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Cristiano Ronaldo’s latest fashion foible, painted toe-nails has provoked the usual bitchy, mocking response that is attached to anything Ronaldo in the Anglo media. Despite – or perhaps because of – the way they seem to regard him as a sure-fire way of selling newspapers.

The announcement of the birth of his son by a surrogate mother last week also presented another opportunity to give him a good kicking.  Some, like Celia Walden in The Telegraph, really going overboard in the expression of their tainted, twisted love.  It almost makes me regret outing the male narcissism of metrosexuality.  As one of the commenters on the Telegraph website points out, her husband Piers Morgan is everything she complains about in Ronaldo – but untaltented and unattractive.  More generally it goes without saying that Ronaldo’s vanity would be considered normal and healthy and worthy of approbation in say, a much less pretty female journalist.

It’s possible, I suppose, that Ronaldo painted his toenails as a riposte to the ‘Twinkletoes’ school playground nickname (Twinkletoes was a fairy, geddit?) given to him by football fans and the tabloids during his stint at Manchester United.  But much more probable he painted his toenails just because he thought it would be fun and might look nice.  Which is an outrage.

Really, it’s no wonder that a year after leaving these shores the UK press continue to love-hate him so.  This boy from a humble Portuguese family is very rich.  He’s famous.  He’s fabulously talented.  He’s young.  He’s absurdly good looking.  And he doesn’t owe anyone anything.  Worst of all, he knows it and doesn’t bother to hide this knowledge.  And he thinks nothing of painting his toenails because he feels like it, rather than because Esquire magazine told him to.  Yes, he’s a spoilt child, but then – so are the gods.

Here are a couple of other recently snapped photos which may help explain the jealousy mere mortals feel towards him.   (And let me assure you most people working in journalism are very mortal indeed – inwardly and outwardly.)

Tip: Mark W

The world’s most populous country, and one of the most authoritarian, is fast becoming one of the most culturally avant-garde.  From the ever-interesting cool-hunt website Science of the Times‘ latest Top 15 trends:

An androgynous fashion style has begun to gain traction in China’s large cities. It’s classified as “Zhongxing Style” and is adopted by “tomboy” girls seeking to express both their coming of age and alternative lifestyle through their gender-blurring clothing and fashion sense. The style is typically associated with short and spiky hair, baggy clothing, and an overall “boy” like appearance.

Although Zhongxing style is not directly associated with homosexuality, the report suggests that the popularity of several gay-themed Tiawanese films with young people in China have fed into this style.  Further, it is likely to accelerate the growth of gender-defying male behaviour too:

If Japan and Korea are anything to go by, the following trend could see a new wave of super effeminate men as well. The pretty boy has long since been in the cultural sphere in Asia, but has regained steam in Korea with popular dramas like Boys Over Flowers and idols such as Kim Hyun Joong. Also, Japan has seen the growth of a group known as “Grass Eaters” — men set on improving their looks rather than starting a family.

(I think the usual English translation of ‘Grass Eaters’ is ‘Herbivores’, but no matter.)

Whilst China’s growing cities seem to be rushing towards a brave new androgyny, some in America are trying to work out ways of stamping it out – along with homosexuality and bisexuality – by giving potentially dangerous experimental drugs to pregnant mothers.

An endocrinologist at Florida International University is reportedly trying to prevent the births of girls who display ‘an “abnormal” disinterest in babies, don’t want to play with girls’ toys or become mothers, and whose “career preferences” are deemed too “masculine.”‘‘

That’s the problem with nature – it’s never nearly natural enough.  So let’s give it a helping hand by pathologising any and all gender non-conformity on the part of women!  The drug used in utero to nix any dykey or tomboy or perhaps just uppity tendencies is called ‘Dex’ – though maybe it should be called ‘Don’ as in ‘Draper’.  It must be a very remarkable drug indeed as it seems to promise a kind of time travel – back to 1952.  But without any dykes.  Or Doris Day, a feisty career woman. And definitely no Calamity Janes.

Though apparently in this drug-induced version of 1952 female endocrinologists are permitted.  The doctor behind this controversial treatment is herself a woman.

Tip: Quiet Riot Girl

Update: since The Stranger first reported this story about the use of Dex to prevent lesbianism and general lack of  conventional femininity a gap has opened up between what some feared Dex was being used for – or what it might be used for – and what it has actually been used for so far: preventing the birth of ‘intersexed’ babies.  Thanks to QRG for this link to a Newsweek article.  And also for this one: a rather entertaining but also alarming blog by P.Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, who argues that the people involved in using Dex to treat intersexed babies are just itching to use it to stamp out lesbianism and general female assertiveness. And warns that baby boys are next:

Before you less-than-hyper-macho men get all smug, though, let me warn you: prenatal hormone effects is a hot, hot topic in the heteronormative world of pediatrics. You’re going to be diagnosed as suffering from a prenatal androgen deficiency and shamed if you’re anything less than a man’s man with stereotypic masculine interests. Look for intrauterine testosterone treatments for women carrying boy children, just to make sure they grow up to like football (American, not that pansy soccer stuff) and follow macho careers!

By this standard probably most young men today would be deemed to be ‘suffering from a prenatal androgen deficiency’.  Which I guess is good news for whoever has shares in the male version of Dex.

So I finally went to see Sex And The City 2 the other day.  Which is a very rash thing to do.  Particularly if you’re not a lady.  Or a gay man with lots of lady friends to giggle with at lady stuff.

Almost everyone in the cinema auditorium was female.  I was flanked on the left by a gran who tutted loudly at anything sexy – and on the right by a couple of bubbly 30-something women drinking chilled white wine out of plastic cups who laughed a bit too loudly at anything sexy.  I didn’t know where to look and was having hot flushes.  I don’t think I’ve been exposed to that much oestrogen since my amniotic fluid.

I blame my new American cyber-friend Caroline who suggested I should see it.  I think she’s generously trying to educate me about women.  To the fact that they exist.  And the English film critic Mark Kermode absolutely insisted that I go along.  OK, he pretended he was telling everyone not to see it – but his passionate rant against it of course had the opposite effect.  And his loud complaint that ‘These aren’t women!! they’re men in drag!!’ sort of clinched it for me.

Actually, as a film it wasn’t quite as boring, pointless and silly as, say, Robin Hood – a film which tries so hard to be taken seriously you just want to roll your eyes.  Yes, SATC2 was a riot of bad taste – I mean, Liza and Abu Dhabi in one movie?  And yes, the treatment of culture and class was equally tasteless: beneath every burqa is a New York princess just bursting to get out, and how does anyone cope without a nanny??  But like Liza and Abu Dhabi, so off the scale as to make it impossible to take seriously.

And unlike Robin Hood, I did actually care about the people in this film and was quite taken with their naked superficiality.  Not a lot, but just enough to take my mind off how much my knees were hurting after two hours of tipsy heart-to-hearts.

However, Kermode’s first advertisement for the film – ‘these aren’t women! they’re men in drag!’ – is very wide of the mark indeed. As well as the worst critical cliche about SATC.  What kind of drag queens, I wonder, has Mr Kermode been hanging out with?  He really needs to find an edgier bunch.  Ones not nearly so obsessed with marriage and husbands and kids and nannies.

And in fact the movie, which begins with a (very) gay marriage, goes to great lengths to distinguish gay men and straight women’s attitudes towards relationships and marriage, in a way which almost daringly goes against the grain of current liberal platitudes that gay relationships are ‘just the same’ as straight ones.

The gay couple getting hitched are quite sanguine about the prospect of ‘infidelity’, to the evident shock of the hetero couples.  One of them is something of a reluctant groom: ‘He gets his marriage and I get to cheat!’  His more traditionalist partner doesn’t seem to mind the prospect: ‘He’s only allowed to cheat in the 45 states where gay marriage isn’t recognised.’  (Which would include, I think, New York.)

Now, I realise that some gays will object that the gay couple getting hitched are a ‘stereotype’.  Certainly their wedding is an all-singing all-dancing stereotype.  And they themselves are a stereotype of hag faggery – plain-looking nellies who haven’t been invited to the circuit party: ‘The music stopped and they were left with one another.’

But SATC deals in stereotypes.  Stereotypes and aspiration (aspiration is almost impossible without stereotypes).  Each of the female characters is clearly a stereotype.  And whilst of course many gay male couples have open relationships, not even the most doctrinaire gay marriage zealot could deny that they are much more prevalent in long-term gay male relationships than hetero ones (about 50% of male-male couples have open relationships according to this survey).

If there is one thing that is definitely not up for grabs for the women in a movie asking for much of its two long hours ‘what makes a marriage?’, as they try and adapt wedlock and family to their needs (and whims), it’s sex outside marriage.  This also applies to their husbands.  ‘Marriage is marriage’ says one of the straight people attending the gay wedding, offended by the laissez faire attitude of the gay newly-weds.  Meaning of course: marriage is monogamy.  Or, perhaps, if need be, celibacy.

This is even the case for the central relationship of Mr Big and Carrie, who take on the some of the stigma of a same sex couple since they have resolved not to have any kids – and are scorned for their selfishness by other married hetero couples.  ‘So, it’s just going to be you two, alone, forever?’  ‘Yep.’  The disapproval and disgust of the ‘breeders’ is palpable.  They even try living separately for a few days a week, which is a strategy of some same sex couples – that can afford it.  But even the possibility of an open relationship is never even broached.  And the big plot point of the whole movie (spoiler alert) revolves around Carrie just kissing another man – and regretting it, terribly.

Now, I somewhat doubt whether SATC 2 accurately depicts the sexual realities – and experimentations and frailties – of modern married male-female couples.  It’s definitely not a cutting-edge movie, or terribly realistic – shouldn’t at least half of them be divorced by now?  Or have just remained unmarried because they don’t want to get divorced?  And (singly single) Samantha’s role here does seem to be to embody sluttiness, panties literally around her ankles, so that none of the other women have to.

But I think it’s fairly safe even for someone as ignorant of women and relationships as me to say that SATC 2 more or less accurately depicts the Saturday Night aspiration – or necessary illusion – of marriage.  That you have found The One.  And Only.  Forever.

Lovely – in every sense – piece in the Guardian today by Gary Kemp, guitarist and songwriter and general brains behind 80s New Romantic norf London working class wide boys Spandau Ballet, about how he fell for David Bowie watching his epoch-making performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops in 1972.  (I’d like to think it was inspired just a little by my account in Saint Morrissey of how I fell in love with El Moz singing ‘This Charming Man’ on The Tube – Morrissey was to my generation what Bowie was to Kemp’s.)

‘The first time I fell in love it was with a man. It happened one Thursday evening in the bedroom of a flat in King’s Cross. I was a wide-eyed boy of 12 and the object of my passion had dyed orange hair and white nail varnish. Looking out from a tiny TV screen was a Mephistophelean messenger from the space age, a tinselled troubadour to give voice to my burgeoning sexuality. Pointing a manicured finger down the barrel of a BBC lens, he spoke to me: “I had to phone someone, so I picked on you.” I had been chosen.’

The bit where Bowie languorously and yet somehow matilly drapes his arm round the golden Mick Ronson on the ‘family show’ that was Top of The Pops was a very calculated and inspiring gesture of defiance back in July 1972, not just a bit of slashy titillation (though it was that as well). I mean, look at them. And if there was any room left for doubt, only a few months before Bowie had publically come out as bisexual.

If you can’t in 2010, in Gay Pride week, at a time when the Conservative Prime Minister has gay celebs round for drinks at Number 10, quite understand why this caused a sensation, and why millions of dads went apopleptic about ‘that fackin’ pooftah!’, bear in mind that just five years previously any and all male-male sexual relations were still illegal in the UK. The very first Gay Pride march had only been held a few days before Bowie’s own parade through the nation’s living rooms. Truth is, this single appearance by Bowie on Top of the Pops, a show watched by most of the UK back then – and every single kid that didn’t sing in the choir – was more significant and influential than all the UK Pride marches put together.

He later famously repudiated all this in 1983, the year of the sell-out (in every sense) Let’s Dance tour, claiming that saying he was bisexual was ‘the biggest mistake I ever made’. In 1993 he announced he had always been a ‘closet heterosexual’ and that despite his interest in the culture it produced, homosexuality and bisexuality ‘wasn’t something I was comfortable with at all’.

But in 2002 an older and perhaps less ambitious Bowie was asked if he still believed that. His response sounds more convincing:

‘Interesting. {Long pause} I don’t think it was a mistake in Europe, but it was a lot tougher in America. I had no problem with people knowing I was bisexual. But I had no inclination to hold any banners or be a representative of any group of people. I knew what I wanted to be, which was a songwriter and a performer, and I felt that bisexuality became my headline over here for so long. America is a very puritanical place, and I think it stood in the way of so much I wanted to do.’

Not for the last time, the power of the almighty Puritan dollar had triumphed over the sexually ambiguous English pop star and his fey, spangly, decadent Limey ways. Success in the US – something Bowie didn’t really achieve until the Yuppie-suited respectability of Let’s Dance – is still regarded as the benchmark for British acts.  Partly because it is such a vast market, of course, but also because since we lost the Second World War to the United States we have nurtured such a vast inferiority complex about our colonial ‘cousins’.

But America, we often forget over here in the UK, is a very foreign country indeed. One separated from us by much more than a shared ocean and language.

The UK is a funny little small island, with far too much media per head – which since it lost its Empire takes far too much interest in superficial, ‘effeminate’ things like music and fashion and gossip. And, crucially, we’re basically a secular country and have been, more or less, since Henry VIII nationalised the monasteries. The UK is a country where the defunct popular tradition of Music Hall (which Bowie drew heavily upon) is probably of much greater cultural importance today than any of that dogmatic Pauline asceticism that calls itself ‘Christianity’.

And America? Well, America isn’t any of these things.

This is why the seriously flirtatious personal style of metrosexuality, which at the very least throws a langorous arm around the neck of bi-responsiveness – and which is much more David Bowie’s love-child than mine – really took root in the UK at the end of the Twentieth Century, largely without the muscular Christian anti-metro/anti-fag backlash that happened in the US in the mid-to-late Noughties.  In the UK, metrosexuality produced new kinds of ‘starmen’ such as David Beckham – football’s answer to David Bowie.

As well as love-ly articles like the one above by happily married men like Gary Kemp.

Look out your window I can see his light

If we can sparkle he may land tonight

Don’t tell your poppa or he’ll get us locked up in fright

There’s a Starman waiting in the sky….

(Special thanks to Paul Burston for very kindly taking me to see ‘The Dame’  – as he’s known in the business, darling – at Wembley Arena, back in the dying years of the Twentieth Century. It was my first exposure to him – and although Ziggy had been buried at the Hammersmith Odeon twenty years past Bowie was still a revelation.)

Apparently Ken Doll is the preening scene-stealer of Toy Story 3 – and ‘makes metrosexuals cool‘.

I haven’t seen it yet, but the clips are fun.

‘…bunch of lacy-drawered, limp-wristed people’ may look like a nice, juicy rhetorical flourish on paper, but it’s actually a bit of a tongue-twister, especially if you wear dentures.  If you’re going to attempt it in public, particularly in a hot, dusty locale such as Yuma be sure to:

a) first remove 1970s hair build-up from upper lip and

b) try to avoid becoming too overtly excited about the idea of lacy-drawered limp-wristed people while denouncing them.

By Mark Simpson

A bullet-pointed column in the NYT by Charles M. Blow examines a sea-change in attitudes towards homosexuality suggested by a recent Gallup poll which found that, for the first time, the percentage of Americans who perceive “gay and lesbian relations” as “morally acceptable” has crossed the symbolically important 50 percent mark.

Also for the first time, and even more significantly, more men than women hold that view.  While women’s attitudes have stayed about the same over the past four years, the percentage of men over 50 who consider homosexuality morally acceptable rose by a by an eyebrow-raising 26% -and for those aged 18-49 by an eyepopping 48%.

What on earth has happened in the US since 2006?  How did the American male lose his world-famous Christian sphincter-cramp and righteous loathing of sodomy? Have the gays been secretly putting poppers in the locker-room ventilation shaft?

Alas, Gallup doesn’t say.  So Mr Blow does what you do at the NYT when you’re stumped: ask some academics.  They came up with three theories:

1. As more gay people come out more straight people get to personally know gay people which makes it more difficult to discriminate.
2. Men may be becoming more ‘egalitarian’ in general, partly thanks to feminism.
3. “Virulent homophobes are increasingly being exposed for engaging in homosexuality”.

Now, the first two of these theories seem to me fairly plausible explanations for increased acceptance of homosexuality at any time, but not especially in the last few years – let alone that whopping 48% rise for 18-49 year olds.  But the third theory about public homophobes being exposed as secretly gay perhaps goes too far in the opposite direction and is too current-news specific.  As if the discovery that famous homophobe George Rekkers hired a rent boy to give him ‘special’ massages could transform attitudes towards man-love overnight – rather than just change attitudes towards George Rekkers.

So I give them all just a C minus.

And, as Blow points out, none of these theories address the main finding – that men now are more accepting than women, reversing the gender split on this subject that has held since pollsters started bugging people with questions about ‘homosexual relations’.

In my own speculative opinion, none of these theories can see the rainforest for the trees.  Of course young men in the US are much more accepting of homosexuality – because so many of them are now way gay themselves.  It’s not really an issue of ‘tolerance’ or ‘acceptance’ of ‘otherness’ at all.  It’s about self-interest – quite literally.  About men being less down on the gays because they’re less hard on themselves now – in fact, rather sweet instead.  It’s about men in general not being so quick to renounce and condemn their own ‘unmanly’ desires or narcissism – or project it into ‘faggots’.

Which from the point of view of today’s sensually greedy male would be a terrible waste of a prostate gland.  Probably most young men are now doing pretty much everything that freaky gay men were once abhorred for doing – from anal play (both ways) to no-strings fuck-buddies, to crying over Glee, and using buff-puffs in the shower while demanding as their male birthright ‘comfortable skin’ (as the recent massive ad campaign for Dove for Men puts it).

And the timing fits almost as snugly as a finger or three where the sun don’t shine.  It was after all only in 2003 that the Supreme Court finally struck down the anti sodomy laws still on the statute books of some US states as unconstitutional.  It was also in the early Noughties that metrosexuality really took off in the US.

Despite a mid-Noughties anti-metro, anti-gay marriage backlash that helped re-elect Bush, in the Tweenies the male desire to be desired, and his eagerness to use product – and body parts and practises – once deemed ‘gay’ or ‘feminine’ or just ‘wrong’ to achieve this, seems to have become pretty much accepted amongst most American males under 45.  It’s consumerism and advertising of course not the gays that has been putting the poppers in the men’s locker room.

Along the way, many young men have twigged that in a post-feminist world of commodified bodies and online tartiness there is decidedly no advantage to them any more in an essentially Victorian sexual division of labour in the bedroom and bathroom that insists only women are looked at and men do the looking, that women are always passive and men are always active – or in the homophobia that was used to enforce it.  Men now want it all.  Both ends.

And perhaps American women aren’t keeping up with men’s changing attitudes because some are  realising how ‘gay’ their boyfriends and husbands are already and wondering where this is all leading.

There’s plenty to wonder about.  After all, it’s the end of the road for that holiest American institution of all: Heterosexuality.  Not cross-sex attraction, of course, or reproduction – but that system of compulsory, full-time, always-asserted straightness for men which straying from momentarily, or even just failing to show sufficient respect towards in the past could cost you your cojones.  What, you a FAG??  If metrosexuality is based on vanity, retrosexuality, it needs to be pointed out, was based partly on self-loathing.  ‘Real men’ were supposed to be repulsed by their own bodies at least as much as they were repulsed by other men’s.  (If they were really lucky they might get away with passionate indifference.)

After a decade or so of metrosexuality a tipping point seems to have been reached.  Men’s self-loving bi-sensuality and appreciation of male beauty, awakened and increasingly normalised by our mediated world, seems to be here to stay.  Even in the God-fearing USA.  And might now, if it’s in the mood and treated right, choose to be consummated rather than just deflected into consumerism again.  When I first wrote about how the future of men was metrosexual, back in 1994, it was clear to me that metrosexuality was to some degree the flipside of the then emerging fashion for female bi-curiousness.  I didn’t talk about this much at the time because I knew no one would listen if I did.  (I needn’t have worried – they didn’t anyway.)

In this regard, one of the academics in the NYT piece was (finally) quoted as saying something interesting, right at the end:

‘Professor Savin-Williams says that his current research reveals that the fastest-growing group along the sexuality continuum are men who self-identify as “mostly straight” as opposed to labels like “straight,” “gay” or “bisexual.”  They acknowledge some level of attraction to other men even as they say that they probably wouldn’t act on it, but … the right guy, the right day, a few beers and who knows. As the professor points out, you would never have heard that in years past.’

An A ++ to Dr Savin-Williams.  Not so long ago, when Heterosexuality was a proper belief system that commanded round-the-clock obeisance, ‘mostly straight’ would have been a heretical contradiction in terms – like half pregnant.  But in this Brave New World of male neediness it’s just a statement of where we’re at.

For today’s young men the fear of faggotry is fast being replaced by the fear of missing out.

Tip: Dermod Moore

By Mark Simpson

So, pretty, svelte – and somewhat swish – David Milliband and his million-dollar smile, who was gushingly described by Hillary Clinton as ‘attractive’ and ‘vibrant’, is the front-runner in the Labour leadership contest to replace the big clunking grimace of Gordon Brown with something more electable.

It seems highly likely that soon all three main political parties in the UK will soon be led by adorable 40-somethings who look like moisturised, pampered 30-somethings who never miss the gym – and whose suits are cut to advertise their shape rather than disguise it. Metrosexual politicians rule. Literally. The ‘new politics’ is looking increasingly like a kind of ‘metro-politics’, in which male politicians have to seduce the electorate with their looks and sensitivity in order to have any chance of ugly, hard power.

Despite famously using a poster of Cameron next to an Audi Quattro and warning ‘Don’t let him take you back to the 1980s’, it was Gordon Brown who looked like the throwback. Gene Hunt without the swagger, or the nostalgia. And more creases. (If Cameron looks like anyone from the Eighties, it’s definitely not Gene Hunt or mannish Mrs T – it’s Spandau Ballet’s Tony Hadley at his most preening.) Even without the financial meltdown Brown was never going to win those brightly-lit TV debates on our Widescreen HDTVs. Not because of anything he said of course, but because he looked like death on toast. Dry toast.

David Cameron and Nick Clegg by contrast are politicians with prime-time skin who have gone one step further and entered into a political metro-marriage. A straight civil partnership which proclaims to the world: this is a progressive affair where there is no ‘husband’ and no ‘wife’: we’re equals who are sensitive to each other’s needs. Plus we both look really fetching in our matching blue made-to-measure.

Nor is metro-politics just a British phenomenon. The most powerful man on the globe Barack ‘smokin hot’ Obama is a President several trouser sizes smaller than most American men his age who makes the Free World wait every day on his morning workout. Even the great white male hope of his Republican Party ‘girly man’ hating enemies is a former Cosmo centrefold. In keeping with the dictums of metro-politics, President Obama is something of his own First Lady in front of the camera, always knowing exactly where the most flattering camera angles are – famously winning the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton because he was much prettier than her, and sending a ‘thrill’ up the leg of straight male commentators.

Which brings us onto an apparently paradoxical aspect of the ‘progressiveness’ of the metro-politicians admiring their reflection in the polls. Whilst they may be more appealing to many women voters than more traditional, plainer politicians, and are often keen to present themselves as ‘post-feminist’, they tend to regard themselves as so sensitive and lovely that they don’t actually need women in their cabinets. Unless they’re a bit camp like Theresa May. Or a bit scary like Hillary Clinton.

Although backbencher Diane Abbot has thrown her bonnet into the ring in the Labour leadership contest, she isn’t regarded as a serious contender – in part because she’s considered ‘too abrasive’. Instead the choice seems to be between David Milliband’s full-wattage metrosexuality and his brother’s Ed’s less dazzling eco-friendly variety.

The smart and nicely turned out money is on David. But either way, Her Majesty’s Opposition will very likely soon be led – like Her Majesty’s Government – by two surprisingly young-looking straight men who openly profess their love and admiration for one another.

Look, the story of Robin Hood is essentially a comedy.  It’s a pie – or an arrow – in the face of authority: both secular (King John) and spiritual (those fat lah-dee-dah bishops). It’s about laughs stolen at the expense of our betters and distributed to the common people – who will always be common and at the bottom of the pile.  And besides, everyone wears tights.

But not when that fat, miserable bastard Russell Crowe is playing Robin.  And the director is giving us a dodgy history lesson on Magna Carta.

Inevitably Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood, which I went to see last night, was Gladiator crossed with Kingdom of Heaven – but with the embarrassing mistake of Orlando Bloom dead-headed.  Though actually I found myself missing the ridiculously lightweight and precious Bloom.  Robin Hood is even more boring and pretentious than both of Scott’s ponderous epics combined (which is an achievement of sorts).  Except that is for the entertainment provided by Crowe’s idea of a northern English accent – a mixture of Harry Enfield Scouse and Brad Pitt Irish, but mostly Kiwi mumbling.

Even worse than Robin Hood though is the news that Ridley Scott is going back to the future by making not one but two 3D prequels for his masterpiece Alien.  The prequels will make scads of money of course, but almost certainly at the cost of making you think you didn’t like the original very much after all.

It needs to be said: Ridley Scott can’t make great or even good movies any more.  Mostly because almost no one can.  We live in an age when movies don’t really matter any more.  There’s nothing sacred about widescreen when everyone has one in their front room, and a widescreen HD camcorder in the bedroom. Which is of course why Hollywood as a whole wants to go back to the future and convince us that we need to see movies in souped-up 1950s 3D.

In a sense, Scott dramatises this sorry development more poignantly than any other contemporary director, because, as this appreciation (below) published in 2005 shows, his films used to matter more than most – literally inventing an epoch that we’ve yet to properly escape from. The 1980s.

And also because his films helped bring about that world in which pretty much all films are forgotten before we’ve even seen them.

Men at arms

First he predicted our dark and soulless future in ‘Alien’ and ‘Blade Runner’. Then he opened our eyes to a new, softer kind of man and a harder kind of woman. Now Ridley Scott has turned his attention to the Middle East with a film set during the Crusades. But if his work has always been prophetic, says Mark Simpson, what is he trying to tell us this time?

(Independent on Sunday, 24 April 2005)

Generally speaking, I’m not terribly interested in film directors. At least, not living ones.  I don’t rush out to see so-and-so’s latest; I watch films that have nice trailers (and am usually as disappointed as everyone else). But the British director Ridley Scott, whose new Crusades epic The Kingdom of Heaven is out next month, is different. I usually make a point of seeing all of his films, even the unwatchable ones like 1492: Conquest of Paradise and GI Jane. Why? Because Scott’s films don’t only tell us about the world we live in today. They are that world.

It may be a sign of the degradation of our culture, or it could just be my brain, but amongst other terrifying things about our future, Ridley Scott’s first blockbuster Alien (1979) seems to predict reality TV: a bunch of people sealed off from the world, a sense of being watched, a Hobbesian battle for survival in which only one person comes out alive, and very bad table manners. When I re-watched the film recently I noticed that the spherical room where the ship’s giant computer (called “Mother”) is consulted even looks like the Big Brother diary room.

Like reality TV, the purpose of Alien seems to have been to put humans in an inhuman environment and find out what being human was really all about. There is a great deal in Alien that proved eerily prophetic. What’s striking about the film now is how it hasn’t aged; the vacuum of space has preserved it perfectly, which is rather more than can be said for the legion of non-Scott directed sequels. Perhaps this is because Alien invented the 1980s – a decade that none of us has actually escaped. And Ridley Scott, who was born in 1937 and grew up in Tyne and Wear, was perhaps more than anyone its visual architect.

In Alien the world of scary opportunity beckoning from the other side of the 1970s is apparent. The crew bicker over shares and bonuses, and in fact they only investigate the distress beacon and seal their doom because a clause in their contract means The Company will rescind their share entitlement if they don’t. It’s every man and woman for themselves. In the same year as a champion of the free market emerged as the victor at the British polls, the sole survivor of the Darwinian struggle unleashed on the Nostromo turns out to be a tough, bossy iron lady (though without the handbag or the hairdo). The female of the species, Scott seems to be telling us, is more deadly than the male.

Consider also that crewmate Kane, played by John Hurt, is orally raped by a face-hugging organism with testicle-shaped lungs, impregnating him with the monster that kills him gruesomely and then goes on to massacre his crewmates. All this, years before Aids, the great terror of the 1980s, had even been named. Kane, it turns out, not Gaetan Dugas, was patient zero.

Like Aids itself, the symbolism of Alien (designed by Ron Cobb and H R Giger) went very deep. Part of the reason why it is such an extraordinarily arousing film is that it’s horribly Freudian. The entrances to the alien spacecraft are giant vaginas. The hatches in the ventilation shaft are clenching steel sphincters. And then there’s the creature itself, with its huge penis-shaped head and phallic-jackhammer tongue that drips with a threading, translucent fluid as it unsheathes before penetrating its victims.

For many years before he started to make films Scott had worked as a director of adverts. And advertising knows about Freud and about desire – in particular, that our desire is actually something that stalks us. Advertising of course tells us to say yes to desire, because in doing so we are saying yes to advertising, which then uses us in its own sweet way. Alien gives us a glimpse of what an “id” world fuelled by consumerism, competition and appetite might look like. That world has arrived. The eggs in the hold of the alien vessel contained the future. Or, at least, embryonic reality TV contestants.

But perhaps the most prophetic part of Alien is its bleakly beautiful look. Every detail is closely controlled by former art-director Scott (who also shot around 80 per cent of the movie himself: “My performance,” he once said of his films, “is everything you see on the screen”) and his trademark high-contrast background and low-lit foreground makes everything seem desirable. Even the Nostromo’s dazzlingly complicated self-destruct mechanism becomes something you feel your home is missing.

“Its structural perfection is matched by its hostility,” the Science Officer (Ian Holm) says about the creature in Alien – something that could be said of several of the lead characters in Scott’s other famous films: the replicant rebel Batty in Blade Runner, Lt. Jordan O’Neil in GI Jane, Maximus in Gladiator. Scott’s early interests in the Nietzschean superman are put on display in the shop window here, helping to make Alien so much more than just “Jaws in space”.

Blade Runner (1982), set “early in the 21st century”, is almost a kind of sequel to Alien. (It was based on Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; as with almost all of his films, Scott is not credited as a writer on Blade Runner.) It shows a chaotic, isolated, cool and cold world of surfaces that could have produced the Nostromo. In this world of signs, people have become artefacts. Replicants. And the famously “layered” technique Scott used to create a believable future actually helped to bring that world about – then trademarked it: almost every major sci-fi film since makes reference to it. We may not have flying cars yet, but the globalised, mediated, soulless, virtual world it portrays is here right now. Perhaps the most prophetic scene has turned out to be the one in which replicant “retirer” Deckhard (Harrison Ford) explores a photograph via a computer, going around corners and examining reflections in mirrors to catch a glimpse of a sleeping, partially dressed woman.

Even in the pre-digital age of the 1980s, film, advertising and music were fast replacing human memory. The fake memories implanted in the Blade Runner replicants to make them think they’re human are like the fake memories implanted in us all by pop culture – and Ridley Scott films. Perhaps the film’s greatest achievement is the way it manages to evoke a sense of ersatz nostalgia. The simulacrum of being human.

We now live in a world where so many memories are being manufactured in so many different formats and media that we really don’t have enough room for them. Like today’s ads and pop music, films are designed to be forgotten before you’ve even finished watching them to make room for the next implant. Blade Runner, seen next to something inconsequential like Minority Report, would be much too rich a diet for today’s audiences.

Scott did such a good job of imagining what the 1980s would look like that, after Blade Runner, the 1980s had no further use for him. The film was a critical and commercial failure when it was released (though now it regularly makes lists of the top 10 best films and has earned millions in video/DVD sales). Scott’s next three films, Legend (1985), Someone to Watch Over Me (1987) and Black Rain (1989), were hardly noticed. It was not until Thelma & Louise in 1991 that he hit paydirt again.

Despite or perhaps because of its ostensibly serious subject-matter – two women on the lam after shooting dead a rapist before consummating a suicide pact – Thelma & Louise is something of a hen-party movie, complete with a baby Chippendale in the form of a young, lithe Brad Pitt in his first major role as the hitch-hiking cowboy who gives Geena Davis a night of six-packed passion and then steals Susan Sarandon’s life savings. For much of the previous decade, ads had been addressing women with the codes of gay soft-core pornography, reprogramming them to treat men as commodities and pursue their desires – and associate feminine freedom with consumption. Even more appropriate then that Thelma & Louise should take the form of an ironic rehash of that notoriously male homoerotic genre, the buddy movie.

Pitt appears here as an early sighting of a simulacrum of masculinity that is now dominant, a pleasingly-made hospitality replicant known as the metrosexual (though Pitt is a particularly annoying example: I found myself agreeing with Harvey Keitel whose character in the film complained: “This guy is beginning to irritate me” – and this was just Pitt’s first big movie…). Interestingly, Scott’s brother and business partner Tony, who also has a background in advertising (and pop promos), made the film Top Gun (1986), which lit the afterburners for Tom Cruise’s career by portraying military life as a gay porn shoot.

With Thelma & Louise Scott succeeded in setting the tone for the Nineties, but once again his success undid him: his other Nineties movies Conquest of Paradise (1992), White Squall (1996), and GI Jane (1997) met with muted responses. GI Jane (alias Ripley – played by Demi Moore – Joins the Army) is a fictional tale about a woman who tries to complete an elite, all-male, hellish training course; it is not so much a feminist film as another example of Scott’s Nietzschean tendencies: the Will to Power. The sadistic DI asks at the end of every new torment, “Are you ready for the next evolution?” Clearly audiences were not. (Though even as I write it has been announced that a woman is taking the Parachute Battalion training course.) The most memorable moment in the film, where Demi tells the DI who has threatened to rape her to “suck my dick”, is a self-conscious reference to Thelma & Louise, where the rapist’s use of the line prompts Louise to shoot him. But by this time audiences probably thought Scott was quoting Madonna.

Perhaps the failure of GI Jane persuaded Scott that, after three decades of unprecedented change, what people wanted was nostalgia. Maybe he himself, now in his sixties, was tired of the changes that he had helped to bring about. Gladiator (2000), was Scott’s first hit since Thelma & Louise, and the first sword-and-sandals epic for nearly 40 years (spawning several others, none of which repeated its critical or commercial success). It seems to reject the brave new androgynous world and retreat to more reassuring, manly sentiments. A very well-made film to be sure, but it’s difficult though not to feel like you’re being sold something dodgy – like one of the fake photographs/memories in Blade Runner. It’s rather like Scott’s most famous and memorable UK ad: the boy on his bicycle on cobbled streets to the strains of Dvorak selling us tasteless, industrially-made bread as something timeless and authentic (it even seems to use the same golden filters). Like noble, self-sacrificing Maximus’s (Russell Crowe) vision of being reunited with his family as he lies dying in the Colosseum, Gladiator is a sepia-tinted reverie of masculinity, selling back to us what capitalism has already alienated us from. It is, however, a spectacularly convincing world.

Maximus’s nemesis, Emperor Commodus (Joachim Phoenix), is selfish, cruel, unmanly, perverted, posturing – in other words, representative of the contemporary world. Wittingly or not, Gladiator provided the ideological-sentimental palette for Bush’s successful election campaign in 2000 against the “corrupt’ and “immoral” Clinton legacy. (Bush of course turned out to have much in common with Commodus’ populist posturing in the Colosseum: such as his Op Gun moment on a US Navy aircraft carrier – a photo opportunity that referenced Tony Scott’s classic Eighties flyboy movie.)

Gladiator has other portents in its entrails. The famous opening of the film, the awesome, flaming forest battle sequence – “at my word, unleash hell” – seems to have anticipated, or prompted, the “shock and awe” opening to Bush’s own blockbuster, Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Scott has mentioned in interviews several times that he very nearly joined the Royal Marines after attending art college but was persuaded to go back into education by his father, an officer in the Army. Black Hawk Down (2002), based on the events in Mogadishu in 1993 when two US Army helicopters were downed and in the ensuing fire fights 19 American soldiers died, seems to be Scott’s paean to his lost/alternative world of male camaraderie and esprit de corps.

Black Hawk Down isn’t just Scott’s lost world, however, but ours too. Cynicism is everywhere. Talking about civilians who think soldiers are drunk on war, a grunt in the film complains: “They don’t understand. They don’t know it’s all about the man next to you. That’s all there is.” This fraternal love is very physical – so physical that it’s beyond sex; a point underlined by a scene in which a soldier has to root around in his wounded buddy’s pelvis for his severed femoral artery in a (fruitless) attempt to stop him bleeding to death.

It’s a harrowing, brutalising and moving film, and quite possibly Scott’s best for two decades, certainly a far more realistic movie than, say, Pearl Harbor – or Top Gun.

But the gory glory of war is precisely what gives Black Hawk Down its glamour. It seems that its gorgeously shot (again that golden filter) heroic realism, and the almost pornographic detail of the SFX mutilations, may have helped prepare the American public for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Originally slated for a 2002 release it was rushed out a few weeks after 9/11. American audiences, reeling from the civilian casualties at the World Trade Center, and understandably looking for someone to punish, must have been relieved to see American men who were actually trained for battle in the firing line instead. Mogadishu may have been a disaster, but Black Hawk Down turned it into America’s Rorke’s Drift. In other words, another memory implant. (Ironically, given what was to happen in Iraq, some critics attacked the film at the time because it seemed just one long, shocking, confusing, endless battle.)

Maybe Scott regretted the way Black Hawk Down was interpreted. Or maybe he calculates that a contemporary Hollywood film set during the Crusades needs to portray Western intentions in the best possible light. Whatever the answer, his new epic Kingdom of Heaven goes so far out of its way to show war as a terrible last resort, to emphasise respect for Islam and to advance tolerance in the “multicultural” world of the medieval Middle East, that the whole thing gets lost in the woolly undergrowth. The Blairite preachiness of the film and its patronising cod-history leaves you longing for a bloodthirsty massacre. Whatever happened to Scott’s Nietzschean/Darwinian tendencies? Whatever happened to all those alien eggs? Surely one must have survived? How did we end up, 26 years later, with this Care Bear of a Crusades movie?

One of the major problems is that the film’s star, Orlando Bloom – who plays an orphaned blacksmith who becomes a great swordsman and defender of Jerusalem – is too much of a modern pleasing simulacrum of masculinity for us to believe in as a hero. But then, that is the nature of the world that Scott made for us. Whatever the reception for Kingdom of Heaven, it is clear that, for Scott, historical epics are the new science fiction – his escape shuttle from the eternal Eighties. Now that the future has arrived, and has proved inevitably to be something of a disappointment, the past is the place to colonise. And it is the science of CGI which makes that fiction possible. Scott may not have joined the military, but he has become a general, even if most of his men are virtual ghosts.

The memory implant he has given us with Kingdom of Heaven is, like his earliest movies, a visually stunning and entrancing world. It may be a manufactured memory designed to make living in the present, uncertain world more possible and peaceful – to help us sleep more soundly, like an android dreaming of electric sheep. But even if it were twice the picture it is, then it would still, in this digital, Blade Runner-lite world, be just as disposable as all the other implants out there.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2010

Stolen from Natty Soltesz