Simon Amstell's Carnage and Pragmatic Utopias

Utopian thinking can be revitalised through art and culture

So recently I finally got around to watching Simon Amstell's new film, Carnage, available on IPlayer. Set half a century in the future in a Utopian world where veganism has become the norm and people openly weep at their memories of eating meat, it recounts a semi-fictional history of how humankind collectively decided to give up consuming dead animals for good. Indeed the sublime punnage of its title reflects Amstell's own attitudes towards the subject matter, but where the film stands out amongst its vegan contemporaries is the way in which it rejects that movement's self-righteous anger and rather bloated self-importance. Its cultural fabrications, including a vegan-themed Eurovision entry from Albania and an opera led by a cow, are somehow both utterly believable and hilariously absurd. Set alongside footage from actual incidents and occurrences, they simultaneously lampoon the vegan movement whilst paving a real road for the future. Yet, as it culminates in an overtly fantastical arcadian future where middle-class teenagers sit around in the countryside feeding each other vegan delicacies, one might wonder how sincere its message actually is. The film in this regard manages to be both wonderfully clear and wilfully obscure as Amstell shows that sometimes fact can be stranger, and a lot funnier, than fiction.

The same day I watched it, I also managed to finish Rutger Bregman's recent work Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There. Similar to Carnage, Bregman revitalises his subject matter and imbues it with a renewed relevance. He argues that it is essential for the Left to recapture the spirit of Utopian thought in order to provide a more effective resistance against a currently more dominant Right. The work reclaims the whole concept of Utopias from dogmatism, instead showing how they are, instead, pragmatic, all demonstrated in the following quotation from Oscar Wilde, "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias." Bearing this in mind, the fantastical, futuristic elements of Carnage suddenly become a lot clearer in their intentions. The faux-historiography the film creates evidences humankind's changeability where, in fact, rather than the fictional elements seeming real, the real elements seem fictional. Meat-crammed footage from today's celebrity chefs, including an excerpt of Nigella Lawson cracking a chicken's breastbone become darkly humorous and almost shocking under the posterity-gazing of a speculative future. One has to bear in mind that this isn't a current historiography, but a Utopian one. Perhaps it is one in the making; in a Q&A for the film, Amstell states that veganism is inevitable, but in the mean time it is, nonetheless, a product of Utopian thinking. And, as Bregman shows, Utopias aren't blueprints for the future, but vehicles for contemporary ideas.

Utopias also encapsulate our current hopes and dreams, they are more than just dry ideas. Like the Right utilises nostalgia, a fabricated past, for political effect, so too can the Left with a fabricated future. Utopias are products of the here and now, they guide rather than dictate. And, as such, they are discardable; they are best represented in art and culture. We look to the artistic Utopias of the past to understand bygone frames of mind rather than as failed political projects. We find cultural value in them despite their outdatedness. We can use them to empathetically engage with our ancestors, find a common cause, and evidence of a deeper, unchanged humanity.

The distinction between the cultural and the actual needs to be made in order for Utopia to become politically potent once again. Currently, Utopia seems to infer naivety and hollow radicalism. Utopias are swatted like flies by people who reject the idea of progress, they insist that these future worlds are unfeasible because "that's not how the world or people work". Utopias, to be pragmatic, need to be discardable and, through an ironic, self-aware distance, Carnage achieves this. Above all else, Amstell achieves it through humour, casting off the much disliked guise of self-righteous fury, echoed by one of its main characters, activist Troy King Jones, who distances himself from his angsty teenage self and accusatory first book, aptly named "Blood on our Forks". The future that the film shows is obviously a fantasy, but the road to get there seems almost analogous to our own reality. The future will still be plagued by problems, but we as humans have an insatiable wanderlust, a need to, as Oscar Wilde says, "look out" and "set sail" for a better country. Utopias should be about ideas, rather than ideology.  

Watch Carnage here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04sh6zg/simon-amstell-carnage

Three films that I think Rotten Tomatoes got wrong

Can a film be rated with a number? The objective of film criticism seems to be to take a film in its entirety and reduce it to a figure indicative of its merits, where it can then be compared to other films. Yet, it's a system that works well enough in summing up a critic's general sentiment, and I find Rotten Tomatoes to be an invaluable source when it comes to carrying out cultural research. Film ratings give the industry a deeper, richer character and history; provoking debate, allocating cultural value, and reflecting political and social realities. It's interesting to see how our ideas of what films should be shape and are shaped by this. These are the stories we live our lives by; this is what we want from our escapism. The worlds we see on screen are often worlds we aspire to or rebel against; worlds with resolution, worlds that follow a sense of logic. Cinema is important because of our innate irrationality, we cannot help but be affected by these fictions, and there are certainly some fictions we prefer to others. This isn't to say that most critics simply hold up hoops for films to jump through, but it is interesting when films I would personally consider good are penalised for failing to do something the right way. I've picked a few films which I thought Rotten Tomatoes got wrong. Like Metacritic, the website takes all the reviews it can find and condenses them into a single score, so of course it isn't a definitive judgement. But, it is one of the most reliable sources of public sentiment out there and, more often than not, it precisely estimates a film's cultural value. 

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

Score: 49%

Critics Consensus: Visually creative, but also aimless, repetitive, and devoid of character development. 

In the above verdict, they say "aimless, repetitive, and devoid of character development" like it's a bad thing. The whole objective of Fear and Loathing is to evoke a sense of directionlessness, moral apathy and nausea. It's a picaresque romp through a heart of darkness, throbbing in the corpulent body of the motherland. Our hero, Raoul Duke, exposes the psyche of Las Vegas through his constant chemical communion, exposing skeletons that fit the role of both victim and perpetrator. Here we find the American Dream dead, rotting on the roadside somewhere near Barstow. And in a world of bright, sugary neon, fetid debauchery and slot machines, sobriety comes only through intoxication. In such a world "character development" and "progress" would only seem out of place. 

Inside Out (2015)

Score: 98%

Critics Consensus: Inventive, gorgeously animated, and powerfully moving, Inside Out is another outstanding addition to the Pixar library of modern animated classics. 

Pixar, once a beacon of hope in a landscape otherwise populated by penny pushing executive-driven animation, has dulled significantly over the years. It first showed signs of faltering with the abysmal Disneyesque Cars. And then, after managing to scrape out a few more good ones; Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up, it sighed and threw in the towel. Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University, were the three following films which showed that Pixar had lost its mojo. Then, when Inside Out was released in 2015, the near-hysterical response would have you believe it was a majestic return to form. It wasn't.

Inside Out isn't a bad film, on the contrary, it's quite a good one. But the mass outpour of critical appraisal, resulting in a score of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, seems thoroughly unjustified. While Pixar has previously prided itself on ingenious ideas and sleek storytelling, creating fantastically complex worlds and characters, Inside Out just seemed too straightforward. Its central idea; exploring the role of emotions in our lives, seemed contrived. The delight one gets from experiencing the worlds created by Pixar is absent. The setting is sugary and Disneyesque, and therein lies the problem. 

Antichrist (2009)

Score: 50%

Critics Consensus: Gruesome, explicit and highly controversial; Lars Von Triers [sic] arthouse-horror; though beautifully shot, is no easy ride.

There is hope for Horror, yet. A torrent of smart, innovative scary films have revitalised the genre recently, and many have been commended for it. Yet, one is left scratching their head when they find that one of the ones leading the charge, Lars Von Trier's Antichrist, wallows at a mere 50% on Rotten Tomatoes. There's perhaps something at least vaguely prudish about this film's downrating. It won plenty of awards in Europe, but US critical opinion seems viciously polarised. A lot of critics didn't get on with the blend of Arthouse and Horror, concluding simply that it was pretentious. If one ponders for too long on whether it's supposed to be one thing or another, they miss out on the primal thrill of it. Roger Ebert's review for the film got it right when he said

"Von Trier, who has always been a provocateur, is driven to confront and shake his audience more than any other serious filmmaker. He will do this with sex, pain, boredom, theology and bizarre stylistic experiments. And why not? We are at least convinced we're watching a film precisely as he intended it, and not after a watering down by a fearful studio executive."

In the US, there is a bizarre, almost fetishistic divide between high and low forms of cinema, one being "Art" and the other "Entertainment". Alongside this is a Victorian-like expectation of moral content, and films that reject this are cast out as "adolescent" and "exploitative". European cinema is leaps and bounds ahead of this, a lot less afraid of exploring human nature.

Ultimately these numbers can't confer any conclusive sense of judgement upon a film. The culture industry will always be able to dig up and re-evaluate hidden treasures, and it often does. Likewise, films once thought to be brilliant can fade into obscurity. Film criticism stands apart from film itself, it can help shape popular opinion and taste, but it can't stop artists from realising their visions and committing them to cinema. But criticism also shouldn't be thought of as a mass of mutually agreed opinion. In each of the above films I found views similar to my own, critics who disagreed with the consensus. We need criticism but, more importantly, we need a diverse array of opinions and perspectives. Critics are the ones who can soil a film's reputation, but they are also the ones who can save it.