which makes me 45 and a very, very young Gen X'er I guess. I grew up in the golden age of MTV and started classical guitar lessons at the age of 12. All of my close friends also played guitar and that was also the golden age of guitar magazines. These magazines would offer tablatures of songs and had a formula, a classic rock song (Zeppelin or ACDC), a modern rock song (Metallica, Nirvana or any grunge band of the early 90's) and then there would always be some type of punk or post-punk song (The Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Cure). I watched a lot of Headbangers Ball and also 120 Minutes on MTV, which was an AMAZING show and played a lot of music from England at the time (Morrissey, Suede, anything coming out of Manchester in the early 90's) as well as American College/Indie rock. My friend Paul had a Tascam 4 track cassette recorder and we spent a lot of time recording music as teenagers. I think the idea of recording something, anything, intrigued me more than being in a band in my formative years, as crazy as that sounds. Music was pretty dormant for me through my college years and it wasn't until post-college and the crush of the reality of working in an office that I realized I needed some kind of creative outlet. This was around 2005-2006 when the first iterations of GarageBand came out and that's when I started recording music. Ariel Pink also emerged during this time and he was very inspirational. This is a bit hard to articulate but while I was never in love with his music, I was very inspired by it. He had created his own world and I wanted to create mine. I moved to San Francisco and was there from 2009 to 2012. Glorious years. I met many like-minded friends who I am still close with; it was the only time I ever felt part of a community. We all scattered out of SF and I ended up back in Texas. I still write and create music although it has a smaller role in my life now. I work for a university where they send me around the world to meet students and I am content.

PH: I remember Ariel Pink being a key figure at that time. And the whole idea of hauntedness seems connected to him especially. “Haunted Graffiti” etc. That’s something I’ll ask you about.
Something that struck me about Suburban Tours is how so many tracks were named after apparent places, but I’ve never been sure if they’re real. “Deerfield Village”, “Bear Creek” etc. This has always tied the record in my mind to Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land, where you have “Lizard Point”, “Dunwich Beach” etc. Place comes up again with Texas Rock Bottom, Out In The Sticks and probably others I’ve not got to yet. Would you say place has been an important inspiration for you as an artist?

JK: Those are all real places. I lived in a subdivision called Deerfield Village in Houston when I was very young.
Rush was also a big influence as a teenager; they have a song called “Subdivisions” I really liked. I only really was into a slice of their catalogue from say 79 to 85.

PH: I tried to Google Maps search the Suburban Tours place names once and got nothing, ha.

JK: And yes, I am a geography nut, whether it's rural topography or built up urban areas. As I kid I would look at globes and atlases all day.

PH: I know you don’t like the lyrics on Late Electrics [Joe calls them “cringe” in the record notes on Bandcamp, having revisited the album 6 years on for remixing], but “Never Expected Much” mentions “a lot of California plates, 800K” and “liberals with your high net worth”, and declares “this town is yours”. A rare appearance for politics in your music?

JK: Eh, I think I was struggling for lyrical content tbh haha. I lived for 1 year in Austin from 2017 to 2018 and it didn't go well. Long story short I left a smaller company in Dallas for a bigger company in Austin and it was the pits......so I asked for my old job back in Dallas and worked remote from Austin for a year before moving back to Dallas. It was a crappy situation. Austin is a tech hub and a lot of people who work in tech and live in a tech hub can be smug and you could feel that smugness there. A lot of self-important people who think they are changing the world. I'm very allergic to all that. When I left I swore I would never live in a tech hub again; now I live in a very low-key college town. So I wasn't trying to be political, I was just observing my surroundings and didn't think they were too spectacular.

PH: Alright, gotcha. I remember one reviewer or blurb writer (it might’ve been on Boomkat, where I used to get my music) comparing your first album to Steely Dan, who I hadn’t listened to then. And when I sampled them, I couldn’t hear the alleged similarities (I didn’t know then that the Dan’s music varies so much in style).
Anyway, that album has always evoked the 80s for me. Snippets of TV soundtracks heard late at night. Similarly Pan Am Stories and Reconsider Lounge. I think after that you moved away from that “hypnagogic” sound. Did you / do you see your early music as part of that scene? Hypnagogic / vaporwave?
Btw, I was born in 76, so that’s why the 80s thing resonates with me.

JK: I think they make the Steely Dan comparison because I use the occasional major or minor 7 chord which is a "jazz" sounding chord.
There is a tune called "California Slime" which I think I have as a bonus track on Sabbatical [I’ve not managed to confirm this with the Bandcamp version of the album, but the track is definitely on Curiosities 2017-2021] that is the closest I ever got to Steely Dan
Yeah, I remember the David Keenan Hypnagogic pop article in The Wire and I guess I see that. I honestly am not that familiar with Vaporwave
There is an old version of “California Slime” on Session Man but I did a sleeker version as the bonus track for Sabbatical.
I think for me that [80s] sound was somewhat accidental. I had a really cheap drum pad which I would manually play for my drum sound, and the only snare sound that sounded decent to me was a gated sound, which is like the 80's sound. Think any 80's synthpop and it had that snare sound. Almost anything automatically sounds 80's with that, and maybe that's why I thought it sounded good, because I grew up with those sounds all around me.
When you start piddling with home recording, especially on a tape machine like I had, you have to go to great lengths to make the music sound "interesting" because it isn't going to sound "good" in the traditional sense. So you use a gated drum setting. You crank up the effects on the guitar. You run the whole mix through distortion. You slow it down. Speed it up. Anything really.

PH: Alright, I’m going to get Sabbatical next. That’s one I’ve not listened to as I’ve mostly relied on Spotify since the end of the MP3 era (though I still use MP3s as Spotify quality isn’t great).
Btw, have you done much in the way of live shows?

JK: Almost nothing for live shows, I had a band in San Francisco for a while and we learned a lot of the Suburban Tours songs, but it just didn't work. For better or worse, a lot of Suburban Tours’ charm is the sound. Would anyone really want to see a dry version of "Woodland Hills"? Beyond the novelty of it? Anyway that was years ago and now I'm older and I could try to do the one man thing but I don't think I have the patience or the technical knowhow to make that interesting and I definitely don't have the time or the patience to try to round up band members to rehearse, lug around equipment to gigs, etc...

PH: You could do a collab with [James] Ferraro or someone like that…

JK: To be honest I wouldn't be interested at this point in my life; I think he has been a lifer musician and I never have. It's always been a hobby and I've always had a job.

PH: Actually, I think it was Ferraro’s Last American Hero that made the TV theme connection. I played it to an ex and she said it sounded like some old TV show. And then I realised your stuff had something similar going on. I think that was something in the air at the time. Maybe from Ariel Pink as you mentioned. But it also pops up on your later records. The electronic bits have that feel for me.
You mentioned geography books and atlases as an interest. Are you a big reader?

JK: Not as much as I should [be]. Tim Marshall had some interesting books on geography, Prisoners of Geography was really interesting. I'm reading a book called Ghost Wars now about the US involvement in Afghanistan leading up to 911.
I'm interested in geography and geopolitics; it also comes in handy for my job. I recruit international students and a lot of factors go into international student mobility, geopol being one

PH: I’m also interested in those. I’m reading Fernand Braudel now (in translation, I don’t speak French beyond phrasebook level). Going to investigate those books.
Okay, I’d like to ask you what your favourite Rangers albums and tracks are. Which are you most satisfied with? Also, which record was the most fun to create?

JK: That’s a really hard one. Pan Am [Stories] was probably the most fun because those times were a lot more innocent and fun, and for a brief moment it seemed like a lot could be possible.
I'm probably happiest with Sabbatical though, even though it was a digital only release. I would be curious to open those files back up like Late Electrics. I've learned more about mixing. Sabbatical was [recorded] during the pandemic, rough time.

PH: Did lockdown conditions have much influence on the making of the album? I picture you having nothing much else to do but make music.

JK: You would think so but it was also a very uninspiring time. I think I work best in small windows. For example, I just had a long university holiday break and I always think I will be productive with music during these stretches, but I can very quickly get sick of myself.

PH: I’ve started on Graham Coxon from Blur’s memoir. In the intro he talks about “ear worms”, ideas for chord sequences and so on that arrive “in his mental inbox”. Do you relate to that? Ideas coming from nowhere that nag away at you until you give them concrete form?

JK: Sometimes that can happen. Usually I need some kind of spark though. Sometimes I can map out a whole song in my head with different parts and dynamics and almost all of the time if I manifest it, it never turns out how I imagined; many times it doesn't work at all but every now and then you get lucky and it evolves into something else and it surprises you. Music is humbling like that. Often when I feel like I have control over it and am orchestrating something to my own will it sucks....but something random or weird will happen [that] I didn't control and it changes into something else and you like it, but it was out of your control.
There's a part in “Glen Carin”, or "Glencairn" on Spotify, from ST, where towards the end there is a misplaced keyboard. Total mistake, but it makes the song

PH: I think everything creative is like this. Writing for instance. There’s a sort of sorcery of the accidental. William Burroughs explored that.
In the notes to Late Electrics Reimagined you mention you’re working on some new music but something weird is happening in your life. Can you elaborate on that?
Also it’s funny that the title of that song is also wrong. Cairn: a pile of burial stones.

JK: Well that was my fault, that is another Houston neighborhood. For years I thought it was Glen Carin and I named it that in 2010, but when I looked it up it was Glencairn, so I fixed it on Spotify. I don't know about new music; I had a whole thing, probably 60 minutes of music and I think I'm going to scrap most of it and start fresh. I really don't know at the moment. I could take it or leave it.

PH: Just listening to “Glencairn” again and I agree, the accidental keyboard really sets the seal on it. Of course I never realised there was anything amiss.
Some of my favourite tracks of yours are on odd little releases. Like the dual single you did with Ducktails [Bored Fortress Split 7”, released 2010 by Not Not Fun—note: I’ve always had Rangers’ contribution listed as “The Bridge of Marin”, but the correct title seems to be “The Bride of Marin”], and Low Cut Fades. [You’re] similar in that respect to My Bloody Valentine, who have gems tucked away on EPs etc.

JK: I’ve released collections of those kinds of tracks: Death of Rangers (2009), Scrap (2013), Curiosities 2017-2021.

PH: One thing more if I may: who did the artwork for Suburban Tours and Pan Am? The ST art especially has always intrigued me.

JK: I did the art for PA, for ST it is from an artist but I forget who. It was an existing piece and the guy who ran the label asked for permission (or so he told me).

PH: The Pan Am patchwork has a psychedelic quality which I associate with some of your music too.
To wrap up, is there anything you’d like to add?

JK: A couple of things. One is that the process of writing and recording music is my main motivation. When I am working on a project I am at peace and whatever real world hang ups I have going on evaporate momentarily. Once an album is completed and it's out in the wild, my head has already moved on to something else. It's very nice if someone appreciates it and sends me an encouraging message or if a publication decides to review it. All good. But that all pales in comparison to the process of making it. The end result almost doesn't matter. I thought of that when David Lynch passed because he always seemed to encourage anyone who has a creative idea to try to manifest it because of the joy it brings the person and if more people went through that exercise the world would be a better place. There is that somewhat famous speech where he says something to the tune of "You got to get your butt moving!", in that corny, nasally pinched voice that sounds like a parental figure. I think that is what he was referring to. The act of creating is transcendental.

PH: My favourite novelist, JG Ballard, said essentially the same thing. Once he’d finished a story or book it was sort of dead to him. On to the next thing.
Joe, thanks so much for giving this interview. It’s been a pleasure.

JK: Thanks for the interest! Keep in touch and I'll keep you posted on any future projects.

Rangers’ latest release, Late Electrics Reimagined, is available on Bandcamp.

While we online masses haven’t yet taken over all news media’s functions, have we not, in a sense, prepared ourselves for the role by giving ourselves over to its traditional obsessions: party politics and celebrity? We’ve come to think like the media. Not unrelatedly, this past decade has witnessed a dramatic narrowing of the culture. Culture’s come to be concerned, almost exclusively, with everyday politics and celebrity gossip, especially where these overlap. In short, with the demands and distractions of the present. To my mind, this is an accelerated version of the banalising process Jean Baudrillard (1929 - 2007) found at work in all modern societies. Baudrillard's oeuvre, for me, continues to be invaluable to any understanding of the extreme cultural and political phenomena of our time. Of course, conditions have changed greatly since the 2000s, so an imaginative reading is required (though arguably that’s always been true to some extent with Baudrillard’s “theory fictions”). Cultural impoverishment and banalisation, for instance, have gone quite a bit further since his time. We find ourselves condemned to a now-thoroughgoing “presentism”, a culture overwhelmingly obsessed with the present. Novelist J.G. Ballard, an admirer of some of Baudrillard’s work, anticipated this development decades ago in the introduction to his notorious 1973 novel Crash, a book on which Baudrillard would later pen a laudatory essay:

Just as the past itself, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age (almost by definition a period where we were all forced to think prospectively), so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present.

Ballard, Arthur C. Clark and the other science fiction authors Baudrillard was a keen reader of were the leading lights of a movement that was much more influential in the twentieth century than it is today. The science fiction genre’s decline into near-irrelevance has been rapid. Denis Villeneuve might be said to be keeping sci-fi on life support.

Blade Runner 2049 and Dune parts 1 and 2 may be thrilling films, but upon reflection, they aren’t really about the future in the same way 2001: A Space Odyssey was when released in 1968. Frank Herbert set his novels so far in the future that the action may as well be taking place in another universe—Dune is more fantasy than predictive science fiction (George Lucas pulled a similar trick with Star Wars, but in the opposite direction). As for Blade Runner, the original film’s 2019 setting has of course slid into our past; this has subtly deterritorialised the entire franchise. Blade Runner is now more alternate universe than believable future. 1989’s Back to the Future Part II, set in 2015, and of course Kubrick’s 2001, are similar cases. Cinematic future has been overtaken by the present.

Harrison Ford’s 1982 appearance on Letterman promoting Blade Runner is fascinating viewing today, a compelling reminder of how important science fiction used to be to the culture. Letterman asks, with apparent earnestness, how things seem to be forty years in the future. Ford at first deadpans that “it’s no musical comedy”, before adopting a serious tone (for once in this interview) to explain how the film tries to imagine one possible future and is “full of wonderful ideas”.

Science fiction did indeed used to supply the culture with some of its most intriguing concepts and poetic metaphors, as Baudrillard knew well. But the genre, once ubiquitous, became a casualty of Ballard’s “all-voracious present”.

The atrophying of historical memory might foster the belief this presentist culture appeared suddenly, was ushered in by this or that technology—for instance, social media. But that would be a simplification; the reorientation towards the present exclusively has been much more gradual. In his 1985 text “Modernity”, originally written for a French encyclopaedia, Baudrillard echoed Ballard but went further, recognising burgeoning presentism to be the exacerbation of something that had always been characteristic of modern life:

Tradition was nourished by continuity and real transcendence. Modernity, having inaugurated rupture and discontinuity, is now closed into a new cycle.
..
Modernity is not a dialectic of history; it is the eventness, the permanent play of the present moment, the universality of news blurbs through the media.
..
[modernity] boils down bit by bit into a culture of daily events.

Of course, technological change has played a role in this, and not a small one. I grew up in the Eighties and Nineties, the late heyday of television. Television culture was ritualistic. The typical viewer would sit down in the same place and at the same time every weekday to watch the box for a few evening hours. TV schedules, too, imparted to the viewing week a ritualised aspect. As a teen I’d look forward to getting my Star Trek: The Next Generation fix from BBC2 every Wednesday at 6PM. These orderly intervals—along, of course, with those of work, school, sport, the press and so on—structured time. Time’s extension, backwards and forwards, along with a sense of relative continuity, were present to mind to a greater degree than today. Past and future were still, just about, living presences in our lives. Time today, in the age of TV-on-demand, social media addiction and the gig economy, is less structured. This loss of structure has, I believe, made us less conscious of past and future. Increasingly we inhabit only the present moment, as opposed to any larger expanse of time.

This de-structuring of time is surely implicated in the cultural narrowing I touched upon earlier. In “Modernity”, Baudrillard makes the connection between a growing focus on the present, with its transient demands and trivia, and the breakdown of the modern project:

[modernity] has lost the ideological drive of reason and progress, and confounds itself more and more with the formal play of change.

Some may take issue with the first part of that assertion. After all, haven’t we had to contend with a new, fanatical progressivism for the past decade or more? And aren’t our societies more obsessed with the advance of technology than ever? Certainly, we have the semblance of progress in the broad sense (social, scientific and technological); I think of it as pseudo-progress. The above quote seems to be saying that the march of reason is not what it once was. Some comments the French thinker made in the late 90s interview book Paroxysm shed further light on this point:

The political, strictly political, alternative has no future. It was a utopia, or a promise, arising out of industrial modernity and a purposive rationality. Neither that purpose nor that promise exists any longer.

To my mind, Baudrillard isn’t saying modernity has succumbed to universal irrationality. He’s well aware there are rational enterprises aplenty in today’s world. It’s that word “purposive” that is, for me, key to what he is saying: the present day’s rational endeavours do not, in the final analysis, add up to true progress. That is, progress towards the more just, more beautiful and truer world dreamed of by the Enlightenment.

Baudrillard and Ballard were far from the only writers to notice how an ever-more insistent present was coming to eclipse past and future, robbing the latter of its promise. That more or less describes the diagnosis of contemporary society Guy Debord made in his 1967 classic The Society of the Spectacle. For Debord, “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Debord viewed the spectacle through a Marxian lense as “no more than the economy developing for itself”. This inhuman order of things rules by fixing human beings’ attention on the unimportant: “the endless series of trivial confrontations is set up again, from competitive sports to elections, mobilizing a sub-ludic interest.”

British writer Mark Fisher, who drew influence from Debord, is another relevant thinker. Fisher, who died in 2017, is best remembered today for 2009’s Capitalist Realism, a book which examined the neoliberal world’s lack of imagination and paucity of vision, deficits made worse by the financial crisis. In this book and elsewhere, Fisher lamented “the slow cancellation of the future”.

Clearly, these attempts to get to grips with how our experience of time is changing share some common features. But the complexity and elusiveness of the phenomenon make a synthesis of these various theories difficult. I often find myself returning to one particular book of Baudrillard’s that I first read twenty years ago, America. This 1986 text (in the original French, an English translation appeared 3 years later), his most atypically optimistic and also one of his most celebrated, is a poetic and visionary hymn to American modernity, delivered in prose that is by turns serene and sardonic. Some twenty-first century readers have been struck by how much Baudrillard’s hologram of Reagan-era America brings to mind their favourite vaporwave LPs and mixtapes, how it feels like a literary equivalent of that genre.

There’s one passage in America that’s always haunted me. It’s one of several to meditate on the American desert, a key obsession and motif in the book:

The natural deserts tell me what I need to know about the deserts of the sign.
..
[the natural deserts] induce in me an exalting vision of the desertification of signs and men. They form the mental frontier where the projects of civilization run into the ground.

That bleak yet poetic phrase, “the desertification of signs and men”, seems to get at something essential. Firstly, it recalls for me Eliot’s quintessential modernist poem The Waste Land, the title of which refers to the cursed and barren land surrounding the Fisher King’s castle in the Grail mythos. Secondly, I value Baudrillard’s resonant phrase for the way it suggests a vast process both enigmatic and ineluctable. The French thinker never reused the expression as far as I know, though he often spoke in similar terms. Only the tone was different—melancholic and often disdainful, in sharp contrast to the serene mood of America. In later books he reported on the ongoing diminishment of culture and the disappearance of forms with cool detachment, coloured with a certain sadness and bitterness.

Taking Baudrillard’s desertification metaphor further—in a modest attempt to explain this unsettling process—we might conceive of those “signs and men” as very much needing the past and the future in order to remain verdant, to avoid becoming desert-like. Life conceived of as irrigated by past and future. I prefer this unfashionably metaphorical way of thinking about the problem, of which the tyranny of the timeline is but one aspect. To be sure, social media has a strong tendency to narrow our vision, to condition us into an even more thoroughgoing presentism than previously. Yet there is the possibility, at least, of using all the various new media in much more imaginative and constructive ways—to stay in the arena while taking a very different approach. I believe the challenge at hand is to transcend that banal “culture of daily events”. A tall order, perhaps. But that may be the only way to open up our bleak, desertified present, to reconnect it with the restorative waters of past and future.

Sources

Baudrillard, Jean, “Modernity”, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory / Revue canadienne de theorie politique et sociale, Volume XI, No. 3 (1987) .

Baudrillard, Jean, Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe Petit, Verso Books (1998).

Baudrillard, Jean, America, Verso Books (1989).

Ballard, J. G., Crash: The Collector’s Edition, HarperCollins Publishers (2017).

Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle, Bread and Circuses Publishing (Translation: Black & Red, 1977).

Fisher, Mark, Capitalist Realism, Zero Books (2009).

Eliot, T. S., The Waste Land (Norton Critical Edition), Norton & Company (2000).

The Carthaginians allowed their Phoenician compatriots a form of partial home rule, including a senate and an assembly of the people as well as the authority to mint local coinage. Many historians believe that the increased number of rock-cut tombs in the center of the island is evidence that Carthage increased the population of Malta. What is certain is that under Carthage, settlement moved inland and towns were founded in the centers of both Malta and Gozo. These are modern Mdina in Malta and modern Victoria in Gozo, then known as Gaulos. Hamilcar Barca is thought to have resided in Malta in the vicinity of modern Rabat at a place known today as Hal-Barka, and some have argued that the great Carthaginian general Hannibal might have been born in Malta as well.
During the Carthaginian period, port facilities at Grand Harbour, which faces northeast toward Sicily, were constructed. In the eighteenth century, during drainage work on the silted-up inner basin at Marsa, the remains of this ancient port were found. These included large warehouses and a wharf that was approximately 1,400 yards long. Further excavations in 1947 and 1959 revealed additional wharves and storehouses in the same area.

While Carthage grew mighty, the fortunes of the Phoenicians’ proud home cities declined. For much of the 1st millennium BC these cities laboured as vassal states of aggressive land empires, a succession of them: the Assyrians, the Neo-Babylonians, the Persians and the empire of Alexander the Great. Periodic revolts against their imperial masters always ended in defeat for the Phoenicians, although enduring a 13-year siege did secure Tyre some concessions from the Neo-Babylonians in the 6th century BC. A fateful event occured in the 4th century during Alexander’s campaign of conquest. The Tyrians refused the Macedonian king’s request to visit New Tyre’s Temple of Melkart in order to sacrifice to Hercules, recognising in it a ploy to occupy that part of the city. They suggested he sacrifice in Old Tyre, a proposal Alexander naturally rejected. That part of the city, which was on the mainland, was undefended and strategically worthless. New Tyre, built on an island, was heavily fortified and a stronghold for the Persian fleet. As a siege was in the offing, Tyre evacuated most of her women and children (no point risking good sacrificial victims!). They departed for Carthage. The former colony also promised to send reinforcements, which never came. Alexander besieged Tyre for seven months. It was a bitter, grinding struggle which concluded with the Greeks breaking into New Tyre; there they massacred 6000 of the defenders. On the beach they crucified a further 2000. 30000 were sold into slavery. The only Tyrians spared were the king and his family; mercy was also shown to some Carthaginian pilgrims sheltering in the Temple of Melkart. The upshot of this disaster for Tyre was that Carthage became the undisputed leader of the Phoenician, or as the Romans called it, the Punic world.

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Occupying a highly strategic location in the centre of the Mediterranean, the Malta archipelago is poor in natural resources, boasting only ubiquitous limestone rock and a number of natural deepwater harbours. These few facts are the islands’ cardinal realities, the ones that have largely determined their history. Malta was home to Neolithic temple builders, served as a way station for Phoenician traders and a naval base for their compatriots, the Carthaginians. It hosted a recuperating Saint Paul after he was shipwrecked on Maltese rocks in a storm. The islands were an outpost of the medieval Arabs, whose legacy—according to quite recent research—appears to be the native language of the islands, Malti. Malta served as a Christian fortress in the centuries-long struggle with the Ottomans, famously resisting a massive besieging Turkish force in 1565. And, as Pynchon’s debut novel powerfully reminds us, the island country endured massive aerial bombardment in the 1940s, as the Axis powers sought to conquer it to further their aims in the Mediterranean.

As can be inferred from that minimal potted history, limestone has made large-scale construction on the islands possible. There are two types of such rock found on Malta. The first is coralline limestone, which is hard and multicoloured, varying in hue from almost white to grey to red. Globigerina limestone, a soft, yellow variety, is the second type. In both cases, the rock was formed by a process that recalls one of V.'s key themes, the animate transforming into the inanimate. As J Kerry Grant observes, the word “inanimate” occurs almost sixty times in the novel. Profane has a tendency to find the inanimate unsettling—on the night ferry to Norfolk, for instance, and also when he catches Rachel sweet-talking her beloved MG. Pynchon explores his animate / inanimate theme with other characters too. Consider how physically transformed V. is by the time of her incarnation as the Bad Priest—not only has (s)he embraced the inanimate, (s)he counsels the male children of embattled Malta to do so as well:

The boys he told to find strength in - and be like - the rock of their island. He returned, curiously like the Generation of '37, often to the rock: preaching that the object of male existence was to be like a crystal: beautiful and soulless.

V. can be considered an avatar for a world-historical process that is described elsewhere as ”decadence… a falling-away from what is human.” These are the words of the impresario Itague, in chapter 14. He continues:

…the further we fall the less human we become. Because we are less human, we foist off the humanity we have lost on inanimate objects and abstract theories.

As we’ll see, in V. as in other stories and novels, Pynchon appears to be very much preoccupied with a modern civilisation in the grip of decadence and entropy.

Let’s return to the subject of limestone formation on Malta—here we see the once-animate being transformed in a much slower (and less morally fraught) way. Over aons, the deposition and consolidation of coral skeletons produced hard coralline limestone. Malta’s softer limestone takes its name from Globigerina, a genus of small mollusks. The remains of their calcareous shells, along with the skeletons of some vertebrates, formed this rock.

Geologically speaking, the islands of Malta can be pictured as a layer cake. The hard top and bottom layers are coralline limestone. They surround a soft middle layer—a filling—of globigerina.

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When the destroyer USS Hank passed eastward through the Strait of Gibraltar sometime in 1956, Thomas Pynchon was aboard as a serving sailor. The warship, a veteran of the Pacific and Korean wars, was beginning its annual deployment to the Mediterranean1. Perhaps Pynchon was seeing that sea in person for the first time. If so he’d have noted the blue transparency of the surface waters; possibly he knew their colour and clarity to be attributable to the Mediterranean’s poverty of animal and vegetable plankton. When combined with the lack of coastal shelving for sea creatures to inhabit, this means that, like the also clear blue Sargasso Sea, the Med isn’t blessed with an overabundance of life, a few fertile bays, lagoons and fishing-grounds excepted2. Though an invitingly warm sea it is also one of typically lean harvests. But of course, that hasn’t kept it from being the most contested sea in history. The Med would have another chapter added to its long history of conflict in the autumn of that year of ‘56, when Britain and France would use its eastern basin as a staging area from which to launch (along with Israel, attacking through Sinai) an invasion of the Suez Canal zone in Egypt. It seems that by that time—late October—the Hank was docked at Valletta, capital of Malta. The destroyer was only a small part of the naval force Eisenhower had ordered to the eastern Mediterranean, a veritable armada which included the entire Sixth Fleet, plus two other aircraft carriers besides, making four carriers in all. The situation was judged to be grave. So grave, in fact, that the Navy had been ordered to prepare to execute emergency war plans3.

At some point during the Suez Crisis Pynchon almost certainly went on ‘liberty’ shore leave at Valletta; if so he must’ve explored streets that still bore many signs of the devastation wrought by German and Italian bombing over a decade earlier4. Assuming he had this experience, I wonder whether it was the beginning of that constellation of obsessions—the Second World War, aerial bombardment, the letter V—which would in time generate Mindless Pleasures (retitled Gravity’s Rainbow shortly before publication). Whatever the case, the Hank’s stay in Valletta provided material that would be central to Pynchon’s first book, the 1963 novel that once again concerns us. And there’s clearly a certain continuity of obsessions across Pynchon’s first three books, the first and third especially, making V. something of a prequel to Gravity’s Rainbow.

As much as V. herself, it is Malta you find at the heart of Pynchon’s first major fictional labyrinth. Part 2 of Songs in the Key of V, and at least the next part after that, will therefore be concerned with the role Malta plays in the novel. Note that, unlike part 1, these installments will assume the reader is familiar with V. If the reader hasn’t read Pynchon’s debut, I recommend part 1, my spoiler-free introduction. Needless to say, the current essay does give away some plot points. They’re not minor spoilers either, as Malta dominates a key middle chapter of the novel (eleven), plus the last two chapters (sixteen and the epilogue). This topic—that of the archipelago’s role in the novel—also gives me occasion to explore what I’ve come to think of as “the Malta mystique”. What is it about these few small islands in the centre of the Mediterranean that has fascinated writers as diverse as Christopher Marlowe, Dashiell Hammett, Winston Churchill, and—of course—the esteemed descendent of William Pynchon, founder of Springfield, Massachusetts?

Incidentally, if the reader’s been wondering about the image accompanying this post, it shows the interior of St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta. Surprisingly, given the pounding the Maltese capital took during the Second World War, the building is the 16th-century original. Having been only slightly damaged by Axis bombs (total destruction was but narrowly avoided), the cathedral was finally restored during the late Eighties and early Nineties. The works of art inside are also original—they were transferred to a safe site before the outbreak of hostilities5.

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What that vision translated into in practical terms were Roddenberry’s dictums for TNG, chief among them being “no conflict between the main characters.” Many writers understandably found this dictum in particular maddening. They argued—quite rightly, of course—that conflict is fundamental to drama. Ways of getting around it were found; for instance the use of guest stars. An abrasive visiting Starfleet officer, like Kosinski in “Where No One Has Gone Before”, was always a reliable source of friction. Another trick was to place a main character in a completely different environment, as in season two’s “A Matter Of Honor”. There an officer exchange programme sees Riker serving aboard a Klingon vessel. Yet another solution, rarely employed for obvious reasons, was to explore an alternate timeline. This was done most memorably in season three’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, which takes place in a darker timeline in which the Federation is at war with the Klingons and losing. A fascinating aspect of this episode is seeing the alternate Picard and Riker at loggerheads, clearly irritated by each other.

Gene Roddenberry was a difficult character to work with, as many people had found out on earlier projects. On TNG he was, if anything, even more of a pain in the neck than he’d been previously. The dictums could be frustrating enough in themselves, but to make matters worse Roddenberry was inconsistent in his enforcement of them. Writer Hans Beimler (“The Arsenal of Freedom”, “The Schizoid Man” and several other episodes):

It was tough, because Gene was very tough to get a story by very often. Gene kept thinking that these were better people; his view of the world was, this was a better world and these were better people than we are. And that was a fundamental problem.
..
Many times Gene would blow up a script because he said, “We wouldn’t do that, because we need to be better than that.” And that was always a frustrating wall to run up on. It was a wall that sometimes wasn’t always there, and that also made it difficult because it was inconsistent.1

I noted in part 1 of this essay how one of Roddenberry’s dictums for Star Trek was “no religion”. Yet, as we have seen, mystical and spiritual themes are present on TNG in seasons one and two. It could be these themes crept in because of Roddenberry’s inconsistency when it came to enforcing his dictums. Or maybe he judged the ideas explored in ”Where No One Has Gone Before” and ”Where Silence Has Lease” to be spiritual, but not religious (to use a phrase New Age has done much to popularise).
Whatever the case, I think few would disagree Roddenberry’s main thematic preoccupation on TNG was the enlightened nature of his 24th-century civilisation, the moral strides that had been made since our present. New Age-type mysticism wasn’t really on his mind, but he doesn’t seem to have objected if it made it into the odd episode or two. What he very much did mind were deviations from his utopian take on the future.

The imperiousness of the obsessive yet mercurial Roddenberry meant the first season of TNG especially saw a high turnover of writers. The original script for “Where No One Has Gone Before” was penned by Trek and Young Adult novelist Diane Duane alongside screenwriter Michael Reaves. Neither of the two would go on to write again for the show. The “WNOHGB” script was also extensively rewritten by writer-producer Maurice Hurley (more on whom below)—though not to such a degree that the story, an adaptation of Duane’s TOS novel The Wounded Sky (Pocket Books, 1985), was changed in its essentials.
One of the two credited writers on “Skin of Evil”, Hannah Louise Shearer, had a longer Trek career, accruing six credits on TNG and one on DS9. “Skin of Evil”’s chief writer, Joseph Stephano, was however not invited to contribute any more scripts. To add insult to injury, his script for that episode ended up being tampered with by, of all people, Roddenberry’s lawyer Leonard Maizlish. A long-term associate of G.R., and someone who seems to have taken it upon himself to act in Roddenberry’s stead when his client was not around, Maizlish appears to have made quite a nuisance of himself, and a lot of enemies, in the first season (a subject for another essay, perhaps).

The revolving door slowed down in the second season, but certainly didn’t stop. The man responsible for “Where Silence Has Lease”, screenwriter Jack B. Sowards, was among those who exited through it. Despite Sowards having made a vital contribution to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan six years before (he’d penned the script on which director Nicholas Meyer had based his rewrite), his services were not sought again.
Such was the turnover of writers on TNG that a “memorial wall” was set up at the Paramount offices, with the names of the departed listed on it. Some of them had resigned. Others had been fired, typically by Roddenberry. In his old age, “The Great Bird Of The Galaxy” had become even more prickly, difficult and capricious than he had been previously.

VI

Irish American Maurice “Maury” Hurley (1939 - 2015) was another difficult, abrasive character (by his own admission), but more reasonable and consistent than Roddenberry. Like his boss he carried out a lot of rewrites of others’ scripts (including many Roddenberry had worked on and left in a subpar state). Hurley was a key figure in the first and second seasons. He and veteran screenwriter Robert Lewin (1920 - 2004) were hired early in the first season to fill the shoes of TOS stalwarts D.C. Fontana (“Charlie X”, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” and others) and David Gerrald (“The Trouble With Tribbles”, “The Cloud Minders”), the outgoing head writers. The latter two had resigned after being treated very shabbily by Roddenberry and Leonard Maizlish.

Like Roddenberry, who’d been a B-17 pilot, an airline pilot and a policeman before starting to write and produce for television, Hurley had had a varied pre-TV career. He’d served in the US Air Force, been a rancher and a shoes salesman. He’d moved into media with a stint producing documentaries and industrial films. He’d decided to become a screenwriter at the age of forty-two. After being story editor on Miami Vice he’d worked as supervising producer on The Equalizer, his last job before the move to TNG.2

Maurice Hurley worked with supervising, later executive producer Rick Berman (b. 1945), previously mentioned in part 2 of this essay (where I supplied some background information). Berman and Hurley had something in common, being both former documentarians. As Trek fans will know, Berman is one of the most important figures in the TNG story, and I’ll be returning to him later. For now here he is discussing his relationship with M.H.:

Hurley was the head writer, and I was in charge of everything else. Gene, for some reason, put me in a position slightly over Maury, although we looked at each other as pretty much equals. And we got along. He was a very strange guy. He was a golfer and he had done a lot of television writing. He was an unusual character. He didn’t suffer fools gladly. He found Roddenberry a pain in the neck most of the time, but he knew how to deal with Gene so that Gene was not unhappy with him.3

In interviews after his stint on TNG, Hurley made it clear he’d never believed in the utopian vision Roddenberry had had for the show. For instance, in William Shatner’s 2014 TNG documentary Chaos On The Bridge (CotB), he dismisses that vision as “wacky doodle”. There are also these comments in The Fifty-Year Mission:

Gene sees this Pollyanna-ish view of the future where everything is going to be fine. If we keep going in this world the way we’re going, there is no future, and the idea that humanity is going to go from its infancy, which is what he currently considers it to be in, to its adolescence in the next four hundred years, I don’t believe.4

Regardless of this, Hurley was, like Berman, a stickler for Roddenberry’s dictums, as the head writer explained:

Star Trek has absolute rules that cannot be broken and nobody knows that until they get into it.
..
They wanted writers who could take the Star Trek parameters—Gene’s vision—and put a shine on it, button it, and not change anything.
..
Some people thought they had a better idea, and God love ’em, they may have, but that’s not the point.5

When, in the first year, the talented (and late) Tracy Tormé (1959 - 2024) submitted the script for “Conspiracy”, Hurley slammed the dark, horroresque story as “not Star Trek” and tried to stop it being produced. It seems Rick Berman viewed Torme’s effort more positively, and overruled him.
Nevertheless, Hurley was usually more successful at enforcing the Trek dictums. There were even occasions when he and / or Berman stopped Roddenberry from breaking them.

Writing inside Roddenberry’s “box” (as later showrunner Michael Piller called it) was a vital skill for a Star Trek writer, and Hurley had it. Some memorable teleplays flowed from his pen.
In “11001001”, written with Robert Lewin, a race resembling a benign version of the Borg, the Bynars, steals the Enterprise-D from a starbase. The theft is key to the aliens’ desperate bid to save their homeworld. I like the surrealism of the theft sequence, with only Riker and Picard aboard the hijacked ship. It feels like the kind of happening you only meet with in the first and second seasons.
“The Neutral Zone” sees the return of the Romulans and hints at the Borg, whom Hurley was developing as a primary antagonist for the Enterprise crew. Hurley also manages to insert some barbed political commentary into a subplot involving the revival of cryogenically frozen people from the 20th century. Among the revived is a cartoonish country musician, the episode’s comic relief. His sexist talk and the affectionate pat he gives Beverly Crusher’s rear no doubt antagonised the real-life owner of that rear, Gates McFadden. The actress was not happy generally, objecting to what she saw as TNG’s sexist writing in the first season. She and Maurice Hurley did not get on at all as a consequence. Among McFadden’s complaints was a claim that she and the other actresses were never given much to do.
“Time Squared”, in which Picard meets his own double from six hours in the future, is notable for its eerie atmosphere—a real rarity for TNG, and indeed for Star Trek generally. In one chilling scene the crew watch the destruction of the Enterprise in a short, grainy video clip from the future.
“Q Who?” is arguably Hurley’s best episode. Featuring both John de Lancie’s highly popular trickster, Q, and the unsettling first appearance of the Borg, this powerful episode is surprisingly dark and pessimistic.
With the exception of “Time Squared”, each of these episodes is enhanced by an imaginative Ron Jones score. The exception was scored by Dennis McCarthy, who did a competent job. The composer’s output could be melodic and memorable when his style wasn’t being cramped by Berman, as perhaps best demonstrated by season one’s “Haven”. Unfortunately it increasingly was after that episode.

The bad blood between Hurley and Gates McFadden had its consequences at season one’s end.
Roddenberry, his health worsening, was minded to step back somewhat from TNG production. He allowed Berman to make “Maury“ showrunner for season two. Hurley then wielded his increased clout to get McFadden fired from the show. There were rumours Patrick Stewart had also found her acting wanting, but according to Berman this is untrue:

Patrick had absolutely nothing to do with it. Maurice hated Gates. He disliked the whole character of Dr. Crusher and he wanted to get rid of Gates and replace her. He didn’t like her acting and he didn’t like her. He went to me at the end of season one, and I said I thought it was a bad idea. Then he went to Gene and he managed to convince Gene. It was all part of the fact that he was the last man standing at the end of the first season and he was going to be moving into the second-biggest chair over in the writing area next to Gene. This was a request he was making, and Gene decided he would honor it. So, Gates was let go and we went through a whole casting procedure and ended up with Dr. Pulaski, who was played by Diana Muldaur.

The Pulaski character was conceived of as something of a retread of Bones McCoy. She was mature—about Picard’s age. Irritable if not irascible, Pulaski was something of a Luddite, mistrustful of transporters as well as of androids. Just as McCoy had liked to tease Spock, this new doctor had a penchant for bullying Data. But as the android could not defend himself this behaviour came across as merely mean, not funny or amusing. It was a misjudgment on someone’s part—probably Roddenberry’s or Hurley’s. Quite why they thought the replacement doctor should be McCoy 2 isn’t clear, but L.A. Law’s Diana Muldaur, who’d appeared once on The Original Series, did a decent job with the role. Pulaski is mostly very watchable. You wouldn’t know Muldaur never really enjoyed herself on TNG. By all accounts there was little chemistry between her and the rest of the cast, a circumstance probably not helped by her salary being much more than theirs (Patrick Stewart’s excepted, I imagine). Also the fans never took to Doctor Pulaski. One of the letter-writing campaigns Star Trek fandom is famous for kicked off, demanding the return of Gates McFadden’s Doctor Crusher.

One season two newcomer who did prove a hit with the fans was Whoopi Goldberg. The star of the highly-regarded period drama The Color Purple played the mysterious Guinan, the bartender of Ten-Forward, a lounge added to the Enterprise-D for the second season (though we’re clearly meant to understand it’s always been there). Arguably the longest-lasting vaguely New Age element on the show, the guru-like Guinan appears intermittently for the rest of TNG’s run, makes it into two of the four TNG feature films and even pops up in the recent Star Trek: Picard. Unlike that other guru, The Traveller, Guinan does not have any reality-challenging philosophy to impart. The advice she gives the Enterprise’s crew members is typically of a much more down-to-earth sort, even though Guinan herself is a highly enigmatic figure. “Q Who” seems to indicate she has extraordinary Q-like powers, abilities she simply declines to use. Goldberg had joined the show because she was a huge Star Trek fan, having found Nichelle Nichols an inspiration as a child. Her character is, it must be said, an example of the tired “mystic wise black woman” archetype (the female equivalent of “black science man”), but Goldberg is so magnetic in the role that it really doesn’t matter.

While Maurice Hurley could take a little of the credit for Guinan, he had to take all of the blame for Pulaski. The character’s failure brought his judgement into question. Adding to the new showrunner’s woes, an industry-wide writers’ strike meant production for the second year started late, with the delay having a lasting impact right up to end of the season. Throughout the year production was playing catch-up. That, combined with the budget cupboard looking a little bare after the lavish Borg episode “Q Who?”, meant the season ended up running to only twenty-two episodes instead of the usual twenty-five (season one) or twenty-six (season three and later). What’s more, the Hurley-penned season closer “Shades of Gray” was a money-saving clip show, an episode that recycles footage from previous episodes. Hurley freely admitted the extremely rushed finale—in which Riker is rendered unconscious and relives past experiences—was “terrible, just terrible”. He’d written the script on his way out the door, having become disillusioned with TNG, in particular with Roddenberry. In the end The Great Bird of the Galaxy had proved too difficult even for him to work with. In CotB Hurley tells Shatner Roddenberry was simply crazy, “a cuckoo bird.”

Hurley had tried, in concert with Berman, to set the TNG house in order, but had achieved only limited success:

After his departure… Hurley talked about the story-writing system, which he had tried to change during his tenure. This system included a pattern of memo-writing among the story staff. “In the beginning there was a lot of [plot] clutter,” Hurley said. “Too many ideas being thrown into one script…. There was a tendency to do a real quick wrap-up. Too much in the bag, trying to fill the bag too full.”6

Whether Hurley left TNG entirely of his own volition is an open question. Diana Muldaur’s character flopping and the time and budget problems at the end of that truncated second season must obviously have displeased Paramount. In CotB, Shatner says “Maury’s” contract was “not renewed”. But in the behind-the-scenes literature, the way everyone tells it, whether truthfully or out of politeness, it was Hurley’s decision to quit. Whatever the case the split seems to have been fairly amicable, as the ex-showrunner contributed a further script to TNG, season four’s “Galaxy’s Child”, and received a story credit for five’s “Power Play”. He was also invited to submit a script for the movie Star Trek: Generations, though what he produced was ultimately rejected in favour of a script by Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, by then firmly established Trek writers.

As regards New Age beliefs, Maurice Hurley seems to have been too tough of a character to set much store by them. Yet he clearly wasn’t averse to explorations of mystical themes, as his final version of the “Where No One Has Gone Before” script shows. Hurley remains somewhat mysterious, an enigmatic figure. Here’s supervising producer and director David Livingston:

I love Maurice Hurley. He was outside the box. He marched to his own drum and that was good in my mind. He was a bit of an outsider, and he brought a different perspective to the show that I thought was good. Especially the Borg. Without the Borg, we would have never gotten to the point we did. He’s always played it really close to the cuff. I was very fond of him. He always seemed like he had something going on in his head that he wasn’t going to share with anyone else, but he did it with a smile.7

VI

With Hurley’s departure and Roddenberry’s further retreat from the show, the way was open for Rick Berman to consolidate control in season three. He knew he had to take the show in hand and impose order on the still-ongoing chaos. His first move was to say goodbye to Diana Muldaur (who was likely relieved to go) and to rehire Gates McFadden. He also ordered changes to the uniforms and various other cosmetic changes. William Ware Theiss, creator of the TOS uniforms, had been brought back in the mid Eighties to design uniforms for TNG. He’d opted to use a very Eighties material: Spandex. Theiss’s TNG outfits look better than their replacements in my opinion (the male miniskirt version excepted), but due to the choice of material were uncomfortable. They were stretched tight with a strap around the boot, and the resulting tautness proved hard on actors’ backs. From Memory Alpha:

Patrick Stewart claimed that the change from this Starfleet uniform to the new version after the second season of TNG was thanks to his chiropractor, who recommended Stewart sue Paramount for "lasting damage done to [his] spine." Evidently, the producers wanted to have a smooth, unwrinkled look to the Starfleet uniforms, which put strain on Stewart's shoulders, neck and back after two seasons in a lycra costume that was one size too small.

The work of Robert Blackman, the new uniforms were woollen and much more comfortable. They added a collar and formed “Eisenhower silhouettes” with broad shoulders—a little too broad for my tastes. The overall look was less utopian, more militaristic. Somehow it got past Roddenberry.

Berman has always maintained that, in his capacity as head of Star Trek from 1991 to 2005, he saw it as his duty to ensure the franchise remained faithful to Roddenberry’s vision. It’s certainly true he insisted writers adhere to the Trek dictums, and right from the beginning in 1987. After Gene Roddenberry died in 1991 it became a question of Rick Berman’s interpretation of those dictums. TNG, DS9 and Voyager writer Ronald D. Moore:

He took the Gene thing too seriously, in my opinion. After Gene passed away it became Rick’s mission to become the guardian of the flame. I just think he didn’t really believe in it. It wasn’t like he had drunk the Kool-Aid and believed that this is really the twenty-fourth century and this is how people will be. He didn’t believe it on that level, but he felt that that’s the way Gene said it and that’s what we have to do.8

Naturally, Berman’s hirings and firings reflected his vision (of Roddenberry’s vision) for the franchise. By far the most significant hire Berman made occurred early in season three, when he brought on Michael Piller (1948 - 2005) to head the writing team. Another candidate, Michael Wagner, had lasted only three weeks (he hadn’t been able to handle Roddenberry).

Now, there’s clearly insufficient space here to consider in depth the contributions to Star Trek of Berman and Piller. I’ll only try and sketch the basics. Plus I'll consider how the two seem to have put an end to the mystic / New Age current on TNG.

A former journalist and onetime censor for CBS, Michael Piller was a disciplined man with a systematic approach. He was the one to finally impose order on TNG story-writing. The memos and informal chats in corridors and offices made way for something a lot more structured:

We had a process that we call “breaking a story,” where we put all the writing staff in a room and we look around and whatever the writer came in with serves as only a starting point. Everybody sits down and we go to a board and break it down into acts and scenes and we try and see how the show is going to lay out. I told everyone that in this room it is a safe environment and that they are to speak out with whatever ideas they have, even if it’s stupid or wrong, because it may spark an idea in someone else that leads us to the solution of a particular problem in a script.9

This process was also known by a charming alternate name, “gangbanging”.
Another key change instigated by Piller: scripts became less plot-driven and “monster of the week”, more character-driven. So a script would be written with a view to making a Data episode, or a Picard episode, or a Worf episode, or what have you.
Piller certainly didn’t stop there. Another initiative involved the tapping of a couple of under-exploited creative resources: freelance writers and the fans. Both amateurs and professionals were invited to submit “spec” scripts. That is how Trekkie Ronald D. Moore became not only a TNG writer, but one of the most respected TNG writers of all. The full-time writing staff heard a lot of pitches from amateur writers like Moore. Though the vast majority were unusable, a handful were good enough to be bought and made into episodes.
The revolving door still did not halt in season three—Piller did clash with some writers—but the new showrunner managed to build up a fairly stable core writing team consisting of himself, Ira Steven Behr, Ronald D. Moore, Brannon Braga, René Echevarria and Naren Shankar. It was a pretty young group—most of them were gen Xers, and broadly speaking lacked the boomer interest in counterculture spirituality that had informed some of the first two seasons’ episodes.
Such is the impact Piller had on the series that he is sometimes viewed as “the man who saved The Next Generation”. He continued on in the position of showrunner until the end of season five, when he left to steer Deep Space Nine alongside Rick Berman and, later, Ira Steven Behr. His place on TNG was taken by Jeri Taylor.

What sort of piller was the showrunner of TNG seasons three through five, DS9 seasons one and two, and Voyager? A redpiller or a bluepiller? In my view, Michael Piller was not wholly either, but more the latter than the former. Considering his casting choices on Deep Space Nine and Voyager he was clearly a progressive, though not exactly a cheerleader for utopia the way Roddenberry had been. He seems to have been under no illusions about the likelihood of the sort of conflict-free human civilisation envisaged by G.R. coming into being. At the same time, he had no interest in breaking the Star Trek dictums:

From that experience [working with G.R. and his dictums], I learned that Roddenberry’s “box” forced us to be more creative and to tell stories in more interesting and different ways than we would have in any other typical universe, so I loved that box. Ironically, I became dedicated to preserving the box as much as I possibly could, and as time went on it sort of became Piller’s box.

With Piller and Berman in agreement on the importance and even the value of the dictums, the two designed Deep Space Nine, the first post-Roddenberry Trek venture, in such a way as to maximise the potential for conflict—considered essential for drama—while respecting the Great Bird’s “box”. Though conflict between the human characters was to be minimised, there’d be human-alien and alien-alien strife aplenty.

Now, I don’t think either Piller or Berman was interested in exploring mystical questions or New Age themes on Star Trek. It was probably a matter of temperament, but the way they interpreted Roddenberry’s “no religion” dictum likely also had much to do with it. I do not by any measure mean to imply either of them was a soulless bugman. Piller, for instance, had an abiding interest in Zen Buddhism. Here’s his wife, Sandra Piller:

Writing was a very Zen thing for Michael. He would give all of the writers on the staff of whatever show he worked on, Zen and the Art of Archery or some sort of Zen book, because that always got to him. So he did enjoy the writing; he would hear those voices. He got to know the voices and it would just start coming out. He’d start writing early in the morning. Before computers, we had an old typewriter and, let me tell you, he’d be typing early in the morning, click-clack, click-clack in my brain. He was very passionate about it.10

Some readers might point to Deep Space Nine as evidence Piller and Berman became interested in exploring religious themes when Roddenberry was no longer around. I think my response to that would be “well, yes and no”. I say “I think” because my experience with DS9 is quite limited, while I’ve watched almost all of TNG. So the opinions I offer below should be regarded as provisional, subject to revision.
As regards Bajoran spirituality, the impression I’ve formed—from the literature as well as from the episodes I’ve watched—is that it was included as an element on the show to add another kind of conflict to the mix. For obvious reasons, no prior Star Trek series or film had explored religious conflict in a sustained way. Thus the passionate religiosity of this alien race brought something fresh to Trek. Even so, my hunch is that the Bajorans were not made a religious race to allow DS9 to seriously explore spirituality per se. Here’s Piller:

…Bajoran spirituality does not go against the atheist beliefs of Gene. If he were still with us—and he was on our shoulders as we thought about these conceptual issues—I don’t think it would bother him one bit. What he felt very strongly about is that humans, and to some degree Federation members, had a humanist attitude. His humans do not overtly celebrate religious beliefs. What we had simply done in creating an environment that brings conflict to our people, which we desperately wanted to do, is to put a group of people with a group of aliens that are different than we are, who had a difference and a conflict with our humanist beliefs.
Giving them strong spiritual mystical orbs and prophet worship forced our humanist people to deal with another alien race that is as different from us as the Klingons are.11

Also Berman, in an interview with the official Star Trek website:

Going into DS9 -- with a space station, stories about war, politics and religion, a fractious crew and a commander of color -- how ready were you for the backlash from the portion of the fan base that felt the show wasn’t their father’s Star Trek?

Berman: At that point, our biggest concern was to do something different. We had a show that was on the air. We had no idea how long it was going to be on the air, but we knew that it was going to continue to be on the air for at least another few years. We didn’t want to send another crew out on a spaceship at the same time the TNG crew was out on the Enterprise. Michael (Piller) and I spent a long time thinking about this.

..

One of the big problems that Michael and the writing staff (on TNG) had was Gene that believed that in the 24th century there wouldn’t be any conflict between the major characters. Mankind had reached a point where the kind of human conflict that exists today had subsided, and the writers all believed very strongly, in fact, that drama is based on conflict, and they were very frustrated by that. And they were frustrated very often by notes they got from Gene about how he didn’t want conflict between anyone in Starfleet, primarily the main cast of the show. So, what Michael and I felt was that if we placed the show on a Bajoran space station we would have characters like Odo and Quark and Kira, who were regular characters, who were not only not human, but they were also not Federation, and thus conflict could exist among the series regulars.

The religious elements you mentioned were not really part of our initial thoughts. That was stuff that evolved. But the idea of a wormhole that led to another part of the galaxy gave us new fodder.

Now I might be wrong, but it seems to me there’s nothing especially challenging about the Bajorans’ Prophets, aka the wormhole entities—they are fully contained within, and can be explained away by, the conventions of science fiction. Do the challenging and subversive elements of “Where No One Has Gone Before” and “Where Silence Has Lease” have any equivalent on Deep Space Nine, or on any of the later Trek series or films? It seems to me that they don’t (although I’d be happy to be proved wrong). As slickly made as DS9 undoubtedly is, I’ve not encountered much of a sense of strangeness or otherness in the episodes I’ve watched. Maybe I will find something if I persevere.

Returning to TNG.
By contrast with the more conventional Berman and Piller-ruled era, the brief period Maurice Hurley presided over was, as I’ve said, studded with episodes that could evoke something strange, eerie or other. Hurley could pull that off; so could Roddenberry, on a good day. Of further interest to me are the apparent political differences between all these men. While Roddenberry, Piller and Berman were clearly liberals, more bluepilled than red, Hurley strikes me as a right-winger by temperament: a lucid sexist, a reactionary character. A redpiller. Having said that, it’s worth noting Hurley had a mixed-race marriage and was liked and admired by the undoubtedly progressive Tracy Tormé—at any rate until the two writers fell out (over TNG-related matters, not politics).12

My impression of Berman and Piller is that they weren’t mavericks like Roddenberry and Hurley. They were more—though by no means entirely—conventional. It seems plausible to me that their Jewishness made them Hollywood insiders, and thus more minded to follow the prevailing conventions13, while the WASP Roddenberry and the Irish-American Hurley were always destined to be outsiders no matter what they did.

However, I think it important to point out that I’m not one of those fans who hates Rick Berman. I don’t blame him for the decline of the Star Trek franchise, as many fans do. I’d say he did a pretty fine job for many years. While not all of his creative and executive choices are ones I would’ve made, he still presided over the creation of many, many hours of high-quality television.

I think the fascinating New Age / mystical current in the first two seasons of TNG was tied to the Eighties zeitgeist, and was never going to continue on into the Nineties. And that’s okay. We know, every one of us I think, what must happen to all good things.

In part 1 of this essay, I argue that a strain of New Age thinking can be found running through the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I link this mystical tendency to the liberal zeitgeist of the Eighties. I offer a breakdown of the season one episode “Where No One Has Gone Before” to illustrate my argument.

Now of course, a single episode does not a show’s sensibility make. If “Where No One Has Gone Before” were the only evidence of a New Age outlook on TNG I would not have bothered to write this essay (though I might well have written a different one on TNG). The other episodes worth mentioning in this regard I’ll come to in a moment. For now I want to consider composer Ron Jones’s flamboyent, synth-heavy music. Now synths, of course, feature heavily in most New Age music—especially synths with a distinctly Eighties flavour. In fact it’s precisely that mood, that vibe, that the first few (very synthetic) notes of the TNG title sequence evoke. That whole sequence, as the reader probably knows, is an Eighties update on the Sixties series’ opening titles. “Its five-year mission…” and “Where no man has gone before” make way for “Its continuing mission…” and “Where no one has gone before”. I don’t know if composer Ron Jones created the synth intro—that instantly recognisable phrase which segues into an orchestral theme equally memorable. This latter, by the way, was originally written by Jerry Goldsmith for Star Trek: the Motion Picture. But whether or not Jones honed that opening melody, it does gesture towards the same imaginative universe evoked by his TNG background music.

For me both versions of that opening phrase—The Original Series’ and TNG’s—are suggestive of the vastness and the enigmatic quality of space. In both cases what is evoked is Mystery. Of course the mood differs slightly between them. With TOS there’s a distinctly retro, perhaps naïve quality. With TNG it’s very Eighties: New Age / vaporwave.

Later Trek series went for different effects. Perhaps, by the Nineties, Mystery was felt to be a little naïve. Whatever the case, the spin-off shows obviously needed to find their own identities. Deep Space Nine’s main theme evokes Majesty. Voyager’s, Grandeur. As for the Enterprise main theme, the less said about that the better. Except for the odd episode or two, I have not watched Star Trek: Discovery or other ‘NuTrek’ films or series.

Ron Jones’s compositions for The Next Generation are extraordinary. He wrote numerous scores for the first two seasons of the show, some more for season three, a mere handful for season four. At that point he was let go by executive producer Rick Berman1, head of the Trek franchise following the ailing Gene Roddenberry’s unofficial semi-retirement and later death. Berman found Jones’s music too conspicuous, too keen to be noticed. He expanded on his reasoning in a 2011 interview:

Why was Ron Jones, who’d been composing music for TNG, dismissed after Gene Roddenberry’s death?

Berman: On various sites, one of them being Wikipedia, I’ve read some pretty nasty things that Ron Jones has said about me, with a general perception that his music was too good and I was not interested in good music. That is insulting and also absurd. The music on Star Trek was something that was supervised by me and by Peter Lauritson. Peter had been involved in hiring and firing conductors from the first episode of Next Generation to the last episode of Enterprise. Ron came on at one point, I forget exactly when, and he did numerous episodes for us. We got along fine. And at one point, because there were other composers we’d try out and we’d use for anywhere from one to dozens of episodes, it got to a point where neither Peter nor I were pleased with Ron’s work. As I believe I said at the time to somebody, he was doing the kind of scoring that was calling attention to itself. That doesn’t mean, as some people have interpreted it, that I wanted dull, boring music. What it means is that the music is there to enhance the scene that is going. The scene is not there to enhance the music. And Ron’s stuff was getting big and somewhat flamboyant. It was a decision that Peter and I made that was just a simple moving on to other composers. I think Ron was a perfectly good composer. I didn’t think he was in the same ballpark as Dennis McCarthy or Jay Chattaway, who we used a good deal of the time. But we decided to move on and try other composers.

In my view this was a bad creative decision, one of the worst taken during the series’ seven-year run. Many fans share my opinion. Jones’s TNG work is so highly regarded it’s been released as a CD box set entitled The Ron Jones Project. The collection’s over seventeen hours of music demonstrate both the composer’s industriousness and his remarkable range. While he was still on the show Jones enjoyed a surprising degree of freedom. This quote comes from The m0vieblog’s page on the composer:

I had creative real estate. I think I got away with a huge amount – I can’t figure out why, I don’t know what it was about. But when they decided to get rid of me, they decided to really change the music and sit with the composers. I never saw Rick at a session once.

“Where No One Has Gone Before”, the thought-provoking season one episode I discussed at some length in part 1, was evocatively scored by Jones. His music does much to establish the episode’s dominant mood of exploration and mystery.

Another favourite of mine among Jones’s scores is the one for “We’ll Always Have Paris”. While the plotting is less than memorable, this season one episode is enlivened by the wistful accordion with which Jones conveys Picard’s mixed emotions. On the one hand, nostalgic affection for an old flame he runs into after twenty-two years. On the other, irritation at his own “self-indulgence” after he recreates “their” cafe on the holodeck. Jones’s Gallic melodies remind me strongly of similarly wistful music Nobuo Uematsu created for the Final Fantasy series of JRPGs. The slight corniness of the accordion on “We’ll Always Have Paris” well conveys the bittersweet quality of Picard’s nostalgia.

In the underrated season one episode “Skin of Evil”, Security Chief Tasha Yar dies a meaningless death at the hands of one of TNG’s weirdest antagonists, a malevolent, living oil slick. Denise Crosby had decided to leave the show. She felt she hadn’t been given enough to do, which is odd, as she features prominently in quite a few episodes in the first season. “Code of Honor” for instance. It’s interesting that the writers opted to give Yar an unheroic death. Was it a punishment for abandoning ship? Possibly. Whatever the case, the randomness, the arbitrary nature of Yar’s death makes it hit harder. As a result the episode is more thought-provoking than it might otherwise have been. “Skin of Evil” is for me reminiscent of some of the darker, more Lovecraftian episodes of The Original Series’ first season (eg “The Man Trap”), and it benefits from a menacing, horroresque score from Ron Jones.

The episode is also notable for featuring one of the most New Age scenes in the whole series. I refer to Yar’s holodeck funeral scene, which takes place on a very synthetic-looking hilltop. The prominence looks astroterfed, the breeze-blown tree unreal, the sky too blue. You half expect to see a pod of silver CGI dolphins swimming serenely across that holo-sky. There’s also something surreal and New Age about the posthumous message from hologram Tasha. “You’re here now watching this image of me because I have died,” says the Yar recording, as calm and unruffled as if delivering a no-hard-feelings resignation speech. “Where No One Has Gone Before”, with that scene in which Picard encountered his dead mother, seemed to argue for the existence of an afterlife. Yar’s closing remarks at her funeral (I realise how odd that sounds) provide an atheistic contrast to that:

Death is that state in which one exists only in the memory of others. Which is why it is not an end. No goodbyes. Just good memories. Hailing frequencies closed, sir.

The funeral scene thus combines New Age aesthetics with a rather godless message, making it very Roddenberryesque. It brings to mind the atheistic mysticism of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, an underappreciated slice of cinema and the one Trek movie that can really be said to be Roddenberry’s.

Gene Roddenberry is commonly viewed as an atheist—William Shatner refers to him as such in “Chaos On The Bridge”, the 2014 documentary on the creation of Star Trek: TNG and its tumultuous first two seasons—and a comment the Star Trek creator made on Christianity lends credence to this opinion:

How can I take seriously a God-image that requires that I prostrate myself every seven days and praise it? That sounds to me like a very insecure personality.

However, a quote from very late in his life, when he’d become close to fringe philosopher Charles Musès, muddies the water somewhat:

It's not true that I don't believe in God. I believe in a kind of God. It's just not other people's God. I reject religion. I accept the notion of God.

Both these quotes appear on Roddenberry’s Wikipedia page—along with Musè’s assertion that Roddenberry’s outlook was “a far cry from atheism”—in the section on Religious views.

There’s certainly a strain of mysticism running through Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the sole Trek film Roddenberry was heavily involved in (Paramount, less than wholly satisfied with the first picture, sidelined him for the sequels). It’s a slow and ponderous movie which is nevertheless quite thought-provoking. As Commander Decker and Spock explain late in the story, the film’s antagonist, the machine entity V’Ger, is unable to access “higher levels of being” because its thinking is restricted to pure logic. Like a great many people in the modern era, V’Ger is hemmed in by rationalism.

The Motion Picture gave Trek fans what is, by my reckoning, their first glimpse of Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco. It strikes me as interesting that Roddenberry chose to locate his HQ, not in Washington DC or New York, but instead in the city that was the epicentre of the American counterculture throughout the Sixties and Seventies. Was he paying homage? Starting in the later Sixties, Roddenberry certainly played up his image as a radical progressive. It was a persona he’d invented for himself around that time by telling fans that Star Trek was a ‘Trojan Horse’ series—a way to smuggle controversial themes, and politics, onto network television. And network television, as Roddenberry had it, was highly conservative, resistent to the sort of radically progressive politics the Trek creator was (supposedly) committed to. Fans, especially female ones, eagerly embraced this notion of Star Trek as a courageous trailblazer for progressive values. Now, this essay is not really the place for me to go into why this view was exaggerated2. Suffice to say, Gene Roddenberry never saw any reason to come clean about his real ambitions during the early days of Star Trek, ambitions that seem to have been humbler and more conventional than the legend he created suggests. No reason, either, to tell the truth about NBC, which was never as conservative as Roddenberry had fans believe3. Gene Roddenberry was such an inveterate self-mythologiser that I would not be surprised to find out that he came to believe his own tall tales.

In aesthetic terms, The Motion Picture is more explicitly utopian than The Original Series. The whites, light greys, tans and browns of the redesigned Starfleet uniforms for instance. And the civilians, with their skimpy, groovy outfits, certainly look dressed for the Age of Aquarius. The Motion Picture’s overtly utopian look dates it much more than any of the sequels or the later TV series. But it also makes it a fascinating document of its time.

Let’s return briefly to Tasha Yar’s Roddenberryesque funeral.

Now, as regards life after death, I don’t know what Roddenberry’s precise views were. Given that, as a teenager, he’d concluded that religion was “nonsense”, it seems likely his attitude was one of disbelief—at least for most of his 70 years.

In ‘vibe’ terms the Yar funeral scene blends humanism and New Age. The presence of the latter element is felt not only in the visuals but also in Ron Jones’s score. It’s a lush and dreamy piece of music, moving in places. The synthetic quality of parts of it chimes with the vaporwave unreality of that soundstage hill.

Jones’s most famous work was earlier released as a standalone album; only a snippet of it is included in The Ron Jones Project for copyright reasons. I refer to the score for the famous two-parter “The Best of Both Worlds”, with which TNG first experimented with a cliffhanger. Jones’s gloriously over the top climatic sting for the first part powerfully underscores Riker’s predicament, forced as he is into a course of action that might kill Captain Picard (who has been transformed into Locutus of Borg). Unfortunately though—considering the quality of “TBoBW” and other Jones scores—from the very first episode he worked on, “The Naked Now”, the composer encountered opposition to his musical vision from Berman and Lauritson, resistance that ultimately did not prove futile.

Jones has also released at least two New Age albums, proof of his strong affinity with that culture. Of course the composer hasn’t given himself over entire to the Age of Aquarius. His other credits include the music for Family Guy and American Dad!

IV

In part 1 I cited the season two episode “Where Silence Has Lease” as one that deals with the subject of death, even touching on the question of life after death. This is another episode that made a strong impression on the teenage Heg. It should be said that, like many episodes in seasons one and two, it’s rough around the edges. There is the occasional cringe moment. Yet it still warrants a close look because, thanks to one scene in particular, this episode is highly relevant to the subject matter of this essay. And even setting aside that scene, for me the episode as a whole is compelling for the level of imagination on display. Let’s examine it, then. It’ll be the last episode we look at in detail.

Memory Alpha reveals the title to have been taken from a line of the Robert Service poem The Spell of the Yukon. I know nothing about Service or that poem, so moving swiftly on…

The plot has the Enterprise exploring the “Morgana Quadrant”, an area of the galaxy not visited before by a manned vessel. The drama begins when Data detects a “hole” in space. Not a wormhole or anything similar—instead a void, a true void “without matter or energy of any kind”. Two probes sent into the hole disappear without trace. Wesley, who’s been promoted to helmsman, suggests they move closer. Picard concurs—unwisely as it turns out. The void suddenly expands and the Enterprise is enveloped. The crew are alarmed to now find themselves inside the cosmic aperture. “It’s like looking into infinity,” says Riker, gazing out at velveteen blue-blackness. There are no stars in sight.

The attempt to fly back out of the void proves unsuccessful. Wesley’s instruments show the Enterprise travelling at warp speed, yet there’s no visual indication the ship is moving—the view of “infinity” on the main viewer remains unchanged. At Data’s suggestion, a beacon is dropped to provide a fixed reference point. As the Enterprise moves away the pinging beacon recedes. But no sooner has the signal faded into nothingness than an identical signal is heard approaching from straight ahead. After a moment Data confirms the source to be the beacon, which is now in front of them. Though the Enterprise has been travelling in a straight line it has circled back on itself, like the player’s ship on the wraparound map of Atari’s Asteroids (1979).

What follows is a series of (initially) unexplained encounters and incidents. There’s an attack by a Romulan warbird, destroyed with suspicious ease by the Enterprise. The sister ship of the Enterprise-D, the Galaxy-class Yamato, approaches, but with no one on board (no life signs detected).

Riker and Worf beam over to find a dimly lit ghost ship constructed from unknown materials and with impossible, Escher-like topology. Communications with the Enterprise are cut off by apparent interference. On the eerily vacant bridge, Worf characteristically loses his cool when confronted with doors that lead off the bridge, back on to the bridge. Meanwhile a dilemma presents itself to Picard. A “star fix” appears on the Enterprise main viewer: a hole in the void, through which the stars are visible. The Captain would dearly love to take the proferred exit, but Chief o’Brien can’t get a transporter lock on Worf and Riker.

Of course Picard wouldn’t abandon his officers, so it’s not really a dilemma at all. The hole closes and the star fix disappears; immediately o’Brien gets a transporter fix on the away team and beams them back at the Captain’s command.

Doctor Pulaski, who has been watching events unfold on the bridge, is among the first to realise what’s going on: the hole in space the Enterprise is trapped in is in fact a laboratory. An entity of some kind is testing their responses to stimuli. Soon enough, this theory is proved correct, with the entity in question appearing on the main viewer. The bridge crew find themselves confronted by a strange, disembodied, vaguely anthropomorphic face. Yet, according to Data’s sensors, there’s nothing there. “Sure is a damned ugly nothing,” mutters Geordie from the back of the bridge.

The entity introduces itself as “Nagilum” (which is (almost) “Mulligan” backwards—actor Robert Mulligan was originally earmarked by producer Maurice Hurley to play the role, which instead went to Earl Boen). It soon becomes apparent that this entity is interested in many things, but what intrigues it most is human mortality. Seemingly out of pure curiosity, Nagilum kills the unfortunate “red shirt” who has replaced Wesley at the helm. “We cannot allow you to do that!” protests Picard, vehemently. “We will fight you.” But Nagilum is undeterred. It announces its intention to carry out a thorough investigation of death, “which should not require [the lives of] more than a third or a half of your crew.”

In the conference room, mulling over this dire prospect with the other officers, Picard proposes a radical course of action: destroy the Enterprise. With fighting such a powerful being as Nagilum apparently futile, the only possible response to the entity’s murderous plan is mass suicide. Naturally this idea raises a few eyebrows. “Why do I get the feeling this was the wrong time to join this ship?” Doctor Pulaski wonders aloud.

In engineering, Picard needs his First Officer’s consent to initiate the auto-destruct sequence. Riker gives it, persuaded of the rightness of the Captain’s desperate solution. The timer is set to twenty minutes.

The next scene opens with Picard in his quarters. The lights are dimmed, “Gymnopédie No. 1” by Eric Satie is playing quietly. Troi enters.

“Our destroying ourselves won’t change its mind, Captain. I would feel that.”

“You didn’t mention you were that certain.”

“I was wrong not to tell you. And your decision may also be wrong.”

The Counsellor sits down; Data enters.

“I have a question, sir.”

“Yes, Data, what is it?”

“What is death?”

“Oh, is that all?”

Patrick Stewart then goes on to deliver some of the most fascinating—and unexpected—lines in the whole of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

“Well, Data, you’re asking probably the most difficult of all questions.

Some see it as a changing into an indestructible form. Forever unchanging. They believe that the purpose of the entire universe is to then maintain that form in an Earth-like garden, which will give delight and pleasure through all eternity.

On the other hand, there are those who hold to the idea of our blinking into nothingness.

[Picard snaps his fingers]

With all of our experiences and hopes and dreams merely a delusion.”

Data: “Which do you believe, sir?”

[Picard smiles, not answering straight away, giving thought to his answer]

“Considering the marvellous complexity of the universe—its clockwork perfection, its balances of this against that, matter, energy, gravitation, time, dimension—I believe that our existence must be more than either of these philosophies. That what we are goes beyond Euclidean or other practical measuring systems and that our existence is part of a reality beyond what we understand now as reality.”

Whether intentionally or not, this extraordinary monologue builds satisfyingly on the ideas introduced in “Where No One Has Gone Before”: there is more to reality, to us, and to existence, than meets the Euclidean eye. The scene is thus another prime example of that New Age or mystical sensibility that enlivens, and deepens, Star Trek: TNG’s first two seasons.

The conclusion of that scene, and that of the episode, are worth mentioning. Troi has been oddly cold and stony-faced from the moment she stepped into Picard’s quarters. She doesn’t seem herself.

Once Picard has concluded his philosophical musings, she speaks up:

“We should not let ourselves die, Jean-Luc.”

“I agree with her… Jean-Luc.”

Data’s use of Picard’s given name is especially jarring. But then so was his initial question about death: a naïve and childlike thing to ask, even for him. Picard realises there’s something up:

“Neither of you should be reacting in this way.”

The Captain asks the Enterprise’s computer to locate Commander Data—he turns out to be on the bridge. Picard gives a slight shake of his head.

“It’s not going to work, Nagilum.”

Realising the game is up, Nagilum dispenses with the bogus Data and Troi. They vanish. A moment later the real Data pipes up to deliver some very good news:

“Captain, we are clear. We are out of the void.”

Sure enough, when Picard looks out of the nearest window, he sees stars. Yet he doesn’t cancel the auto-destruct sequence immediately, as Riker urges.

On the bridge, Picard orders the Enterprise to go to warp 6, any heading. Then he waits. The bridge crew become increasingly alarmed as 30 seconds becomes 20 seconds becomes 10 seconds. Finally he relents. When the computer invites Riker to provide consent for the cancellation of auto-destruct, he concurs “wholeheartedly”.

Picard has one last encounter with Nagilum. The entity appears on the Captain’s personal terminal in his ready room. After some less than warm words the two agree their species have at least one thing in common: curiosity.

“Where Silence Has Lease” isn’t considered one of the greatest TNG episodes, but remains a favourite of mine. I hold a minority view of TNG generally, preferring the less well-regarded seasons one and two to later seasons, when these fascinating spiritual and mystical themes we’ve been exploring disappeared from the series, dematerialising as surely as an unfortunate red shirt hit by a phaser beam set to kill. Precisely why that happened is a question I attempt to answer in the third and final part of this essay.

Man as Paracelsus describes him is, like the firmament, 'constellated with stars', but he is not bound to it like 'the thief to his galley-oar, the murderer to the wheel, the fish to the fisherman, the quarry to the huntsman'. It pertains to the firmament of man to be 'free and powerful', to 'bow to no order', and 'not to be ruled by any other created beings'. His inner sky may remain autonomous and depend only upon itself, but on condition that by means of his wisdom, which is also knowledge, he comes to resemble the order of the world, takes it back into himself and thus recreates in his inner firmament the sway of that other firmament in which he sees the glitter of the visible stars. If he does this, then the wisdom of the mirror will in turn be reflected back to envelop the world in which it has been placed; its great ring will spin out into the depths of the heavens, and beyond; man will discover that he contains 'the stars within himself ..., and that he is thus the bearer of the firmament with all its influences'.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things1

I

I’m sure the reader has had no trouble recognising the image accompanying this post as a screen grab from Star Trek: The Next Generation. And he may be thinking, Why does Heg want me to read something about Star Trek? Compared with the best of DeLillo or Pynchon, Roddenberry’s franchise is not much of an intellectual touchstone. True, true... Nevertheless Trek interests me enough to pen a piece on it. In fact three pieces, which together will make up the full essay. My motivation here is a bit different to usual, being similar to the impulse which led me to write The Mother of All Battles series—a desire to return to an event, or in this case a TV series, which loomed large in my teenage years. Something which shaped me.

Having said that, Trek is interesting in itself. While the franchise’s various series certainly aren’t highbrow, they have always reflected the liberal culture of their time. And arguably more revealingly than just about any other American series. To analyse a particular iteration of Trek is to analyse American liberalism in that era.

Star Trek: The Next Generation was, and remains, the important one for me. Also I think this series is more interesting—in the context of analysing liberalism—than most would acknowledge (given the deep nerdiness of Trek and its fandom).

So let’s - ahem - make it so.

To begin, let’s recall that by the early Nineties a modernising reform of Anglosphere left-liberalism had been ongoing for perhaps a decade, driven by left-libs finding themselves shut out of power by an apparently invincible neolib conservatism. It was in the US, not the UK, that this reform happened faster and achieved concrete results sooner. Bill Clinton was elected in ‘92, two years before Tony Blair even became Labour leader, let alone Britain’s Prime Minister. Maybe this can be put down to Labour having had a stronger attachment to social democracy and socialism than the Democrats did, at any rate until the advent of neolib New Labour in ‘94.

But it would be a mistake to think of this process of reform as purely a matter of political economy, of changing policies and promises. The whole of left-liberal culture altered, shifted. In preparing for power, American left-libs developed a polished, slick, palpably vacuous style and ethos, embodied of course in the person of Bill Clinton.

The more esoteric elements of Seventies liberalism, like the New Age mysticism that survived that decade and left its mark on the Eighties, disappeared almost entirely from view. In the early Nineties, therapy-speak was in but hippy talk was out; it was time to prepare for government.

This particular change can be tracked in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The first couple of seasons, aired in the US from ‘87 to ‘89, are subtly inflected by a New Age sensibility. The reader may be surprised by that assertion. It’s something I’m going to return to later. For now, allow me to briefly share how I discovered this series almost thirty-four years ago.

“Encounter at Farpoint”, the 90-minute pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation, was first shown in Britain on September 26th 1990, a Wednesday, almost three full years after it had premiered in the States. It was broadcast on BBC Two at 6PM. I didn’t see it; in fact it was only very recently (and thanks to Netflix) that I watched this pilot. The first episode I ever saw, or rather caught the last ten minutes of, was “Code of Honor”, the series’ lackluster third episode. If memory serves I stumbled on it while surfing channels (which never took very long—we only had four of them).

“Code of Honor”, I’ve since learned, is rather notorious among both fans and the TNG cast as a vile, racist episode, and possibly the worst forty-five minutes of Star Trek ever made. Trekkies and lib thespians being what they are, the reader can likely guess how melodramatic that assessment is (and on both counts). “Code” is the “space Africans” episode. According to Trek fansite Memory Alpha, the episode’s aliens, the Ligonians, were originally to be reptilian; presumably someone realised how expensive and/or time-consuming that would be, so a bunch of black actors were cast instead. Following The Original Series’ convention, these actors were put on screen without visible makeup or prosthetics, and viewers were simply invited to accept them as aliens. This curious old-fashioned approach was taken several times in the first couple of seasons. “Code of Honor’s” particular racial faux pas, though, was not repeated.

The Ligonians’ backward tribal customs (all-female gladiatorial combat to the death to win a husband, anyone?) meant the casting led to some controversy. Jonathan Frakes called it “a racist piece of shit episode”. That was decades after the initial broadcast, at a convention. In 1987, though, political correctness hadn’t yet got its talons fully into the culture, so whatever controversy there was in the States was muted. And happily, no one was cancelled.

In any case, you can watch “Code of Honor” uncensored and without any content warnings on Netflix, so it really can’t be anything worth having an attack of the vapours over.

But let’s return to 1990. The inactive yet useful Trek blog Space Doubt notes that the Beeb went on to show much of Star Trek: TNG’s first season out of order, for no clear reason. The earliest episodes, including that one I stumbled upon, seem to have escaped this capriciousness. I found it interesting to check the broadcast dates. Learning precisely what you were doing on a particular day well over thirty years ago is a curious feeling. “Code of Honor” I must’ve caught on October 10th. The few minutes I saw featured attractive women, a fancy starship, cool minimalist uniforms and striking, futuristic sets: more than enough to pique my 14-year-old self’s interest. But what was the programme? I probably found out what I’d watched from weekly listings magazine The Radio Times, a copy of which was always lying around. I made a mental note of “BBC Two, Wednesdays, 6PM”.

Consulting Space Doubt reveals that the first full episode I watched must’ve been “Where No One Has Gone Before” (more on which later). It was a really impressive forty-five minutes that showcased that fancy starship I’d only caught a glimpse or two of toward the end of “Code of Honor”. Needless to say, that fast and bulbous craft, the Enterprise-D, was soon zipping across our modest TV set on a weekly basis. Science fiction was irresistible for me, as for most teen boys of the time. We had hungry imaginations and devoured as much satisfying “content” as we could get our hands on: comics such as 2000 AD, where Judge Dredd busted (or just wasted) “perps”, and the relanched Eagle, home of Dan Dare and his galaxy-brained foe, The Mekon; computer games that were often pirated, the tapes that bore Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum titles being child’s play to copy; fantasy novels, from the most well regarded, like Tolkien’s and Moorcock’s, to the most ephemeral and trashy; movies on VHS which, of course, were also often illegal duplicates and violent enough to be rated 15 or 18; board games with an SF or sword and sorcery theme, like Talisman or Games Workshop’s Judge Dredd tie-in Block Mania; weekly doses of the weird, imaginative, low-budget Doctor Who, until its cancellation in 1989; gamebooks, such as the Fighting Fantasy, Lone Wolf and Way of the Tiger series—mini RPGs for kids lacking the resources for Dungeons and Dragons (money, space, friends).

The more family-friendly Who and Eagle excepted, it was a lurid, violent and occult-themed diet, one sorely in need of some thoughtful, wholesome fare. Star Trek: TNG filled that hole nicely. Closer to grown-up entertainment, it was unusually idealistic for a TV show, as I came to realise through the first season. There was a real moral vision there. And a philosophical bent to the stories.

I think it was TNG that first introduced me to many of the weightier ideas and themes that would preoccupy me in later years. Season one’s “Skin of Evil” dealt with sudden, meaningless death, and the struggle to make sense of it. “Conspiracy”, from the same year, delved into intrigue and paranoia. Season two’s “Where Silence Has Lease” was another death-themed episode: it touched upon the question of whether something exists for us beyond the destruction of our bodies. An episode with a touch of that New Age mysticism I mentioned earlier to it, it’s one I return to later in the essay, in part 2.

The time-travel story “Time Squared”, also from season two, eerily evoked a sense of tragic fatedness, of doom. The various holodeck stories, such as “Elementary, Dear Data”, took the series into metaphysical territory. I hadn’t heard of the Argentinian writer then, but I now recognise those stories as essentially Borgesian.

While it was the visuals and the cool concept that first drew me in, it was TNG’s exploration of these unfamiliar philosophical concerns that really hooked me.

II

“Where No One Has Gone Before”, that first full episode I watched, was one of the most intriguing episodes. Recently I recalled how fascinating I’d found this one as a teen. Revisiting it a couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to discover that New Age sensibility I mentioned earlier. I’d never consciously associated it with Trek before. Indeed, out of all the early TNG episodes, it’s in “WNOHGB” that that New Age outlook is most clearly in evidence. A detailed episode breakdown is therefore warranted (spoilers ahead). However, it would be wise first to briefly define what I mean by “New Age”. A thorough explanation of this concept is outside the scope of this essay. I may well write a separate piece on it. But for this piece, I think the opening paragraphs of the entry for “New Age Movement” in Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism (Brill, 2006) will suffice:

The New Age has emerged during the 1970s and increasingly during the 1980s as a common denominator for a variety of quite divergent contemporary popular practices and beliefs. Among other things, healing, channeling, the interest in crystals, varieties of positive thinking and several forms of divination have been linked to this term. The New Age also includes various “alternative” interpretations of history and of the sciences.
The term itself originally arose in theosophical literature and in UFO cults after World War II in connection with the millennialist belief that the world stands at the brink of a major evolutionary transformation of consciousness, often identified in early New Age literature as the Aquarian Age. Many of those sympathetically involved in the first years of the New Age movement principally saw the various techniques of healing, divination etc. as tools in this transformation. This sense of the term New Age was in the later 1970s and in the 1980s largely superseded by a new and expanded meaning. It no longer refers to a specific movement that expects the coming of a new age, but refers to a wide array of ideas and practices, largely united by historical links, a shared discourse and an air de famille. The two uses of the term have been characterized (Hanegraaff 1996, 94-103) as the New Age sensu stricto and sensu lato.

Now let’s turn to “Where No One Has Gone Before”. We’ll be examining it with an eye for how the sort of beliefs described in the quote above, New Age beliefs, might be said to be given expression in the episode. I’ll assume at least a passing familiarity with Star Trek on the reader’s part—any of the various series, but ideally including The Next Generation.

An homage to The Original Series’ second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, like its inspiration this early TNG episode sends the Enterprise on a journey to, and then beyond, the limits of the known universe. Visually it’s arguably the most spectacular episode of the first season. By TV standards we’re taken on a pretty psychedelic voyage.

The plot is fairly simple, and concerns an attempt to improve the efficiency of the Enterprise’s warp engines—an endeavor that goes awry.

Things get off to an unpromising start when the Starfleet propulsion expert sent to upgrade the engines, Kosinski, turns out to be supercilious and arrogant, quickly antagonising almost everyone. Riker in particular is concerned the experiments—ordered by Starfleet—may endanger the Enterprise. Kosinski is accompanied by his assistant, a tall, rather mysterious alien whose name “is unpronounceable by humans.” Wesley and this quiet alien hit it off, but everyone else largely ignores this “assistant” of Kosinski’s.

The propulsion expert receives, from Picard, the go-ahead for the first test run. Kosinski and his assistant man consoles in Engineering and set to work. Of course Riker’s scepticism proves well-founded when the pair lose control of the warp-drive experiment, sending the Enterprise to the distant M77 galaxy, over two million light years away from its starting point.

During this “leap”, Wesley was taken aback to see Kosinski’s assistant “phase” in and out of existence. He suspects there’s more to this alien than meets the eye. While the rest of the crew debate what to do next, Wesley quizzes the now-exhausted assistant on what’s really happening during these extraordinary jumps Kosinski and his colleague specialise in. The boy’s questions soon take a mystical turn:

“Does it mean that space and time and thought aren’t the separate things they appear to be?”

The alien reacts with some alarm—the world isn’t ready for such “dangerous nonsense” (though he says this last with a smile). At this point the viewer begins to realise the alien “assistant” is possessed of special insight. He perfectly fits the guru archetype, so important to the boomer generation of course. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the Wesley / alien relationship is a self-insert on the writers’ part, a retelling of their own 60s / 70s spiritual awakening.

The mystical “space and time and thought“ theme is developed further when the attempt by Kosinski and the assistant to take the Enterprise-D back to its starting point goes even more drastically wrong than the first leap. The ship finds itself in a bizarre realm apparently at the “outer rim” of the universe. It’s a place where things from one’s past or one’s imagination are liable to suddenly materialise, then just as abruptly disappear (shades of Lem’s Solaris).

Picard, for instance, almost tumbles from the Enterprise into space (or what looks like space) when the doors of the turbolift he’s riding in unexpectedly open onto the void. Later he meets his dead mother in a corridor. She tells him that, although she has died, she is always with him. “I’ve felt that,” Picard replies. It’s an unexpected exchange on a show where talk of religion and the mystical had supposedly been categorically ruled out by creator Gene Roddenberry2.

We learn that Kosinski has been labouring under a delusion: his precious equations have played very little role in the extraordinary “leaps” he and his alien assistant have accomplished together.

Wesley: “Is Mister Kosinski like he sounds? A joke?”

Assistant: “No, that’s too cruel. He has sensed some small part of this.”

In truth, then, the “incredible explosions of velocity” (Picard’s description) have almost all been down to the extraordinary powers of the assistant. Now, with Kosiniski being such a puffed-up, pompous man, this humiliating discovery almost destroys him.

“I honestly thought it was me. I thought somehow, somehow I was operating on his level.”

Brought low, he retreats into the background. I wonder if this humbling of the vainglorious propulsion expert is intended to make a larger point about the arrogance of scientific rationalism. If so, it’s an atypical—though certainly not unwelcome—theme for an episode of Star Trek.

Kosinski’s alien assistant has been left severely weakened by the two leaps. It seems he may die. Yet he is the Enterprise crew’s only hope of returning home. In sickbay, Picard questions the mysterious alien on his adventures:

“Who are you? Or what?”

“I am a Traveller.”

“Traveller? What is your destination?”

“Destination?”

“Yes, what place are you trying to reach?”

“Ah, place. No. There is no specific place I wish to go.”

“Then what is the purpose of your journey?”

“Curiosity.”

The Traveller explains that the power of thought is key to what he does, since (as Wesley summised) space, time and thought are not really separate. Although Picard finds this reasonable Kosinski, ever the rationalist, responds with incredulity:

“Really, that’s so much nonsense. You’re asking us to believe in magic.”

Yet Picard is convinced. After consulting with Councellor Troi he prepares the Enterprise crew for the leap home:

“All decks, all stations: This is the Captain speaking. All decks, I must have your full attention. In a few moments, as we attempt to warp back home, it is vital—absolutely vital—that you center your thoughts on your duty or on the welfare of the one called the Traveller. Think of giving him some of your strength. Now, this is an order. You must try to do this. And now, attempt to concentrate completely on your duty of the moment or on the Traveller, on his well-being. Think of him as someone you care deeply for. All decks, all stations: battle stations.”

We’re shown some more goings-on in engineering and on the bridge, including Kosinski recovering some of his confidence when invited by a magnanimous Traveller to resume his station. Troi, turning to the Captain, couldn’t sound more New Age if she tried:

“I feel such an abundance of well-being on the ship. It feels… quite wonderful.”

Of course the episode’s conclusion proves the Traveller, Troi and Picard right and the earlier, sceptical Kosinski wrong, thus cementing “Where No One Has Gone Before”’s surprising New Age message.

I have to say that “WNOHGB”’s mystical speculations went largely over this 14-year-old’s head in 1990. I expect I treated the Traveller’s philosophy—that space, time and thought are not separate—simply as a plot device, not an idea to be considered. Though I was certainly able to relate to other episodes’ musings about death and fate, New Age ideas were too far outside my experience to register at that time. What fascinated me about this episode were the visual effects and the vast speeds and distances involved. Plus, of course, the fantastic notion of travelling to the edge of the universe.

The reader may find New Age culture, and mysticism in general, intriguing. He may equally find them risible. Either way, it seems to me interesting that, in the late Eighties, such ideas could find their way into a mainstream TV show. Just why these themes largely disappeared from The Next Generation in the Nineties is a question I explore in part 3 of this essay, the final part. But what of part 2? In that instalment I examine other New Age elements in the early seasons of TNG—touching upon certain other episodes (such as “Where Silence Has Lease”) as well as on the music of composer Ron Jones, which is replete with New Age textures and motifs.

It’s V period, dammit!

Such was the alleged reaction of famed literary recluse Thomas Pynchon when presented with one of the covers that got the title of his debut novel wrong. Or perhaps it was Pynchon seeing the title misrepresented in print somewhere else, in a newspaper or magazine. There’s always been an aura of mystery surrounding this author and his writing. He’s not quite a B. Traven for our time, but almost. Thus my uncertainty, my having been unable to establish that quote’s precise context, feels appropriate. Btw, I found it on thomaspynchon.com.

Scrolling through the V. cover gallery at that site, I was surprised to see just how often, over the course of the book’s 60-year publishing history, that particular clanger had been dropped. This, one of my favourite covers, is an ambiguous case:

Is that red dot behind the alligator a period, or just a graphic element included to make the scaly critter’s head show up, make it ‘pop’? Or is it even, conceivably, a halo?

I also really like this cover, though it’s one of those in which nothing like a period is anywhere to be seen:

It’s curious. Maybe this and cases like it are evidence of careless disinterest in V. on the part of publishers? While the book, in the early and mid Sixties, does seem to have been kind of a big deal, celebrated for innovations that would later come to be called postmodern, it looks to have since been overshadowed by what came to be Pynchon’s two most popular and most highly esteemed works—The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). The latter book especially of course. Can a rainbow cast a shadow? Ordinarily I think not, but that singular one certainly has, and over the entire rest of Pynchon’s oeuvre. I wonder if it’s caused the novelist some frustration.

Any reader of Pynchon is likely to be vexed sooner or later, though for quite different reasons. Crime writer Ian Rankin has described him as

the greatest, wildest, most infuriating author of his generation.

For a long time—almost twenty years—I resisted Pynchon. Though I acquired a Gravity’s Rainbow paperback in about 2004 I never made any headway with it. I knew Pynchon’s reputation for difficulty and, sure enough, the prose struck me as turgid, the story obscure and impenetrable. I’d also picked up, from J.G. Ballard if memory serves, a prejudice against all fiction pigeonholed as postmodern. That copy of GR remained in my possession, neglected, until I sold it about eight years ago. Last year I acquired another copy. I’d revised my views, finally discarded that anti-pomo prejudice, was intent on getting into Pynchon. I felt it was time. The reader is probably no stranger to that sense of owing it to yourself to finally read this or that very important writer. But besides that, I was aware there was a vitality and a richness in Pynchon, even if I’d not been able to appreciate them the first time. I’m always on the lookout for works that can be pitted against what is, for me, the defining problem of our time: that metaphysical desertification I often write about. The slow, steady advance of barrenness.

And so I attempted Gravity’s Rainbow once again. I got further than before, but still not that far. Yet my reason for halting this second time was different. It wasn’t that I wasn’t having fun with the book. I was enjoying it so much I realised I wanted to read all of Pynchon’s fiction. It’d be logical, I figured, to set GR aside and pick up the man’s debut, published ten years before when he was only twenty-six.

ii

So this brings me back to V., with its oft-misrepresented title.
Without the period V is just a letter. With it, an initial. But who, or what, is V.? Not only the identity but also the ontological status of V. (animate / inanimate; living / dead; natural / supernatural)—these are the central obsessions which hold together this first novel, a near-500 page pocket epic set largely in mid-1950s east-coast America. Though they soon become the reader’s obsessions too (at least this reader’s), to begin with it’s only a single mind they haunt, that of middle-aged Englishman Herbert Stencil. Born to an unknown mother in 1901 and thus “the century’s child”, the peculiar Stencil, like his father a former employee of the British Foreign Office, is one of V.’s two protagonists (the other being 23-year-old ex-sailor Benny Profane, more on whom below). Herbert’s interest in V., destined to become an extreme fixation, begins with a discovery in his dead father Sidney’s journal:

Stencil reached his majority three years after old Stencil died. Part of the estate that came to him then was a number of manuscript books bound in half-calf and warped by the humid air of many European cities. His journals, his unofficial log of an agent's career. Under "Florence, April, 1899" is a sentence, young Stencil has memorized it: "There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she. God grant that I may never be called upon to write the answer, either here or in any official report.”1

It’s actually Herbert Stencil who’s speaking here—he always refers to himself in the third person. Sidney Stencil did his intelligence work for the British state in the decades just before and after the turn of the 20th century. Though he wasn’t as eccentric as his son would be, Sidney’s philosophy was an offbeat one:

Stencil gritted his teeth. Oh, The Situation. The bloody Situation. In his more philosophical moments he would wander about this abstract entity The Situation, its idea, the details of its mechanism.
..
He had decided long ago that no Situation had any objective reality: it only existed in the minds of those who happened to be in on it at any specific moment.2

As this passage indicates, the V. narrative pays a visit (in fact more than one) to Sidney Stencil’s time, the late 19th / early 20th centuries. Herbert Stencil suspects V. is a woman, quite possibly his mother, and his quest for her sends him rummaging around in the past. In fact he uncovers, in a clutch of strife-torn times and places, a bewildering range of ‘Vs’ whose relation to each other is uncertain. They include a number of women (Victoria, Vera, Veronica) who may or may not be the same person, a rat also given the name Veronica by a deranged Catholic priest, an uncharted country called Vheissu, a bar called The V-Note, the list goes on. Although Herbert’s quest is often dark in tone, even somber, it’s not without humour:

At half past one the phone rang. It was Stencil.
”Stencil’s just been shot at,'“ he said.
Private eye, indeed. “Are you all right, where are you.” He gave her the address, in the east 80’s. “Sit down and wait,” she said. “We’ll come get you.”
”He can’t sit down, you know.” He hung up.3

Herbert’s odd way of speaking is amusing but it distanced me from him; I identified more with V.’s other protagonist Benny Profane. As Pynchon intended that his reader do, I suspect—a balance is thereby struck between the esoteric fascination of Stencil’s quest and the human interest of Profane’s picaresque “yo-yoing”, his aimless wandering up and down the east coast.

iii

Benny Profane, and some of his louche friends, we get to know before meeting Stencil the younger. It’s also in Chapter One that the letter V first makes its presence felt—unaccompanied by that all-important full stop:

Underfoot, now and again, came vibration in the side-walk from an SP streetlights away, beating out a Hey Rube with his night stick; overhead, turning everybody’s face green and ugly, shone mercury-vapor lamps, receding in an asymmetric V to the east where it’s dark and there are no more bars.4

SP is Shore Patrol, and one of the many biographical details Pynchon, who’d served about two years in the US Navy (‘55 - ‘57), put into his debut. This early and enigmatic appearance of the eponymous letter is typical of the author’s (in)famous allusiveness, and of his penchant for subtleties—like narrative foreshadowing and esoteric symbolism—which have intrigued and fascinated his many academic readers5 (in particular) for well over half a century.

Where we are, in this opening chapter, is East Main Street in Norfolk, Virginia, en route to a bar called the Sailor’s Grave. When we are is Christmas Eve, 1955. We’re accompanying Profane—“a schlemihl and human yo-yo” and the closest thing V. has to an avatar for its author—as he indulges a festive whim to haunt old haunts.

Like Pynchon at the time of the novel’s appearance (1963), Profane is an ex-sailor in his twenties. As the book begins he’s wandering through the eastern states, fresh from a stint working on a road crew. This last is another element drawn from the author’s life—Pynchon had done such work in summer in his Long Island hometown of Oyster Bay, where his father was road commissioner6.
Benny Profane’s a drifter, as not a few young men were in the postwar years. He’s living the kind of deracinated, unstructured existence that figures so heavily in the Beat literature of the 1950s. Pynchon has confirmed that the groundbreaking Beats were a key influence for him and his writing contemporaries. This from his introduction to Slow Learner, a collection of his early stories (all but one of them written and published prior to V.) that appeared in bookstores in 1984:

At the simplest level, it had to do with language. We were encouraged from many directions—Kerouac and the Beat writers, the diction of Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March, emerging voices like those of Herbert Gold and Philip Roth—to see how at least two very distinct kinds of English could be allowed in fiction to coexist. Allowed! It was actually OK to write like this! Who knew? The effect was exciting, liberating, strongly positive. It was not a case of either/or, but an expansion of possibilities. I don’t think we were consciously groping after any synthesis, although perhaps we should have been.
..
Against the undeniable power of tradition, we were attracted by such centrifugal lures as Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro,” the wide availability of recorded jazz, and a book I still believe is one of the great American novels, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac.7

V.’s chapters are divided into numbered sections, and in Chapter One’s part II Benny Profane is revealed to be the child of a Jewish mother and Catholic father. I find it curious and fascinating that, in V. and elsewhere, the gentile Pynchon displays what I assume to be quite extensive knowledge of Jewishness and Judaism, along with a fondness for certain words of Yiddish provenance, like schlemihl. For this word (in its alternate form schlemiel) Wiktionary offers the following:

Profane, then, is something of a bungler. Still, he’s not uncharismatic: he has a lazy, midcentury American charm. As a human yo-yo, ceaselessly moving but not really getting anywhere, he doesn’t know what he wants. His visit to the Sailor’s Grave sees him meeting up with his old Navy chum Pig Bodine, a cynical party animal (no pun intended). Pig is still a serving sailor but has gone AWOL. He’ll feature heavily in the novel, especially in flashbacks to Profane’s stint aboard the USS Scaffold. Also at the Sailor’s Grave Profane meets, and becomes the reluctant ‘guardian’ of, Paola Maijstral, an eighteen-year-old Maltese immigrant who’s been doing bar work. It’s a Platonic relationship, mostly. The good-natured Paolo will prove to be one of the book’s central characters. Some of Pynchon’s commentators have noted8 how her name seems to allude to Saint Paul, who, according to the Book of Acts9, was shipwrecked on Melita, present-day Malta. Over the course of the book the small archipelago will slowly emerge as a location central to the V. enigma.

The mind of Benny Profane is untroubled by any medium- or longterm goals. He represents an existential mode characteristic of the period 1945 to 1960–a certain Waiting for Godot aimlessness. His behaviour is in stark contrast to Herbert Stencil’s. The driven Englishman can, I think, be viewed as a symbol for the sciences’ obsessive search for certainty, for absolute truth. Their gnostic project, we might say, borrowing from Eric Voegelin (who I’ll have more to say about). All the ambiguities and paradoxes of that quest, and how Pynchon thematises them, I will consider in subsequent instalments of Songs in the Key of V.
Benny Profane incarnates an aspect of the century that isn’t so much the opposite of modern gnosticism as its complement. As his name suggests, Profane’s a stranger to grand things, holy things. At least in this respect he seems to be quite unlike his creator, who, according to a friend, music writer Jules Siegel, attended Mass and confession, at least during his time studying electrical engineering at Cornell University. Siegel was then his dorm-mate and, like Pynchon, a science student, but in premed.

iv

Chapter One, part V sees Profane leave behind his old Virginia stomping grounds (Norfolk, Newport News) to travel with Paola up to New York City, with an eye to hooking up with an old flame. Ms. Maijstral goes to stay with Benny’s ex–a young Jewish woman named Rachel Owlglass, who remains enamoured of Profane. Meanwhile, Benny looks for a job and gets one, hunting alligators in the sewers. Under orders to shotgun ‘em. Naturally the ‘gators, which as infants had been purchased as pets at Macey’s department store and ended up in the sewers when their owners had second thoughts and flushed them, are finite in number—so Profane’s spell of employment is also finite.

It’s in “Nueva York”, as it’s often referred to in the novel, that “wandering Jew” Profane meets Pig Bodine again. He’s initiated into “The Whole Sick Crew”, Bodine’s circle of degenerate, would-be artist friends. Among The Whole Sick Crew’s acquaintances is Herbert Stencil. Profane and he meet but don’t exactly get to know each other. Their destinies are linked, but not that closely. What we have in V. are really two concurrent stories that cross paths in places.

“Profane”, “Maijstral”, “Pig” and “Owlglass” were obviously not chosen by accident, and J. Kerry Grant, in A Companion to V., describes Pynchon as

one of the twentieth century’s great onomastic provocateurs, dangling his characters’ monikers before us in gleeful expectation of our surrender to the hermeneutic impulse.10

The novelist’s use of names like this would seem, on the one hand, to be ironic and comedic, and on the other to be part of what Harold Bloom called Pynchon’s “theosophical allusiveness“11. This latter is a mysterious aspect of Pynchon’s writing that I want to delve into in a forthcoming part of Songs in the Key of V12.

Another of V.’s facets I intend to examine is its psychogeography—how the various lands that the narrative visits make their presence felt. I have in mind, too, what I might call the “psychotemporality” of V.: how, in a sense, the novel provides doorways to other times.

1901—68. Novelist, painter. Helen Emily Woods published six novels under the name she acquired by her first marriage, Helen Ferguson. Her second marriage, like her first, failed, and she emerged from a spell in an asylum as Anna Kavan, the platinum blonde heroine of two of her novels.

As Kavan she became an avant-garde writer and painter, publishing novels and short stories possessed of a unique, intense, disturbing poetic vision. She was a long-term heroin addict, but her prose always remained sharp, classically weighted, icily precise.

Robert Aickman

1914—81. Short story writer, novelist, conservationist. Another controversial choice: Aickman was often scathing about modernity in his writings, but he’d probably agree there was little that was traditional about his approach to supernatural fiction.

Before achieving some renown as a writer of fiction, Aickman was known for his crucial role in the preservation and restoration of Britain’s canal system: in ‘46 he created the Inland Waterways Association with LTC Rolt, the author of Narrow Boat, the book that had first sparked in Aickman a passion for the waterways.

Aickman took the role of chairman for himself and under his energetic leadership the IWA was hugely successful; policy disagreements ended his friendship with Rolt, who was expelled from the organisation.

Politically RA was on the Right, and he later wrote that he’d conceived of the waterways campaign and lifestyle as a ‘redoubt’ within which he and his friends would resist socialism, conformism, vulgarity, the decline of standards, urban sprawl, and everything else they hated.

By the 60s Aickman felt his waterways work was done and he retired as IWA chairman to concentrate on writing fiction. There was a novel, The Late Breakfasters, inspired by his failed romance with Elizabeth Jane Howard, who‘d married Kingsley Amis. But Aickman’s best known for his 48 ‘strange stories’, supernatural tales where oddity and mystery are the common themes.

Aickman never much cared to explain the weird phenomena his protagonists encounter, and it’s in their presentation of the alien and the inexplicable that the stories’ modernism is to be found. Comparisons can be drawn with Lovecraft, although RA’s work is subtler and more enigmatic.

In ‘The Hospice’, for instance, a motorist gets lost in the English countryside and chances upon a curious establishment where reside listless, apparently amnesiac individuals (including an elegant woman who takes a shine to the protagonist, allowing Aickman to use his flare for eroticism). These people might be guests, patients, prisoners, or something else again. What is this place? Is it the afterlife—the underworld maybe? Needless to say, no definitive answer is forthcoming.

Patricia Highsmith

1921—95. Novelist, short story writer. ’Crime fiction’ is an inadequate description for Highsmith’s voluminous output (22 novels and many short stories)—hers is a sophisticated oeuvre that incorporates existentialist themes, most notably in 1969’s The Tremor of Forgery, which recalls Sartre and Camus.

Like Dostoevsky she was fascinated by human psychology, and in particular the species’ penchant for the transgressive and the perverse. Highsmith employed a spare, classically modernist prose style; her main innovation was in refusing to impose a conventional moralistic framework. For instance, her most famous antihero, serial murderer and conman Tom Ripley, evades punishment for his crimes, at least in the first novel to feature him. In the first film adaptation (‘60’s Plein soleil with Alain Delon), to Highsmith’s disgust, Ripley is apprehended at the end.

1864—1920. Sociologist, philosopher. Alongside Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim, Weber is considered one of the three founders of sociology. In contrast to Durkheim, Max Weber was an antipostivist, and sought to understand social action through interpretative means, not purely empirical ones—he asked what purpose and meaning individuals attached to their actions.

One of his most famous ideas is that modern societies possess a “stahlhartes Gehäuse” (steel-hard casing)—also translated as ‘iron cage’—of rationalism and bureaucracy, which the individual experiences as profoundly oppressive. Kafka explored a similar idea in his fiction.

For Weber, the iron cage was part and parcel of the “disenchantment of the world”. While Weber’s view of modernity is thus a melancholy one, he analysed his era in a resolutely modern way.

Another well-known idea of Weber’s is that capitalism is Protestant in spirit, a theory he laid out in his most famous work The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism1. The Protestants had sought to turn the world into wealth for the glory of God. Accumulated riches as evidence of being among God’s elect. An idea that helps us understand America’s individualist and workaholic tendencies.

The Reformation, for Weber, brought a revolution in the view of work,with even the most mundane professions now seen as contributing to the common good; primarily Catholic societies held on to older attitudes. An extract from Weber’s Wikipedia page:

Weber put forward the thesis that Calvinist ethic and ideas influenced the development of capitalism. He noted the post-Reformation shift of Europe's economic centre away from Catholic countries such as France, Spain and Italy, and towards Protestant countries such as the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and Germany. Weber also noted that societies having more Protestants were those with a more highly developed capitalist economy. Similarly, in societies with different religions, most successful business leaders were Protestant. Weber thus argued that Roman Catholicism impeded the development of the capitalist economy in the West, as did other religions such as Confucianism and Buddhism elsewhere in the world.

Weber made studies of various religions, including ancient Judaism (in a book of that title), and it’s interesting to take Weber further and speculate (as the early Marx did) on how Jewish attitudes may interact with Protestant ones in capitalist societies: something to be explored in another post.

Lev Shestov

1866—1938. Philosopher. A Russian Jew who accepted the resurrection of Christ, Shestov was a radical thinker who believed philosophy should dispense with reason. For Shestov rationality was misleading and, in the age of science, increasingly tyrannical.

“Everything is possible.” This wasn’t a utopian claim but rather an affirmation of life’s arbitrariness and strangeness. Shestov believed that the cosmos only appears to be coherent: reason conceals its inexplicability. This belief connects him unexpectedly with Jarry and pataphysics.

Here’s the opening of Shestov’s opus, Athens and Jerusalem (I consider it worth quoting at some length)2:

We live surrounded by an endless multitude of mysteries. But no matter how enigmatic may be the mysteries which surround being, what is most enigmatic and disturbing is that mystery in general exists and that we are somehow definitely and forever cut off from the sources and beginnings of life. Of all the things that we here on earth are the witnesses, this is obviously the most absurd and meaningless, the most terrible, almost unnatural, thing—which forces us irresistibly to conclude either that there is something that is not right in the universe, or that the way in which we seek the truth and the demands that we place upon it are vitiated in their very roots.

Whatever our definition of truth may be, we can never renounce Descartes’ clare et distincte (clarity and distinctness). Now, reality here shows us only an eternal, impenetrable mystery—as if, even before the creation of the world, someone had once and for all forbidden man to attain that which is most necessary and most important to him. What we call the truth, what we obtain through thought, is found to be, in a certain sense, incommensurable not only with the external world into which we have been plunged since our birth but also with our own inner experience. We have sciences and even, if you please, Science, which grows and develops before our very eyes. We know many things and our knowledge is a “clear and distinct” knowledge. Science contemplates with legitimate pride its immense victories and has every right to expect that nothing will be able to stop its triumphant march. No one doubts, and no one can doubt, the enormous importance of the sciences. If Aristotle and his pupil Alexander the Great were brought back to life today, they would believe themselves in the country of the gods and not of men. Ten lives would not suffice Aristotle to assimilate all the knowledge that has been accumulated on earth since his death, and Alexander would perhaps be able to realize his dream and conquer the world. The clare et distincte has justified all the hopes which were founded upon it.

But the haze of the primordial mystery has not been dissipated. It has rather grown denser. Plato would hardly need to change a single word of his myth of the cave. Our knowledge would not be able to furnish an answer to his anxiety, his disquietude, his “premonitions.” The world would remain for him, “in the light” of our “positive” sciences, what it was—a dark and sorrowful subterranean region—and we would seem to him like chained prisoners. Life would again have to make superhuman efforts, “as in a battle,” to break open for himself a path through the truths created by the sciences which “dream of being but cannot see it in waking reality.” In brief, Aristotle would bless our knowledge while Plato would curse it. And, conversely, our era would receive Aristotle with open arms but resolutely turn away from Plato.

Guy Debord

1931—94. Theorist, filmmaker, board game designer. One of the most brilliant thinkers of his generation, Debord first became politically and theoretically active with the Letterist International. A Parisian avant-garde movement of the 40s and 50s, the L.I. took inspiration from Dada and Surrealism.

These influences would be key to the group Debord went on to found and lead in the 60s, the Situationists, who combined Marxism with anarchism. Their name came from their practice of creating ‘situations’—poetic disruptions of everyday banality intended to awaken and liberate.

Debord’s main theoretical contribution was The Society of the Spectacle3, in which he defined a kind of unreality, engendered by capital, that had taken over the modern societies of both East and West (the Soviet system he considered ‘bureaucratic capitalism’). The familiar opening few theses (the reader will note the obvious influence of Marx, but the idealist strain in Debord’s thought is more Hegelian):

1. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

2. The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

3. The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.

4. The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

5. The spectacle cannot be understood as an abuse of the world of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung which has become actual, materially translated. It is a world vision which has become objectified.

6. The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production.

Debord’s career petered out after the 60s. He made a curiously hypnotic film to accompany tSotS (viewable on YouTube), and even designed a board game simply titled War, but didn’t produce anything else of note. The Situationist International disbanded in 1972. In ‘94 Guy Debord committed suicide.

1846-70. Really a proto-modernist, the Uruguayan Ducasse was born in one capital city under siege (Montevideo) and died in another (Paris). A strange destiny for a still stranger young man, author of the most radical and perhaps most disturbing work in 19th-century literature—The Songs of Maldoror, penned under the name Comte de Lautréamont.

A bizarre, sarcastic celebration of wickedness, Maldoror went on to greatly influence the Surrealists. The book is fascinating for its acute grasp of what Baudrillard called ‘the eccentricity of evil’.

It’s difficult to say whether Ducasse was mad or just very skillful at inhabiting a mad persona—that of Lautréamont. In his follow-up, Poesies, he disavowed evil and pledged himself to the good—a sincere change of heart or merely a pragmatic move? As with so much about Ducasse we’ll never know.

One of his more famous utterances is found in the Poesies: “Poetry must be made by all, not by one.” Against the Romantic notion of lone, isolated genius, Ducasse seems to pit the idea of a poet who would draw upon the real experiences and stories of others. ”Hold to the common,” as Heraclitus says.

Georg Trakl

1887-1914. “Trakl’s poetry is for me a thing of sublime existence.” So said fellow Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein, who anonymously provided the poet with a sizeable stipend so he could concentrate on writing. Trakl had trained as a pharmacist, and it was in a medical capacity that he served in the Austrian army during WW1, an experience he found unbearable.

Trakl’s poetry is dreamlike, often ominous, and possessed of a dark beauty uniquely its own. He’s considered one of the foremost German-language expressionists.

Below is one Trakl’s most celebrated poems, with Alexander Stillmark’s translation1 alongside.

Allusions in the poems suggest one source of Trakl’s anguish was his possibly incestuous relationship with his sister, the pianist Grete Trakl (1891-1917). Georg Trakl committed suicide by cocaine overdose in a Kraków military hospital; Wittgenstein arrived too late to stop him.

Philip Larkin

1922-85. Librarian (as well as a poet). Larkin would’ve likely objected to being included here, but critics did find modernist qualities in his works. The themes of the existentialists—alienation, absurdity, but also mystery—are very much present.

He once referred to himself, mockingly, as ‘a welfare state poet’. As a conservative he found Britain’s diminished postwar status lamentable, but no doubt also funny on some level. Irreligious, he accepted the collapse of religious belief. Though perhaps with a twinge of regret, as suggested by one of his most famous poems, reproduced below.

Larkin is simplistically pigeonholed by many as a doom and gloom poet, yet there’s also an abundance of wit in his works, and in many poems one encounters an unsettling haunting quality that goes beyond mere melancholy. Philip Larkin spent his working life as a librarian in Hull, a fittingly provincial town-one of his main themes was disappointment and the scaling-back of ambitions and expectations that often follows.

Although he never married, he enjoyed (or perhaps endured) a number of relationships with women. In 1984 he was offered the post of Poet Laureate—he declined it, feeling that the relative paucity of his output since the mid 70s disqualified him.

1896-1954. A pioneer in documentary making, Vertov was most active from the late 1910s to the 30s, with the 20s—his heyday—being a decade of great creative ferment in the newly-formed USSR. He developed a theory of Kino-Pravda, ’film-truth’.

Kino-Pravda was about not just capturing actuality, but also organising the material so that a deeper truth about the subject matter, one not immediately apparent, would reveal itself. Vertov promoted this concept in a series of 23 newsreels starting in 1922. His most famous work, the experimental silent Man with a Movie Camera, he made in 1929.

While in a sense a documentary, the film focuses on a camera crew who are supposed to be filming everyday life. The eponymous man with a camera was in fact Vertov’s brother Mikhail, himself a filmmaker.

MwaMC was little-regarded at first, but later it was recognised as a stunningly innovative and visionary work, both in technical terms and for its self-reflexivity. Several directors, including Jean-Luc Godard and Ridley Scott, have paid visual homage to it. MwaMC remains a fresh, elegant and witty work even today.

Michelangelo Antonioni

1912-2007. You’ll either love his films or be bored out of your mind. There’s never much plot to speak of, and the modern landscapes Antonioni’s characters inhabit interest him as much as the characters themselves.

Like Ballard, he seems to view man-made landscapes both as reflections of, and shapers of, states of mind. Antonioni’s characters are unconscious psychogeographers, not infrequently taking to wandering aimlessly through the concrete flora like Situationists on a dérive.

Alienation and ennui are themes in all his films. Again like Ballard, his attitude to these is ambiguous: are they simply bad, as conventional wisdom has it, or could alienation and a lack of definite purpose have positive effects? If we embraced them, could they lead us to something more interesting?

Chris Petit

1949- Filmmaker and novelist. The first living modernist in this series (as of the time of writing), Petit is a major talent but not widely known. Radio On(1979), an existential journey through modern Britain and one of the few British road movies in existence, was his directorial debut.

The film’s sensibility is very European, with Petit drawing inspiration from the German New Wave (Wenders, Fassbinder). Chris Petit grew up partly in Germany, with his military father working on NATO bases there, and he’s clearly retained a fascination with the country and its particular brand of modernism.

Petit began his career as a novelist over a decade after Radio On, with Robinson(1993). A Soho novel where a fictionalised Petit follows the enigmatic and dangerous Robinson (first met in Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night and later to appear in the poetry of Weldon Kees and the films of Patrick Keillor) on a strange, visionary quest into London’s pornographic underground. Like all of Petit’s best work, this first novel is elegant, compelling, and haunting.

Another very noteworthy work is Content (2010), where Petit returns to the genre of the road movie 30 years after Radio On.

However, Content is a personal, non-narrative film, an example of ‘ambient filmmaking’. Petit surveys the social and existential changes of the previous 30 years. “TVs got flatter, and so did everything else.”

For a few weeks in 2020 I ran a series called Daily Modernist. My first choice was Bela Bartók; the thread for him was very short, only two posts. As the series progressed the threads quickly grew longer. I wanted to do justice to the figures I picked, while at the same time remaining concise. However, after the first few my Daily Modernists weren’t as daily as I’d have liked, and after fifteen entries I concluded the series was too ambitious and suspended it. I still like the threads I produced, though, so here they are in Some Private Diagonal form.

By no means all the figures I’ll present will be canonical modernists, that is, individuals recognised as modernists by academia. However, they’ll all be bold innovators who displayed a fascination with one or more aspects of the modern world (without necessarily being all that fond of modernity as a whole—there was in fact a very important strain of modernism that was antimodern).

The modernists will be grouped by specialisation. We begin here with two musicians.

..

Béla Bartók

1881-1945. Composer, pianist. Bartók incorporated folk melodies from his beloved Hungary into his music. As with other 20th-century composers with nationalist leanings, this mining of a folk tradition was a response to the breakdown of the diatonic system of harmony that had served Mozart, Beethoven et al. Bartók also embraced avant-garde dissonance, though more subtly than did radical contemporaries like Schoenberg. Raised a Catholic, Bartók became first an atheist and later a Unitarian. He was said to be a great lover of nature.

Daphne Oram

1925-2003. Musician, composer. What does a circle sound like? Or a square, a triangle? This is what Daphne Oram wondered as a schoolgirl in the 30s, as she dreamt of a device that’d allow her to draw sound, draw music.

Her journey towards realising this vision began at the BBC during the war, where she was tasked with producing sound effects. After hours she’d experiment with tape recorders long into the night.

In France at the same time two Pierres, Henry and Schaeffer, were conducting similar experiments, producing what they called musique concrète. In 1958 Oram cofounded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop with Desmond Briscoe. The Beeb was producing avant-garde radio plays by the likes of Samuel Beckett and needed unusual music and sound effects. Electronic instruments barely existed then, so the Workshop had to experiment every which way to come up with the goods.

Oram believed electronic music should become the BBC music department’s main focus but the department refused, so she left the Radiophonic Workshop after less than a year. She set up her Oramics Studio in a converted Oast House in Kent and, with the help of her brother John Oram and an engineer, Fred Wood, set about building her Oramics Machine, the device that would allow her to draw sound as she’d envisaged decades before.

The finished machine took lines and shapes drawn onto 35mm film stock and turned them into sound.

Oram’s music is by turns playful and unsettling, even disturbing.

Her work can be heard in the 1961 film The Innocents, an adaptation of Henry James’s ghost story novella The Turn of the Screw. The eerie otherworldliness of Oram’s sounds is remarkable, and at the time cinema-goers had never heard anything like it.1

Do you want to know why Ballard’s late 1960s and 1970s output is based? Because it’s all about unstoppable civilisational decline, and the chances of thriving, despite everything, in the midst of it. Ballard’s radical proposition is that decline and dissolution even open up new, undreamt-of possibilities.

Logic of the landscape

Getting off to a tentative start with 1964’s short The Terminal Beach and ending with the 1975 novel High Rise, this is what’s generally regarded as Ballard’s most radical era. Although there’s a case to be made that The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash are sui generis, the “concrete and glass” period as a whole bears comparison with the work of the Futurists and that of Wyndham Lewis. Parallels can also be drawn with the Oswald Spengler of Man and Technics.

Lunar and abstract

Decades later, in a departure from this broadly (though certainly not trad) Right-wing position of the 60s and 70s, Ballard became moderately Left-wing—as he himself confirmed in interviews. But it’s the concrete and glass era that is, for me, the most compelling. It’s the strange combination of optimism (at the individual level) and pessimism (at the social level) that makes this work fascinating.

Tolerances of the human face

Ballard’s motives for writing these works seem ambiguous. Is this the author as moralist, as responsible social critic—or something darker? The answer of course is that it’s both. The self is a spectrum of spiritual possibilities, and the writing of a work will involve many of these.

Operating formula

An interesting question is Ballard’s position vis-à-vis modernism and postmodernism. The heavy use of scientific terms and the clinical prose style would seem to mark him as a modernist. Yet Ballard said he used these terms to achieve a certain effect, and spoke of “so-called” reality.

Ballard certainly doesn’t ignore or dismiss science as postmodern theorists are wont to do. He seems to think science (which one character calls “the ultimate pornography”) is broadly true, but missing something: it contains no account of “the unseen powers of the cosmos”.

Casting the runes

Ballard admirer Iain Sinclair speaks of the author and his work in terms the man himself never did. He calls JGB ”a magus” and writes of the texts collected in The Atrocity Exhibition: “No one could be expected to act on these instructions; they were magical and threatening to the fabric of the received world.”1

There is, perhaps, an element of hostile intent in Sinclair’s commentary: this is an attempt to remythologise Ballard, to remove him from the modernist / science-fiction frame in which he presented himself, in order to place him definitively within Sinclair’s preferred frame of occultism. To some extent this has succeeded.

Addendum

The following text is taken, slightly altered, from a later thread.

Modulus of pain and desire

This section will look at a lesser-known story from Ballard’s concrete and glass period. This piece, “Journey Across A Crater”, dating from 1970, is for some reason not included in the second volume of the so-called Complete Short Stories, which covers this period of Ballard’s work.

Exit wound

As is typical with the ”condensed novels” of this period (the others are collected in The Atrocity Exhibition), it’s not immediately clear what’s going on. We have a protagonist, here unnamed, whom a young woman, Helen Clement, sees “appear [in the urban landscape]..like a drowned archangel.”

Ballard’s stories of the period 1964 to 70 stand out in his work in that they quite often present explicitly religious, Christian images. Archangels also appear in TAE, alongside images of the Virgin, and even a Christlike figure (whose Second Coming is, however, botched).

Alien obsessions

The sentences are compressed, hard, angular. Ballard observed in an interview that his prose tended to take on the qualities of the landscapes it was describing. His prose in his earlier novel of catastrophe, The Drought, thus has a certain arid quality Ballard didn’t care for.

The aggressively active cripple, Gabrielle Saltzman, is clearly a focus of erotic fascination. During this period Ballard was obsessed with life’s victims—and how they sometimes, in a perversely original move, embrace their irreversible misfortune, and in so doing transcend their victimhood.

Music of the quasars

But what is the lead character trying to do? Seems that, like the T character in TAE, he’s having a breakdown (which may be a liberation). He moves through the external world but also through his own consciousness. Like the author, he follows his obsessions—he senses that these hold the key.

Perhaps what all Ballard’s protagonists are searching for is simply transcendence, ie God (in our Western understanding). And sometimes they find it, though in these concrete and glass stories it’s more often a negative transcendence that they attain—the transcendence of Evil?

I remember hearing often about football hooliganism as a kid in the 80s. As a serious problem of the day, there was much talk about what was to be done about it. Finally something major was done—and the action taken turned British football into the monster of global Capital it is today.

Aggro

Having become an international talking point in the 60s, British football hooliganism had grown into quite a grave problem by the 70s. Fierce animosities had developed between rival clubs’ fans, and matches had come to be frequently marred by violence, either inside the football grounds or, more commonly, outside. Millwall FC, West Ham, etc had all had acquired their own ‘firms’—hardcore hooligan gangs who were the main instigators of violence, egging on other, less committed supporters (the ‘casual’ hooligans).

The Old Bill

The authorities’ solution was special trains to transport fans, a heavy police presence on matchdays, as well as cage-like fencing to separate fans from the pitch and prevent pitch invasions. But hooliganism did not go away. And then, in 1985, tragedy struck.

A first disaster

It was the European Cup Final between Juventus and Liverpool. The venue was the Heysel Stadium in Brussels. About an hour before kick-off, some Liverpool fans charged Juventus supporters, who tried to flee. In their panic they pressed against a concrete retaining wall, and some were crushed.

Eventually the wall collapsed, allowing many fans to climb away to safety, even as others lay dead, dying or injured. In total 39 people died; around 600 suffered injuries. Strangely, the match was not called off. Juventus won 1-0.

Home to roost

Heysel led to much soul-searching in Britain, in Liverpool in particular. How to prevent such hooligan-caused disasters? By a dark coincidence, tragedy was to touch Liverpool FC again 4 years later, this time with the club’s own fans as the victims. Hillsborough.

Lightning strikes twice

Liverpool were to play Nottingham Forest in an FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. As the official account has it: before kick-off, as they were shepherding fans into the stadium, the police made a fatal mistake. To ease overcrowding outside entrance turnstiles the police opened another entrance. A fatal crush resulted inside the stadium,in one of the pens where fans were quite literally caged (cages had been adopted to combat hooliganism, as you’ll recall). The death toll was terrible: 96 lost their lives and 766 were injured.

Walk alone

In the days and weeks after the disaster, police and the right-wing press claimed hooliganism on the part of Liverpool fans was to blame for the disaster. This remains controversial to this day. Whatever the Hillsborough tragedy’s true cause (hooliganism or official incompetence), it was realised there’d have to be some radical changes in football.

Transformation

In the top two divisions of English football the ‘cages’ were removed and a transition to full-seater stadiums began. Around the same time the FA entered into negotiations with Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV, which wanted exclusive broadcast rights to all top-flight league matches.

Sky’s the limit

In the event, Murdoch injected vast sums of money into English football, transforming the First Division into the Premier League, the matches of which were only shown live on Sky. Ticket prices rose rapidly, pricing out many working-class fans. The hooligans seemed to have been beat.

Legacy

In fact, although hooliganism largely disappeared at the club level, hardcore groups continued to travel with the English national team, occasionally instigating trouble abroad. The possible root causes of hooliganism are interesting, but I’ll get on to them in another post.

In 2011, inspired by Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, I undertook to visit all the surviving Queen Anne churches in London. These buildings date from the early 18th century, a period of extensive construction and reconstruction in the capital. The Great Fire of 1666 had destroyed a great many of the city’s places of worship. Thus in 1710, during the reign of Queen Anne, the New Churches in London and Westminster Act was passed; the following year saw the setting up of The Commission for Building Fifty New Churches. The target of fifty would not be met; ten new churches would be built and a two existing ones rebuilt. The Commission would also partly fund a number of other church rebuilding projects. I paid visits (often fleeting, due to the number of destinations on my itinery) to all these churches.

English Baroque

Most of the new churches were designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor (now a cult figure of course), with John James, Thomas Archer and James Gibbs also involved in the work. I was intrigued by the strangeness of Hawksmoor’s churches, and the idea the architect may have been involved in the occult.

Deep assignment

When the thought of visiting the Queen Anne churches first occurred to me in the summer of 2011, while I was in London for work-related reasons, I didn’t know the significance of the year 1711. A little research revealed the odd coincidence that it was precisely 300 years since the establishment of the Commission. At that point I thought that, despite the size of the task, I couldn’t very well not follow through on the idea—my mind had been made up for me. The first church I visited, later a favourite of mine, was St George in the East (pictured below).

A casualty of the Blitz

One Hawksmoor church none can now visit is St. John Horsleydown. Co-designed with John James in the 1720s, sadly it was badly damaged during the Blitz. Much later (the 1960s) it was determined that it should be demolished. Pevsner had considered its ”silly but loveable spire” a landmark.

Sacred geometry

Columns, obelisks, pyramids. Hawksmoor was inspired by various architectures of antiquity: Hellenic, Roman, Egyptian, and perhaps others. In 1975, in his first major publication, Lud Heat, Iain Sinclair floated the notion the renowned architect had sited his London churches so as to form an Egyptian hieroglyph. A stretch maybe, but Lud Heat being a poem, it’s not really a question of true or false.

Cycle of sacrifice

Peter Ackroyd acknowledges the debt his 1985 novel Hawksmoor owes to Sinclair. Here the 18th-century master of English Baroque is reimagined as Nicholas Dyer, a sinister figure who has an (involuntary) human sacrifice interred within the foundations of each of his churches.

‘Meanwhile’, in the present, Detective Inspector Nicholas Hawksmoor investigates present-day murders, each one seemingly committed in the vicinity of a Dyer church. The novel helped launch the Hawksmoor myth which, whether there’s any truth to it or not, is now a potent force at work in the city.

Scarlet tracings

Among the various mystical / metaphysical (or even pataphysical) ideas that have come to be promoted by psychogeographers like Sinclair and Ackroyd, one of the more thought-provoking is the notion that places influence the lives they touch in consistent ways. Darkness inhabits some places. Eg. Whitechapel, where the Ripper committed his murders. The Hawksmoor church of the district seems to me to possess a hostile aspect—something about the geometry of the building, and the silouette it cuts, suggests malignancy.

Underground

If 1984’s The Terminator has a political subtext it is perhaps the expression of a deep unease about Reagan’s hawkish approach to the reheated Cold War. But by James Cameron’s later standards this subtext is postively subterranean. Consider Avatar. In contrast to the heavy-handed polemical approach he would take with his 2009 film, with this first feature the director wisely chose not to shovel politics down the viewer’s throat. In fact The Terminator is pretty ambiguous. The film isn’t simply anti-technology, since we learn the surviving remnants of humanity have smashed Skynet in the post-nuclear future. Presumably their high-tech future will be bright.

Nice night for a walk

The film is one of slow reveals and defied expectations. Take the scene where a naked Arnold encounters the delinquent punks, the latter wielding chains and flick-knives. Rising crime has conditioned us to fear these types. Despite his muscles, things look bad for the naked fella.

Goblinesque

One of the most haunting sequences for me has always been Reese’s night arrival in ‘84, followed by him fleeing from the police in the alley into the empty department store. Here the synth score is reminiscent of the electronic music of John Carpenter, Goblin and Fabio Frizzi—those unnerving scores that enhanced many a horror or low-budget thriller in the late 70s and early 80s. It was the era of the soundtrack avant-garde. Arriving toward the end of that era, Brad Fiedel’s similarly abrasive and weird music for The Terminator works superbly in the ‘Reese chased’ scene, accentuating the strangeness and alienation.

Posthuman

Something the figure of the cyborg Terminator taps into is the fear of people becoming machinelike, emotionless, dehumanised—while still retaining a normal outward appearance. A theme in science fiction cinema since at least Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), one which became more pronounced in the genre films of the late 70s and the 80s.

In cells

One thing that’s always struck me is Reese’s incel (or volcel?) status. He remained chaste and pledged himself to a woman he’d never met, in whose defence he finally sacrifices his life. The archetypal Christian knight: he wouldn’t be out of place at Arthur’s Round Table.

A storm blowing from Paradise

If John Connor is the Messiah, then Skynet is Herod, acting with foreknowledge in an attempt to kill him before he becomes a threat (before he’s even conceived). And what of the nuclear war and the battle with the machines? Echoes of the Last Judgment. Survivors as the elect, chosen to enter paradise.

Part B

Unresolved

The first two Terminator films and the postmodern condition. A question neither film definitively answers is whether the course of history can really be altered by someone acting with foreknowledge. Skynet seems to think so, but who’s to say it’s correct?

Wheels of fate

OIn the first film there’s never any question of Reese and Sarah attempting to stop the apocalypse from happening. The impression left by Reese’s account is that the forces that’ll bring it about dwarf them so much it would be futile to even try. The film ends on a note of Stoic fatalism.

Paranoia and paradox

“A person could go crazy thinking about this.” Sarah’s metaphysical dilemma, merely touched on in The Terminator, will become a dominant theme in Terminator 2. It’s the kind of poetic evocation of ontological uncertainty that makes science fiction (or rather made science fiction—it’s practically disappeared as a significant genre) the fictional mode par excellence of postmodernity.

Ground zero

In Terminator 2 Sarah does seem to have become genuinely unbalanced to some degree. Both her knowledge of the future war and the thought she might be able to stop it have brought her to this. The postmodern condition is one of chronic ontological uncertainty—where is the real, where the true?