No, seriously. See for yourselves. 

I quote:

In January 2004, the carcass of a 50-ton sperm whale explodes in a Taiwanese city centre. [National Geographic Channel] examines the physics and the biology of this 100,000-pound animal whose body was destroyed by its own internal forces. On the way to Tainan University for research, the whale exploded due to volatile gas build up in the abdomen.

At this point, further comment seems unwise. It would only lead to jokes involving the ending of Watchmen and “volatile gas build-ups.”

Thanks to TDK, I finally got to see Mike Judge’s new animated series, The Goode Family, which follows an environmentally obsessive PC household and their ostentatious concerns. Here are the first three episodes.

Given Judge’s previous creation, King of the Hill, there are inevitably some good moments. There’s an amusing scene involving carrier bag anxiety, and the local overpriced whole food store has an electronic display informing customers of the latest ethical shopping practices, which change in real time. And there are odd flashes of demented ingenuity, as when a visiting Freegan uses his own tears as seasoning. Unfortunately, these moments are spaced much too far apart. What we get instead are misfires like this scene, in which the Goodes fret about the correct way to refer to their black neighbour. There’s a joke lurking in there somewhere, but nobody managed to find it. And that’s pretty much the default setting for the first few episodes.

King of the Hill quickly grew beyond Texan small town caricature and, however grotesque its protagonists could be, they felt both plausible and deserving of some empathy. Comedy emerged from character and didn’t depend entirely on stereotypes, knowing references or the weekly plot contrivance. Viewers soon came to share the producers’ obvious affection for the Hills, despite – or because of – Hank’s unwavering squareness and preoccupation with propane. And while Hank was often stuffy, unadventurous and emotionally repressed, he remained above all an honourable man – something of an oddity in modern animation. The rooting of comedy in character and culture – as opposed to politics – also made possible a collision of surrealism and genuine poignancy. Peggy’s need for oversized shoes and her subsequent, unwitting friendship with a transvestite springs to mind or Khan’s off-meds mania and all too brief grill-building genius. Likewise, Bill’s near-constant teetering on the brink of despair – a gag that could only be sustained over 13 years because his innumerable failures were offset with moments of real pathos and humanity.  

In contrast, The Goode Family is laboured and affected, as if built by committee from the outside in, with unlikeable characters and a premise that’s somehow both obvious and thin. There’s no evidence yet that Judge or his writers have any sympathy for the Goodes and their self-inflicted predicament, and it’s not clear whether we’re supposed to see them as victims of their own politics or just unrelenting grotesques. The daughter, Bliss, is presented supposedly as a foil for her dysfunctionally PC mother, but the tension on offer is between preening political concern and preening teenage ennui. Perhaps these are teething troubles and The Goode Family will find its footing and become much funnier and less self-conscious. But if so, it needs to improve a hell of a lot, very quickly. Right now, the protagonists seem more suited as secondary characters in a show about someone else, and the air of contrivance leaves the series feeling almost as fake and unappealing as the pretensions it mocks.

Poking about in the archives, I unearthed the second episode of Vanessa Engle’s excellent documentary series, Lefties. Titled Angry Wimmin, the film traces the rise of radical feminism in a grim Britain of the 1970s. As a record of social history it’s interesting stuff. The revolutionary politics of shoes, for instance, is quaintly entertaining, and the subsequent, post-revolutionary fear of being caught shaving armpits or wearing lipstick may also amuse.

Around 6 minutes in, there’s a section on “political lesbianism,” i.e. lesbianism as an ideological duty, irrespective of desire. One of the figures interviewed is Julie Bindel, a Guardian commentator whose subtleties of mind include a belief that “[get] men off the streets” is “a fabulous slogan” and “all women know that if we have not been raped, we are lucky.” In the first clip below, Ms Bindel airs the following reminiscence:

What’s striking is Bindel’s adamance. It’s not even open to debate. This, presumably, is how she still sees the world. Sexuality simply is a social construct – it’s a fact – and all human beings can reconfigure their desires in accord with ideology. Though the basis for this claim remains somewhat mysterious. Former activist Lisa Power recalls her own, rather different, experience of sexuality by decree:

Here’s part 1:

Watch Angry Wimmin Part One in News  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

For newcomers, three more items from the archives:

Spooky Action.

Jim Schnabel’s charmingly bizarre film about Cold War research into extrasensory perception as a tool of espionage. By turns intriguing and hilarious.

Rebellion, Revisited. 

Classroom impropriety and the grooming of young minds.

Even if we set aside the not insignificant issue of whether professors of, say, literary criticism have any business trying to “win over” their students and mould their political outlook, reasonably or otherwise, there is another problem. Is the student-professor relationship sufficiently equal and reciprocal to ensure evidence and reason prevail? Is there no pressure on students to defer, to please? Can we simply assume that improper leverage will never be brought to bear – for instance, in terms of grading or more subtle signs of displeasure? And isn’t there an unavoidable air of… predation?

Infestation.

A Guardian writer asks, Am I Fit to Breed? Other, less hesitant souls long for human extinction.

Explore the greatest hits.

Tim Cavanaugh recently noted the tradition of grafting highbrow socio-political subtexts onto lowbrow zombie films, often regardless of the film makers’ intentions. As, for instance, when the film historian Sumiko Higashi saw the Vietnam War lurking somewhere among the zombies and wrote that although “there are no Vietnamese in Night of the Living Dead… they constitute an absent presence whose significance can be understood if narrative is construed.” Or when cineaste Robin Wood informed readers that the zombies’ cannibalistic tendency “represents the ultimate in possessiveness, hence the logical end of human relations under capitalism.”

I’m not a great fan of the zombie genre and a little flesh-eating goes an awfully long way. But it seems to me that with a couple of exceptions, most notably Homecoming, such lofty critiques are misplaced and say more about the critics and their politics than the films being discussed or the audience that watches them. Even the more, er, distinguished zombie films, including George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, are at best a kind of coarse nihilistic satire, in which all values are upturned with adolescent glee.

Shannon Love offers a less grandiose explanation for the lingering appeal of the walking dead: 

I think most modern literary criticism seeks to exploit the analysis for political purposes instead of seeking to understand why and how the artist chose to tell the story as he did. The critics avoid trivial but true explanations and instead grasp at exotic but false ones solely to gain attention for themselves and their pet causes. Why would anyone need to presume that people find zombies scary out of some broader contemporary social or political phenomenon? The modern zombie created in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead encapsulates many core human fears. Fear of the dead. Fear of a painful death. Fear of decaying flesh. Fear of contagious disease. Fear of betrayal. Fear of a loss of social order and support. Is there any social or political milieu or even any culture ever in which masses of nigh-indestructible ambulatory dead people trying to eat people alive is not a frightening thought? Even cultures that mummify the dead and keep them around would find the idea that grandpa’s corpse could come alive and eat the family disturbing…

Zombie stories (and most survival horror or science fiction) also appeal to us as parables about cooperation. Beyond the physical excitement of the zombies themselves, a zombie story’s main drama evolves out of the conflicts between the survivors. The beleaguered survivors must organize themselves and cooperate to escape the zombie menace and all zombie stories spend most of their time examining that process.[…] 

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a zombie is just a zombie. People like zombie movies because zombies and the apocalyptic you’re-all-on-your-own setting they come with is genuinely horrifying. You can easily write interesting variations around the basic theme. Financially, zombies are cheap monsters and isolated farm houses are cheap places to film. Cheap, horrifying monsters explains the appeal of zombies for both film makers and their audiences, not tortuous allegories or appeals to zeitgeist.

As if to prove the point about shoestrings, British director Marc Price has apparently been turning heads at Cannes with his ultra-low budget zombie film, Colin. Price’s production company, Nowhere Fast, recruited aspiring zombies via Facebook and assembled the film over 18 months and for a mere $70. If you’ve a taste for lumbering reanimated flesh, by all means watch the trailer.