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An interview with Johnny Monroe, 'the punk Victoria Wood', creator of Coronation Street spoof Buggernation Street, and the notorious BBC Wokeday Evening   During the first lockdown, shortly before I fled London, living in a shared house that had become a miniature lunatic asylum, with murder in the air, rather than wallow in the boo hoo hoo I retreated into and saved my sanity with the ha ha ha, gorging on Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Seinfeld , Spongebob , Curb Your Enthusiasm , The Fast Show and Harry Enfield clips, anything. One evening I found myself, in my cups, down a comedic YouTube hole, and came across Buggernation Street for the first time. I did, as they say, PMSL.  I’m not quite sure how I found it, possibly via Derek and Clive , but I was quickly addicted. The channel was under the name ‘Victoria Lucas’, a pseudonym of its creator Johnny Monroe, who had taken 1970s episodes of Coronation Street and dubbed his own dialogue, sound effects and music over them.  Coronation Street became the story of “the filthiest street in the country”, Buggernation Street , set, like Coronation Street, in the fictional town of Weatherfield, but recounting the deviant, erotomaniacal exploits of a streetful of “depraved and retarded northern folk”. The pilot episode opens in the home of “serial benefits cheats” Stan and Hilda and Ogden. “Back street abortionist” Hilda is crowing, with Van der Graaf Generator playing in the background, about having been chosen to feature in the Readers’ Wives section of a porn mag, news she can’t wait to convey to Annie Walker, stuck-up landlady of the Rover’s Return, and Chairwoman of the Weatherfield Satanic Abuse Society. In a later episode, Wild is the Wind , her husband, “fat lazy cunt” Stan, with an ear-dazzling firework display of flatulence, will win a farting competition in a rival pub. This very funny and slyly political episode includes a recitation by Ken Barlow of one of Joyce’s filthiest letters to Nora Barnacle, and the series is shot through with knowing cultural references, high, pop, and low. Monroe’s relentless torrent of scatology, hilariously improbable, baroque sexual scenarios, and obscene vituperations show great imagination and linguistic verve. You don’t see any filth, it’s all language, and it can hardly be said to be pornographic – you’d have to be very peculiar indeed to be turned on by it.  It has in common with de Sade’s writings that the sexual scenarios are patently preposterous and impossible (though de Sade took himself seriously and his writings, though not lacking in satirical content, are emetic and unpleasant). In the alternative universe of Buggernation Street , Albert Tatlock, 173 years old, is a serial flasher obsessed with watching Minnie Cauldwell pee, Ena Sharples is interviewed by the NME, Deirdre Barlow is on the game, Bet Lynch a gravel-voiced transwoman, Len Fairclough a swimming pool haunting paedo, and “pompous wanker” Ken Barlow a rapist (“Can I join you ladies, don’t worry, I’m not going to rape you. Having said that, would you mind if I patronised you for a while?”) Johnny Monroe This laying of a new set of narrative threads over the originals and synchronising consistently funny new dialogue over the old shows an immense original talent, especially considering that it is all improvised. This detournement has been tried before, in Situationist Rene Vienet’s Can Dialectics Break Bricks? and Woody Allen’s What’s Up Tiger Lily? (the former is much funnier than the latter). They’re not nearly as successful, but then Monroe has been at this since his teens, when he created “pastiches and parodies I indulged in with my first tape recorder”. There’s a trickle of filth that runs through Western literature, from Juvenal to de Sade, the poems of Rochester and Swift, to Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theatre and Viz . The closest to Buggernation Street are the expletive strewn, filthy fantasias of Derek and Clive in audio-sketches such as Joan Crawford’s Cunt . Much of the humour of Buggernation Street derives not just from the copralalic content and the inventiveness of the invective but also from the incongruity of it coming from the mouths of these ‘beloved’ characters, though in fact most of them retain the essential character traits they have in the original. Albert Tatlock, for instance, was already a miserable old bastard (though not a former gigolo), and Ken Barlow a pompous, superior prig -  these traits have merely been exaggerated to absurdity. The dialogue in Buggernation Street is also a kind of uncensoring because its expletetves and obscene, sexually mocking banter, though grossly exaggerated, are nevertheless closer to the speech in ‘real life’ of that class, time, and place than the dialogue of the original. Although Carry On ’s saucy repartee is clearly an influence, Buggernation eschews double entendre for straight up filth. No people swear as well or with as much gusto as the British and, like James Kelman, Monroe is alive to the poetry and music of swearing. ‘Fuck’ is an infinitely multivalent word, and for the English there are more types of cunt and modes of cuntishness than there are words for snow for Eskimos. The sauciness of British humour and its wordplay, the sketch show and stand-up genres, have their roots in British working class humour and in music halls, and the figure of the comedic pervert, often comically inadequate or half-mad, also began there, continuing into modern popular culture with the suggestive songs of George Formby, characters in the Carry-On franchise, various stand-ups, Benny Hill, and Les Dawson’s Cosmo Smallpiece . Cosmo Smallpiece, a quintessentially British pervert Johnny Monroe is prolific and has self-published several novels, several volumes of poetry and, under the pseudonym Petunia Winegum, writes a regular blog, T he Winegum Telegram . This is wide ranging, though Monroe’s fondness for the 70s is evident, covering subjects such as Starsky and Hutch , the sophistication of script and characterisation in 70s tv dramas, the trial of Fatty Arbuckle, discontinued chocolate bars, obituaries of cultural figures, the Online Safety Bill, and the death of the High Street. It’s a shame that this remains in an obscure corner of the internet because the blog is really a regular column and makes for more entertaining and insightful reading than most that appear inthe mainstream press. Monroe’s video output isn’t limited to Buggernation Street . The filth and elaborate verbal abuse continue hilariously with Bruce Forsyth’s Humiliation Game , in which Bruce mocks, berates and humiliates his gormless contestants (again, he’s bringing to the surface a dynamic that was already present under the surface of the original).  There are TOTP chart run downs that are both mocking and fondly nostalgic at the same time, the humour lying in the puerile and ridiculous names given to songs and bands (Turd Burglars, Klunge, Dicky Dumpling, Erectile Delinquent, Salty Creampie, The Slags) paired with their ridiculous hair, costumes, and posturing. His cruelly funny overdubbing of Rick Beatto’s Spotify Shitlist perfectly skewers the comic banality of every dimwit genre of contemporary music, complete with puerile lyrics, and in one of his Jim’ll Fix It  covers that sails right into the wind a child gets to meet the Gay Daleks. Indigo Rumbelow’s interview with Mark Austen is rendered even more comic and her true idiocy brought more fully out into the open just by the addition of a laughter track and intercutting shots of a laughing studio audience. It was Monroe’s spoof programme rundown of a BBC Wokeday Evening that led to his cancellation. This spoof, which began with “highlights from this year’s book-burning championship from Islington’s George Floyd Stadium” and included notices for LGBTXYZ Cars  and Emily Maitliss giving “an impartial sermon on News Speak at 11pm” went viral. Shortly afterwards, Monroe received notice of the permanent removal of his channel from YouTube and his banning from the platform, citing “multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy on nudity or sexual content”. Although the complaints may have been made about Buggernation Street , it was the Wokeday Evening video that attracted the attention of the “Identity Politics Gestapo”. (A very generous sampler of Johnny Monroe’s video content, including episodes of Buggernation Street, can be found on his Vimeo channel , the remainder, and regular new content, on a subscription-only Patreon .) Authoritarians don’t like to be mocked or lampooned and when they are, if they can, they invariably punish. This episode – like so many cancellations – seems an act of revenge from the woke, whose absurd shibboleths, fraudulent cant, dark psychological motivations, inherent totalitarianism and stupidity the video so accurately and scathingly skewered. In the 80s, 90s or 2000s an inventive, original talent like Johnny Monroe would have become a household name (though the sexual content of Buggernation Street would always be beyond the mainstream pale). His satire is essentially Juvenalian. The fact is that from around 2014 comedians could have had a field day. Never in history has so much been offered up for satire, so many maniacs, midwitted mountebanks, hypocritical fellow-travellers, and crackpot ideas to mock; never has so much low hanging comedic fruit been there for the taking. Even on the visual level, of physiognomy and dress, there’s been an embarrassment of riches. Instead, apart from a few honourable exceptions, the comedy world chose cowardice and conformity, to speak fawning lies to power, to promulgate an oppressive ideology, and to thus become themselves fit subjects for satire and derisive mockery. This cowardice, and the decision not satirise the bien pensant elites and dominant middle class doxa, has contributed significantly to the world eventually becoming almost impossible satirise; its absurdities were left unmocked for so long that it has taken on the sinister aspect of a world that is a parody of itself. Satire is after all a corrective mirror intended to eradicate or at least reduce vice and stupidity, to shame into wisdom and right conduct. If one looks at the staff biographies, physiognomies, imbecilities, mission statements, and destructive work of, for example, sensitivity reader agencies, one sees that, though they’re funny, it is not possible to actually satirise them, they’re’ too OTT already. Similarly, a typical Guardian headline is now impossible to differentiate from a parody Guardian headline, which was not the case in 2014, and many of the spoofs of Tatiana McGrath from a few years ago became reality. Gatekeeping, nepotism, conformity and ideological screening are now so prevalent in comedy and in all the arts (Jesse Darling’s acceptance speech for the Turner Prize was a comedy sketch), that the situation has become very much like that of the arts behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War – only without the dissidents.     I interviewed Johnny Monroe by email:   CM : How did Buggernation Street start, and how popular had it become before YouTube took it down?     JM : I suppose the genesis of Buggernation Street and all my videos can be traced back to the first tape recorder I received at Christmas when I was 10. After using it to record favourite programmes from TV, I quickly set about producing my own 'programmes', even though they were audio-only. I even used to create my own listings magazine to document them all, miniature versions of the Radio Times that I'd draw by hand in exercise books. So, I was creating 'content' on cassette and writing about it as well; today, I create content on video and write a blog and books. It's evident all the seeds were planted a long time ago.   The first Buggernation Street appeared - I think - around 2011; it was just a short, really, running for around 12 minutes. It went down well on YT, but I had no idea whatsoever it would lead on to 70-odd episodes over a decade later. It was something of a best-kept-secret cult for the best part of ten years and then it went into overdrive during lockdown. I had a fair amount of subscribers before then - well into the thousands - I was pretty overwhelmed by the amount of new subscribers I received in 2020/21. I'd usually gain maybe a couple of new ones a week, but during lockdown that completely snowballed so I'd be gaining a dozen a day. It was mind-blowing, really. It's only because of that sudden and unexpected rush of interest that I returned to Buggernation after a gap of six years (I'd originally ended the series in 2015). People were demanding it and I figured I may as well give people what they wanted, especially when they were so bloody miserable thanks to events. Due to a few screen-grabs I thankfully took from YT, I can see that the first new episode of the series premiered on 4 April 2021 and was on 83,521 views and 1.2K thumbs-up by 17 April; at that time, my channel had 12.4K subscribers.   CM : Could you tell me more about your cancellation by YouTube. What reason did they give for taking your channel down?   JM : YouTube gave me no warning, no 'three-strikes-and-you're-out' beforehand when they cancelled me and the channel. Suddenly, everything was gone. I literally ceased to exist on YT. They completely erased me from history - every video I'd ever posted, every comment I'd ever made on someone else's video, all vanished in an instant, as though I'd never even been there. I could no longer subscribe to any other channel, like a video, comment, or even see comments. An email from YT informing of the event after it happened contained an opportunity to appeal, which I did; but it was a joke. They replied to my appeal within a matter of hours and it made no difference to their decision. They'd made their mind up. They said - and I quote: "This account has been terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy on nudity or sexual content', to which they added: 'We have permanently removed your channel from YouTube. Going forward, you won't be able to access, possess or create any other YouTube channels". In other words, "we have rendered you a non-person". The reply to my appeal was that 'YouTube is not the place for nudity, pornography or other sexually provocative content.'   This gives an entirely misleading impression of my channel. There was no nudity in any video I ever posted. Yet, the uncut and uncensored Blurred Lines promo video was still accessible on YT at the time; it may still be for all I know. Double standards. All my videos with 'bad language' or references to sexual acts were over-18 only; they already had measures in place for that and I abided by them. But I'd seen YT change and become more 'corporate' over a period of years from when my channel began in 2010; I was writing about it as far back as 2015, and I'd more or less stopped posting videos by 2019, instead posting new material on smaller and less censorious platforms like Vimeo, as well as my Patreon subscription channel, which I set up in 2021. I only came back to YT because of the sudden rush of new subscribers during lockdown. So many of them told me I was making a difference and giving them something to laugh about that it felt wrong not to pay them back for their kindness.   It's too coincidental that when my BBC1 Wokeday Evening  spoof trailer went viral due to being picked up on and tweeted by several (in the eyes of the MSM) 'undesirables' that YT cancelled me just a few weeks later. I'd touched a nerve, even though to me it was just straightforward satire, which I've always done. To me, if you ring-fence anyone and make them exempt from having the piss taken out of them, you castrate satire, and anyone who calls themselves a satirist and avoids certain subjects is complicit in this.   CM : Do you think anyone should be unmockable and banned from being subjects of satire? And would you agree that a society in which there are protected privileged groups that you can be punished for mocking is totalitarian?   JM :  I don't think anyone should be ring-fenced from satire, though it has to be good satire to begin with; if it's not funny in the first place, there's no point anyway. I don't believe in the 'punching down/up' rhetoric because it's another extension of categorising everybody and pigeonholing people on the basis of race, gender, sexuality etc. 'It's okay to take the piss out of that group, but not this group' and so on. I've spent most of my life avoiding being put into a neat little box and labelled, and I can't understand why anyone would want to begin a sentence with 'As a gay man' or 'As a woman of colour' etc. Just feels like facilitating divide and rule to me.   Funnily enough, going back to schools programmes - one that was referenced in a Buggernation episode was called Cloud Burst,  a serial that was part of the long-running Look and Read  series in the 70s. In it, the same actor plays identical twin brothers, one of whom is a good guy and one of whom is a bad guy. Both characters were played by the British Indian actor Renu Setna, and when the BBC at the time were concerned casting an Asian actor as a villain might imply all Asians were villains, they received reassurances from organisations dealing with race relations that showing both positive and negative traits would present a more rounded and honest portrait of an Asian man - scarily proving 'them' are actually just like 'us'. That to me seems a healthier approach than what we have now. But as Jim Morrison once said in relation to the Permissive Society, this is always a cyclical thing; it swings to one extreme and then gradually swings back again. Could well be a generational thing as well, that the next generation will reject what the current one is pedalling and thus return us to a better place than where we are now; just seems a shame we have to wait.   CM : Do you think that your cancelling was down to higher ups at the BBC or to disgruntled and offended lower downs?   JM : I doubt that my spoof reached as high as the BBC upper echelons, but enough like-minds lower down the food-chain are active on social media, and they probably played their part. CM : Because you criticise woke shibboleths and absurdities, I'm sure there are those who would categorise you as on the right, though it seems to me that you're essentially left wing and sympathetic to the working class - Is that accurate?   JM : Like a lot of people in my position and of my generation, I always regarded myself as being on the 'Left' up until the Left handed the keys of the asylum to the lunatics. Now I'm just one of many who regard themselves as politically stateless. I remember one of my most popular videos was my Trumpton spoof, and the comments I received when it was on my YT channel varied from calling me a Communist to labelling me 'Far-Right'. I remember thinking if I'm being accused of both I must be doing something right. The Wokeday Evening video saw some on the Right try to claim me as one of their own, but I'm not being claimed by anybody. The minute you nail your colours to the mast, your ability to take the piss is immediately limited and you're back in a box, just like adhering to Identity Politics. Fuck that.   CM : Which comedians and comedy shows do you like? Are you a fan of Derek and Clive, 70s stand-ups, and Carry On ?   JM : When it comes to my own favourite comedians or comedy shows, I've always liked comedians who are clearly intelligent and have knowledge about a wide range of subjects but who are also not too highbrow to indulge in smut or simple silliness. This is why I will always be a fan of the Pythons or Derek & Clive or South Park . The Carry On  films I enjoy because I love that feeling of being able to see the next gag coming a mile off, making its delivery all the more enjoyable. To be fair, the same thing applies with Laurel and Hardy; the joy is waiting for what you know is coming.  CM : Do you see yourself as in any kind of tradition - like Hogarth, Viz etc.? And does satire for you have any purpose other than to be funny?   JM : I suppose I do fall into a British tradition of satire, yes; but it's not really a conscious thing, not as though I thought 'Hey, I can do that!' - it just came naturally, something I was doing at school, drawing caricatures of teachers and doing Mike Yarwood-like impressions of them. To me, what I do now is a natural outgrowth of that. Even the name Buggernation Street I coined when I was at school, drawing a comic strip parodying Coronation Street in an exercise book, one which plumbed the same kind of perverse depths as the series does today.   One could take Peter Cook's oft-quoted sarcastic comment about satire re 'the great German satirists of the 1930s 'whose sterling efforts prevented the Nazis from seizing power', but to me it's one of the few weapons people have against the powerful, even if it's ultimately like taking on a tank armed with a pea-shooter. What better reflected the mass discontent of one half of the population with Thatcherism in the 80s than Spitting Image ? And the powerful always find it an irritant, as their reaction in the 18th century demonstrated; playwrights having to submit to the scrutiny of the Lord Chamberlain was a direct response to satirical plays taking the piss out of Walpole and his generation of politicians. So, yes, it has to be funny; but it can be the sole tool that those who will never have power can use as annoying little slingshots aimed at those who do.   CM: Do you have any fondness for 70s and 80s Coronation Street , and already find it funny?   JM: I do have genuine fondness for the first 20 years or so of Coronation Street . The characters and dialogue are so rich, and those old episodes totally hold up today; it goes without saying they piss on today's unwatchable excuse for the series from a great height. People have often asked me to do parodies of Eastenders or Emmerdale , but they're missing the point. It's because I love the Coronation Street  from the era I cover in Buggernation  that I can parody it with such attention to detail; if I didn't care about the source material like I don't care about other 'soaps', Buggernation  wouldn't have stretched beyond one episode.   CM : I grew up in working class, semi-rural north Lincs in the 70s and 80s, and the swearing in Buggernation Street is not that exaggerated to me - is that the case with you too?   JM : Swearing was certainly prolific in the playground in the 70s - virtually every 'swear word' I ever learnt infiltrated my ears for the first time there, and we all swore like navvies whenever a teacher wasn't around. In fact, I remember when I was about 10 being summoned to the headmistress's office to receive a bollocking because some other kid had grassed me up for telling him to fuck off. Although parents in my experience didn't as a rule swear in front of their children then, whenever they imagined their kids weren't listening they'd be effing and blinding like The Sex Pistols having tea with Bill Grundy. As far as the language on Buggernation goes, to me it's perfectly normal that adults around each other at that time would have sworn - as if Len, Ray and Jerry wouldn't have sworn in a masculine bastion like a builder's yard! In a weird way, to me Buggernation is closer to real life than any TV soap ever could be because of the language and the fact characters break wind and go to the toilet - just like real people do.   CM : Are you much aware of the real working class 'sexual underground' of the period?   JM : As far as the 'sexual underground' of the working-class goes during this period, it was perfectly normal for one's dad and his mates to go see a stripper at the pub, or purchase a top-shelf mag, or visit an adult cinema to see the latest Mary Millington movie, or to be having it off with a bit on the side (to use the parlance of the time). It was in the culture, so seems silly to pretend it wasn't there.   CM : Several Coronation Street  characters were comic characters already, Hilda and Stan Ogden, Ena Sharples, Albert Tatlock and the rest. You've made them even funnier. Do you think you've partly brought out something that we already knew was there.?   JM : For me personally, what I often find the funniest about the way in which I've exagerrated the existing characters is when I give them extensive knowledge of pop cultural subjects they clearly wouldn't know anything about - such as Minnie's love of King Crimson, Ena's of Eno, Albert's of Genesis and so on. To me, that's as sublimely silly as the two 'pepperpot' characters on Monty Python paying a house-call to Sartre to settle an existential argument that a couple of middle-aged suburban housewives simply wouldn't have in real life. There are other examples, whereby the Buggernation characters routinely watch and talk about obscure down-time TV of the era, like the test card, IBA Engineering Announcements or schools programmes. The manner in which, say, Alf and Maggie casually discuss water-sports or spanking over dinner is equally so preposterous that it can't be taken as anything other than a joke. As I said in a piece I wrote after my cancellation by YT, the presence of this kind of subject matter in the dialogue of these videos put such horrific images in the minds of the offended that it's almost as though they convinced themselves that the acts were actually shown in graphic detail on screen - utterly ridiculous.   CM : Have you always been a pisstaker - were you a class clown?   JM : I suppose I was what you might call a 'class clown'. At the school-of-hard-knocks I attended, three things mattered in terms of status and respect: being good at fighting, being good at football, and being good at making people laugh. I was useless at the first two but could manage the third.   CM : Stupid names and nickname-giving seems to be a peculiarly British form of humour, there were always kids at school with those particular cruel talents - were you one of those kids?   JM : Any nicknames at school seemed to already be in place before I came up with any, but I did impersonate the teachers, both physically and in comic strips I'd draw with them in.   CM : Do you think puerility has a positive social function - or is it just funny for its own sake?   JM : Being puerile in humour is something I think most people enjoy, even if they don't admit it. I don't really think it has a valid function beyond provoking a laugh, though.   CM: Could you tell me more about your novels and poems.   JM : I've been writing novels and poetry volumes more or less as long as I've been producing videos; the two have run on parallel lines for a decade or so and have had very different audiences. People have come to me through both and have told me they'd often struggled to equate the author of each as being the same person. When I set up my website, the aim was to bring these different audiences under the same umbrella, as I think people aren't as one dimensional as some would have you believe and can actually enjoy both.   CM : Have you ever tried to break into the mainstream? Into the BBC itself, or mainstream publishing houses?   JM :  I sent manuscripts to publishers for years and got nowhere; I eventually gave up when it became possible to publish physical books via Amazon. I knew I was writing good stuff and I felt liberated by the fact I no longer had to go cap-in-hand to detached institutions that I would never be at home in anyway. Being told to 'stay in my lane' is not something I would be comfortable with.   CM : What was your experience of scriptwriting before Buggernation Street ?   JM :  I don't actually 'write scripts' for any videos I produce, Buggernation  included. It's all improvised. In the case of the latter, I assemble the footage from dozens of different archive Coronation Street episodes and create my own narrative, coming up with the dialogue on the spot as I watch the visuals.  "Shut the fuck up Stan, you fat lazy cunt" CM : You said some perceptive things in your blog about the shallowness of contemporary drama compared to the 70s. How would you account for thi s?   JM : I think the state of TV drama today is a natural consequence both of the BBC's DEI policy being imposed upon writers and the way in which those writers are schooled in the system. In the 60s and 70s, television was largely informed by theatre and many of its writers, actors and producers came from that arena; today, that link has been completely severed. Soap operas serve as the contemporary university for writers in particular, and they bring all of its cliches to post-watershed drama, with the only difference being the use of the word 'fuck', which they seem to imagine the repetition of makes what they're writing 'grownup'.   CM : Were you expecting to be cancelled at some point, or did it come as a surprise?   JM : I'd already retreated from YT as far back as 2019, sensing which way the wind was blowing. I only returned because of the tidal wave of new subscribers I received during lockdown, and I largely stuck to just Buggernation Street when it came to posting new material on there. I was very aware of walking a tightrope, but I think it was the sudden abruptness of YT's cancellation which surprised me, not receiving any warning beforehand.   CM : Your sensibility seems best described a 'punk' - were you a punk?   JM : I was too young to be a Punk in the 70s - just a school-kid. But I suppose I have a Punk 'sensibility'. One of my favourite YT comments re Buggernation  was one I used on my website, which called it “A Punk Victoria Wood. I think that's as good a description of the series as anything.     Johnny's Vimeo channel can be found here: https://vimeo.com/user43074276 His Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/user/posts?u=56665294 His blog here: https://winegumtelegram.wordpress.com/ And his website here: https://winegumtelegram.wordpress.com/

“For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, could soon be a thing of the past, The Iliad  could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, as at the very centre of human history, The Iliad is the purest and loveliest of mirrors”. Simone Weil, The Iliad or the Poem of Force Vengeance of Achilles , 1978, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Western literature begins with a song of savagery and gore. It is this bloody epic poem, the Iliad , specifically Alexander Pope’s 1720 translation of it, that Cy Twombly illustrates and interprets in his series of ten paintings Fifty Days at Iliam . Nicola del Roscio, Twombly’s long-time assistant, recounts that Twombly was “fixated for some time on Pope’s translation, almost in a fanatical way”. That he is illustrating a text is made clear by the incorporation of the titles within the body of the paintings, a reference to the captioned illustrations in a book. Twombly had already treated the subject of the  Iliad  and the Trojan war more than 10 years earlier in 1962, in the paintings Vengeance of Achilles and Achilles Mourning the Death of Patroclus , and again in the triptych Ilium, 1964. The ten paintings that make up  Fifty Days at Iliam  are now housed in their own room, as Twombly wished, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’s likely that Twombly, who lived in Italy from the late 1950s, had seen the Hall of the Iliad in the Pitte Palace in Florence, and the idea of his own ‘Hall of the Iliad’ may have been inspired by it. Although he would have been familiar with art relating specifically to The Iliad , including amphorae at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, paintings and vases at various sites in Italy, and the Flaxman illustrations to his edition of Pope’s translation, it was to the literary text to which Twombly was responding. Cy Twombly was one of the Twentieth Century’s most literary painters, obsessed enough by his favourite poets not only to include snippets of their verse in his paintings, and create paintings as a response to them, but also to rewrite or ‘correct’ their poems in his copies of their books. Vengeance of Achilles , 1962, Kunsthaus, Zurich The ten paintings follow each other like a loose, discrete narrative based on the slaughter-filled books XIX and XX of the Iliad , beginning with the decision of Achilles to re-join the war, following the death of Patroclus. Paintings focusing on the Trojans face those dealing with the Ilians across the gallery, with the painting Shield of Achilles  displayed alone in a separate room. Twombly explained his decision to replace the ‘u’ of Iliam with an ‘a’ to David Sylvester, relating the series to his earlier Achilles painting: “I spelt it I-L-I-A-M which is not correct. It’s U_M … Because I did that Vengeance of Achilles with the A shape. Also, it’s the Achilles thing and the shape of the A has a phallic aggression – more like a rocket. The Vengeance of Achilles  is very aggressive. My whole energy, will, work … [has] a very definite male thrust. The male thing is the phallus." Critic Mary Jacobus described this series as a “meditation on the aesthetics of violence” and Twombly was ambivalent about violence -  not only is his style violent and barbaric, but he illustrated a poem that glorifies war. Del Roscio, noting that Twombly was “a convinced anti-war person who was against any kind of violence” describes the alarming genesis of the Fifty Days at Iliam series, showing Twombly’s identification with Achilles, and how the motivation for the paintings lay partly in vengeful aggressiveness and domestic strife: “The fury of Achilles and the other warriors [in the paintings] was the result of the irritation and rage that Cy’s wife Tatiana, in a domestic mixture of familiar contempt, caused in daily episodes, emotionally overpowering him … He carried with him a halo of anger and rage, cigarettes and Pinot Grigio." The 1962  Vengeance of Achilles  is three metres high, and Twombly uses scale to intimidate. Achilles does not face, but confronts us, the air of menace enhanced as the figure is hooded, level with the picture plane, and as close to being in the viewers space as is possible without resorting to trompe d’oeil . The flurries of graphite and red oil paint are contained within the A shape, connoting the disciplined ‘cold fury of the warrior’ rather than an intemperate frenzy, allegorising both war and warmaking, art and artmaking, the A standing for Apollo and the Apollonian, that which structures and makes coherent passionate Dionysiac frenzy. Achaeans in Battle , 1978, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia This painting, like many of Twombly’s works, hovers on the edge of figuration and abstraction, inducing a state of semiotic delirium. An important book for Twombly, one he studied closely, was William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity,  in which he discusses the ways that poets can create ambiguity, suggestion, ambivalence and multivalence with “one sentence, phrase or even [a] single word”, through “any verbal [or pictorial] nuance, however slight, that gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language”, producing a  “richness and heightening of effect”.  Vengeance of Achilles  is thus simultaneously blood-tipped phallus, dagger, sword or spear-point, wraith, arm, artist, warhead, flame, Klansman, arrowhead, Ares, giant ‘A’, Apollo and Achaean. The letter ‘A’ also implies the orginary and elemental, and that the violence associated with this figure is fundamental to humankind, with the scribbled pencil lines' evocation of pubic hair compounding a sense of the phallic and the primary. Rage is properly the title of Homer’s poem, and his contemporary audience probably knew it by that name. The rage depicted in the 1978 version of Vengeance of Achilles  is specifically a testicular rage, and the hybrid shape is at once ball-sack and chariot wheel. A similar phallus shape to the one in this painting appears in both Achaeans in Battle  and Ilians in Battle , though in these two paintings it more closely resembles a crude toilet wall graffito .  The prick-chariot that is Agamemnon in Achaeans in Battle is the only one that Twombly has clearly delineated as a penis, rather than just a schematic penis shape, through the inclusion of a glans. Whatever Twombly may be implying about male violence and vengeance the image unavoidably amuses, and the childish pleasure of scrawling obscene graffiti – in effect straight onto a gallery wall – is not only one that Twombly alludes to, but also experienced. Twombly has shown a consistent phallomania, yet the obvious homo-erotic implications of his work have elicited barely any critical comment. The viewer is pointed towards the next ‘episode’ clockwise by these phalli, and the general movement from left to right calls attention to the fact that we are ‘reading’, evoking the written text of the Iliad . I would suggest that how we are taught to read words affects how we read images, that is, from left to right, (including the cinema: all the long tracking shots in films that I can recall have moved from left to right) and so affects how we experience a painting. Like those that dominate both versions of Vengeance of Achilles , the overdetermined form that is the Shield of Achilles presides over a tangled knot of significations and metaphors, some having in common qualities such as redness or roundness, and so on. What is a shield is also a sun, what is a sun is a ball of fire, what is a ball of fire is a wound, a scrotum or an anus, a blazing eye or a burning world. The circle is of course a symbol of eternity and, in this context, because of all the other violence-related connotations it calls forth, it expresses a fatalism about war – the eternal recurrence of the same barbarities. Which is not to say that Twombly necessarily laments this: The Iliad is a relentless catalogue of killings described with queasy, medically accurate detail, and it was a text that was dear to him. Shield of Achilles , 1978, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia In the 1975 Vengeance of Achilles , rather than just the tip, the whole of the penis-spear-missile is in red oil, whilst the scrotum-chariot-wheel is rendered in graphite. There is a predominance of red in all of Fifty Days Iliam , and the paintings in the cycle that have Achilles as a protagonist express his rage through red. The most obvious things that the reds used by Twombly call up are torn flesh, and blood, freshly spilt or in various stages of congealing and drying, and it has an archaising effect and archaic sources, both art-historically and psychologically. The preference for red has a genetic basis and it is possible that an attraction to red minerals was deeply ingrained in the biological behaviour of humans. According to anthropologist Ernst Wreschner in his paper Red Ochre and Human Evolution : “Cognition is knowing or acquiring knowledge. The perception of red, the ability to discriminate colours, led to actions that resulted in new experiences and learning. Part of the cognitive process is the endowment of objects– in this case ochre – with meanings. The creation of relationships [between objects] resulted in cultural structures.” The colour red was the first to be given meaning, to be used figuratively and to accrue symbolic associations, all pain, conflict or violence-related. The red-violence-representation nexus has been foundational for humankind’s cognitive development, and it is thought that the associative stimuli red ochre triggered contributed to the development of the brain and our very capacity for ideation. Red also acts directly on the nervous system and provokes an intense somatic response more effectively than any other colour.  Twombly’s work generally has a primitive feel because it is pictographic, often with the violence of a scrawl, on a white ground with no concern for figure, depth or perspective, like cave art. As well as a cave wall, this white ground also evokes the marble of monument and statuary. Another literary figure that fascinated Twombly was Mallarme. In Fifty Days at Iliam  there's a Mallarme-like use of white space to give more force to what inhabits it. Mallarme wanted to give his isolated words an explosive, aggressive force, and as in Mallarme's of Un Coup de Des Twombly places a word or phrase in isolation on the page/canvas, exploiting the resonance-giving power of white space. In the 1978 Vengeance of Achilles  the expanse of white is a visual cognate of silence, and therefore of death and eternity, which makes its roar of red seem vainglorious. He also places words and proper names alongside non-linguistic elements, dissolving the barriers between the pictorial and linguistic, the canvas invoking both canvas and page.   In Cy Twombly’s paintings there is an automatic, aleatory element: not the planned, programmatic chance of the surrealists, but an unmediated transference of energy, something atavistic and aggressive surging urgently from the body itself, accounting for their feel of suppressed drives finding vicarious release. The similarity of Twombly’s technique to a toddler’s scribbling has often been noted, and the intoxication of paint that is Shield of Achilles  is perhaps his most obviously ‘scribbled’ painting, with its heavily applied oil crayon over a ground of scumbled white oil with pinkish notes. Cy Twombly in Rome Twombly once commented that “the scribble is the artist’s fundamental rhythm”, and paintings such as Shield of Achilles  gives the viewer a sense of the enjoyment of pure motor pleasure that toddlers are known to get from scribbling, an atavistic joy in pure mark-making being evident in much of Twombly’s work. Shield of   Achilles  is an example of what child psychologists have recently characterised as ‘onomatopoeic scribbling’, whereby scribbles are divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘fast’, ‘slow’, ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ lines, and the substrate is either ‘caressed’ or ‘hit’ (when painting his Nine Discourses on Commodus , Twombly used a whip to paint). If Twombly is attempting a kind of ontological portrait of Achilles, it’s fitting that he does so partly by replicating the typical expression of a toddler’s inchoate rage. Cy Twombly replaced Picasso as the artist most subject to the derisory comment ‘my child could do that’, but the truth is that nobody could ‘do that’ without Twombly’s particular sensibility or artistic training. Conversely, no adult can achieve the nonchalant sprezzatural abandon of a child’s scribble because the child is coming from an irrecoverable, infantine subject position. When we are moved by our children’s scribbles it is partly because we experience nostalgia for a lost state of being, before we were time’s food or memory’s prey, and had barely nibbled the fruit of the tree of knowledge. When an artist such as Twombly tries to recover something akin to this infantile state it is a falling-back-into, not a going-beyond. Despite the ostensibly avant-garde, neo-Abstract style of his paintings, according the thinking of TS Eliot, Twombly, with his lack of historical specificity, and the way he incorporates the whole of history in his works, is a traditional  painter, having “the historical sense, which is a sense of timelessness as well as of the temporal … this is what makes the writer [read: painter] traditional”. In Eliot’s terms, Twombly is using the “mythical method” rather than the “narrative method”, “controlling, ordering, giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is … history.”  Fifty Days at Ilium  is Twombly’s most achieved work in this regard, the paintings calling forth simultaneously the prehistoric cave wall and the utmost contemporary artistic sophistication, the scribbling child and the slaying warrior, murderous, petty vengefulness and disinterested aesthetic distance, the birth of humankind and its final fatal flame.

Philosopher Thomas Nagel The arguments in philosopher Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 essay, What is it Like to be Bat? can help us answer the question of whether a human born with XY chromosomes and a male body can be, can become, or can know what it is like to be a woman, or can know what inhabiting the world is like for a woman. Nagel — who randomly chose bats from the list of mammals — began from the premise that if an organism has consciousness, then there is something that it is like to be that organism, and his question was whether we could know “what is like for a bat to be a bat”. Nagel’s essay argues for the wholly subjective character of experience, and how this subjectivity is dictated by differences in the physicality of beings. A creature shapes its Umwelt, or lifeworld, through its interactions with the world, and those interactions are determined by that creature’s body. Men and women inhabit similar, yet profoundly different Umwelt’s. The qualia of sensation — meaning the instances of subjective experience, such as what it’s like to perceive a colour, to taste an apple or hear a baby cry — are different for each individual human. But these differences are also sexed. The last is a good example, as the female body — and therefore mind — responds to a baby’s cry in a radically different way to a man's. But there are also large differences in the way they experience running for five hundred metres, the colour red, having a nipple touched, and innumerable other things (almost everything, in fact). There are qualia that each sex experiences that the other will never be able experience at all, but which help form their consciousnesses. A woman will never get an erection, and a man will never have a clitoral or vaginal orgasm, menstruate, or give birth. All of these ways of experiencing the world physically, along with our anticipations and memories of them, form a human being’s consciousness, its personality, its very being (or soul, if you like), who he or she is. If one, or even half a dozen of the physical particularities of a woman could be miraculously reproduced in a man (which they can’t), such as giving him the same muscle mass and bone density as a woman, a uterus, a clitoris, or a brain that reacts in the same way to temperature or noise, he still wouldn’t be a woman physically, or anywhere near being one. Consciousness is a complex feature of evolutionarily determined biological systems, the latter radically different for men and women, such that even their spatial and temporal perspectives for experiencing the world are different. For a man to become a woman everything, every molecule, would have to be changed, and a lifetime of memories implanted. Each moment-to-moment sequence of experience from the womb onwards grows coherently out of those that preceded it, and determines those that follow it. Surgery is merely an in-real-life filter, advanced dressing up, and transitions someone towards nothing that meaningfully resembles a woman. To give one of hundreds of examples: men have no Cooper's Ligament, which means that after HRT their breasts - which in any case are functionless - will be tubular and spaced very widely apart. Even the cells of men and women are biochemically different and determine, from before birth, many things, including how each sex fights particular diseases. Objective, unchangeable, sexed physical states partially determine subjective states; lopping off this or that part of the body or appending a functionless simulacrum of another will in no wise change the quality of those subjectives states. Every cell in our body has your male or femalness inscribed within it. Even if it were possible to change your hormonal sex completely (which it isn't) that would still leave your unalterable chromasomal sex, and your genetic sex, intact. There are many male and female brain circuits that behave very differently, sex-recognition is hard-writed into our brains, and the neurons have been identified that allow us 'instincitvely' to discern a member of the opposite sex, however heavily disguised: this is why no trans people ever really 'pass'. So, a man can never become a woman physically, and thus cannot logically be or ‘identify as’ a woman, as you can only know what it feels like to be a thing if you are that thing. To argue otherwise, that there is another, 'real'self within us distinct from the bodily self, and that the mind and body are separate , is philosophically centuries out of date - Locke's Empiricism first put pay to Descartian dualism almost 350 years ago. “Mental states”, Nagel adds, “are states of the body, and mental events are physical events”: the ghost is the machine, the machine is the ghost. The hormonal impregnation of the foetus has a direct effect on neural circuits, creating a masculine brain and a feminine brain, which can be distinguished from each other anatomically and biochemically, and cannot be housed in the body of the other sex, it being determined by the sexed body. Let’s look at a passage of Nagel and replace ‘bats’ with ‘women’: “Even if humans [men] could transform over time into bats [women] their brains would not have worked as bats' [women’s] brains from birth, and could therefore never have the mindset of a bat [woman] … it is doubtful that any meaning could be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neuropsychological constitution of a bat [woman] … even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat [woman], nothing in my present condition enables me to imagine what the experience of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like”. and, “To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat [or a woman] without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would [still] not be anything like the experiences of those animals [women]”. It is then, the much vaunted ‘lived experience’ that mitigates against the possibility of trangenderism. Nagel goes on to give the example of trying to attain knowledge of what it is like to be blind or deaf (he could just as easily have substituted disabled, or schizophrenic), concluding that “the subjective experiences of a person deaf or blind from birth are not accessible to me … we cannot form more than a schematic notion of what it would be like". Nagel says that “… the more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success you can expect in your guesswork”. So, men can come close to guessing what it is like to be woman. Men and women both experience hunger, sexual desire, boredom and aesthetic pleasure, but the way they experience those things is qualitatively different, and unalterably so. Nagel writes that “there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in human language”, and that “to deny the reality or logical significance of what we can never describe or understand is the crudest form of logical dissonance”. In other words, the subjectivity of other beings is ultimately ineffable and irreducible to language, and so the subjective experiences of men and women will always be unknowable for each other. The idea that someone, by adopting the outward and trivial indicators of femininity, can suddenly thereby have access to that knowledge is preposterous. We can only guess, and approach knowledge through empathy, imagination and the testimonies of women themselves. “Nobody has yet devised", Nagel writes “an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy and imagination — that could describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to a being incapable of having those experiences”. Men and women are restricted by the resources of their own sexed minds, their consciousnesses made sexed by their sexed bodies. To deny that they are sexed is not only contra accepted biology, as well as common sense, it would also completely undermine the discipline of evolutionary biology. For instance, men do not have breasts, nor could they ever have them, just things obtainable via hormonal treatment and surgery that look like them: they merely have nipples with muscle and adipose tissue underneath, cannot produce real breast milk, nor do men have, nor can they ever have, the profound ocular-brain relationship with babies that women have. The belief that ‘trans women are women’ makes a belief in magic seem sophisticated, because belief in magic or miracles explained effects for which causes could not (yet) be identified, but there was at least an observable effect to be explained. Likewise, when people believed erroneously that the world was flat, they did so because the world looked flat. With trans women, there is no such observable effect. What you have before you after saying the magic formula ‘trans women are women’ is visibly still a man. At best, after the surgical removal of his genitalia, a man will have a crude cavity, its position and its condition of being a hole being the only things it has in common with a woman’s vagina, and yet it is the only part of a woman's reproductive system that it's even possible to crudely mimic. This is why the word 'trans' itself is inadmissable, as there isn't a transition towards or into anything. The feeling inside that one is male or female is biologically determined, the idea of 'being in the wrong body' has no concrete, observeable, proveable basis: ‘male’ and ‘female’ are ‘assigned’ at birth, but by Nature, not by a doctor or midwife. One cannot move from the fixed point of being male or female and back again, so the idea of gender fluidity, of being non-binary is illogical, impossible, mad. The main differences between men and women lies in their reproductive organs, in their potential reproductive roles, and in the reproductive apparatus that produces sperm or eggs, so that ultimately all social determinations regarding gender are biologically determined. This is why, until very recently, sex and gender were used interchangeably: for there to be a third gender, there would need to be a new, third reproductive function, and new organs to go with it. Arguments that sexual dimorphism can be overcome or does not exist are pure Lysenkoism, and matters of ideology, not science. Gender theorists wanted to separate sex and gender, but it simply can't be done. Everyone is at points in time and to differing degrees ‘gender non-conforming’, in that they veer towards and away from society's fixed ideas of what is masculine or feminine, but this changes nothing substantial about their gender or their sex. A liking for cut flowers, Emily Bronte and fancy soap, or even a prediliction for wearing dresses, makes a man neither gay nor a woman, and a girl's obsession with climbing trees or football, or wearing her hair short, doesn't mean she is a boy inside a girl’s body, or a lesbian. To have given this matter philosophical consideration is to have given the it way more than its due, and to have accorded the adherents of trans ideology more respect than they are due, and has necessitated the bracketing of matters such as that its middle class adherents are all lying, the data showing that it is in part a social contagion, that its are roots in pornography and anutogynephilia, is funded by a small gourp of trans billioaires, that it is a multi-billion dollar business, and that its explosion amongst the young is closely tied to social media, beginning with MySpace and especially Tumblr, and then via Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. The one thing that trans ideology has done more than anything else, that will outlast it, is to have made a nonsense of the idea of human progress, other than technological-scientific progress. It is perhaps the most profound manifestation of human credulousness and stupidity in history, outdoing even the witch craze of the seventeenth century. It is more egregious than any previous superstition or mass insanity because it is has come well after the end of the age of superstition and the Enlightenment. The 'truths' of science have always been subject to suspicion and revision, but trans ideology has never had its Hegelian 'moment' of temporary truth that was later abandoned as more information came to light. Quite the oppostite; it is wholly retrogressive, an attempt to replace biological knowledge with magical thinking, a regression to something lower even than pseudoscience. At its core is the irrational claim that feelings determine reality (which is how schizophrenics experience reality). Those declaiming that ‘trans women are women’, even if they have ‘Dr’ preceding their names, are no more advanced than gap-toothed, illiterate medieval peasants expressing a belief in dragons, fairies and unicorns.

Polish film poster for Rosemary's Baby   Rosemarys’ Baby  (1968), the first of Polanski’s ‘trilogy of evil’ that continued with Macbeth  (1971), and Chinatown  (1975) is, despite its comedy, one of the most misanthropic films ever made. Ambitious actor Guy Woodhouse (John Cassavetes) and his wife Rosemary (Mia Farrow), who is desperate for a child, take an apartment in the exclusive Bramford Building in New York. They’re befriended by their eccentric elderly neighbours, Roman and Minne Castavet (Sidney Blackmur, Ruth Gordon), leaders of a coven of Satanists, first meeting them on the street outside the Bramford in the crowd gathered around the broken body of Terry (Angela Dorian) a runaway and junky the Castavets had taken in, who had leapt from their seventh-floor window after learning that they had lined her up to be impregnated by Satan. Guy, in exchange for his acting career being furthered by Roman, agrees to Satan raping and impregnating Rosemary. Drugged on a spiked chocolate Mousse given to her by Minnie, she becomes pregnant following the rape at a black mass held in the Castavets’ apartment. Guy’s career takes off, his first break coming as he replaces an actor who is blinded by the Castavets via sympathetic magic after Guy steals his tie. Rosemary’s writer friend Hutch (Maurice Evans) alerts Rosemary to the true identity of the Castavets, giving her a book on satanism that reveals that Roman is the descendant of a notorious Satanist. Hutch too is later murdered by sympathetic magic, after Guy steals his glove. Rosemary meanwhile has been put in the care of Dr Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy), a famous obstetrician recommended by the Castavets, but a member of the coven, who puts her on a bizarre diet that makes her cadaverous and unhealthy looking. Rosemary flees the apartment and seeks sanctuary with her previous obstetrician, Dr Hill (Charles Grodin), who betrays her out of professional fealty to Sapirstein. She’s forcibly taken back to the apartment, where she gives birth. She’s told that her baby has died, but hears a baby crying from the Castavets’ apartment through the wall. She walks in on the coven, and finds her baby. Lifting the curtain on the crib, she’s horrified at what she sees. But she softens as he cries, and rocks the cradle, accepting Satan’s spawn as her child. Rosemary’s Baby  is a schizoid paranoid delusion which turns out to be true: everyone around Rosemary really is  evil and conspiring against her, and nobody can be trusted, even, in the end, herself. The film has been seen as eerily prescient of Roman Polanski’s own encounter with evil when members of the Manson Family murdered his wife and unborn child one year later, but Polanski had already known horror and evil, and the film looked not forward but back, to the experience of Nazi Germany that had been formative for the director. Rosemary’s Baby  may be about misogyny, domestic violence, the body-horror of pregnancy, female bodily autonomy, ambition, betrayal, the terrifying unknowability of others and so on, but it is also about the inherent evil of the collective, of conformism, of joining in . Just as the ‘banality of evil’ can be revealingly reversed to the ‘evil of banality’ so ‘collective madness’ can be reversed to the ‘madness of the collective’, and this is the underlying theme of the film. Minnie Castavet (Ruth Gordon) Ira Levin’s 1966 source novel had been a big bestseller. Most of its dialogue was retained unchanged by Polanksi, and the film’s plot cleaves closely to the book’s, too.  The late 60s and early 70s was a golden age for high quality popular literature by such as Levin, Peter Benchley and Stepehen King, providing rich food for filmmakers. Levin was one of its most successful practitioners (Truman Capote likened him, somewhat hyperbolically, to Henry James, but his novels are nevertheless excellent and unputdownably gripping). The film is a much richer experience, as the story is also told visually and aurally. Legendary production designer Richard Sylbert and costume designer Anthea Sylbert (his sister-in-law) were as notoriously perfectionist as Polanski. Nothing in Rosemary’s Baby  was left to chance: not a colour, costume, hem length, fall of light, or camera position is arbitrary or without signification, psychological effect, or emotional impact. Guy and Rosemary are invariably dressed in blue and yellow and Rosemary has the flat decorated and furnished in yellow, even down to the crockery. Some have seen this as representing sunny hope, soon to be brutally dashed. Perhaps; but yellow is also the colour of madness, and it may be a nod to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper , another canonical psychological horror story of a woman being gaslighted by a scheming husband. Polanski commented, “If you don’t attach extreme importance to every tiny detail, you’re just being lazy”, and “…the only way you can seduce people into believing you, whether they want to or not, is to take painstaking care with the details of your film, to make it accurate. Sloppiness destroys emotional impact.” Polanski wanted the two apartments to be ‘characters’ in the movie and insisted on interiors being shot on wide angle lenses so that the walls were “always overwhelming Rosemary”, and cinematographer William Fraker flashed the filmstock to soften the colours, creating a sense of irreality and dissociation reflecting Rosemary's paranoia. Composer Krzysztof Komeda’s music is used sparingly but effectively and is, too, a kind of character, functioning as an abstract chorus on events. The lullaby that we hear over the opening credits is repeated throughout the movie but is at times barely recognisable, echoed in the chanting of a black mass, and at certain points it seems as if this chorus is jeering at and mocking Rosemary. The Black Mass Polanksi’s complex, formalist patterning of visual and aural motifs achieves a richness of signification that is entirely without artificiality, pure cinema in the service of compelling, popular entertainment. This is why his films so handsomely repay repeated viewings. On my last viewing, I noticed for the first time the way Cassavetes’s face reddens exaggeratedly as he sits by the fire with Rosemary as they plan her conception later that night: Guy is in reality waiting nervously for Minnie to drop around the drugged chocolate Mousse to ready Rosemary for the attentions of Satan. Rosemary however has surreptitiously thrown away some of her Mousse and there follows a scene that mixes her dream with the reality of the black mass, as she drifts in and out of consciousness. Polanski intended there to be a constant feeling of discomfiting ambiguity regarding Rosemary’s sanity (which is why he didn’t show the baby). It's probably the most effective and convincing dream sequence in cinema (he discusses why it was filmed the way it was in this interview with Mark Cousins), though Francesco Barelli’s extraordinary and too-little-known 1974 giallo The Perfume of the Lady in Black  goes one further technically, seamlessly and without demarcation mixing hallucination, memory, dream, and reality. Macbeth  and Chinatown , both dour and nihilistic, were made after and informed by the brutal murder of Polanski’s wife, her friends, and their unborn child at their house on Los Angeles’s Cielo Drive by Manson Family cult members, the event that was, according to Joan Didion, the official end of the 1960s. But Polish Jew Polanski knew Chinatown well before Chinatown : the Krakow Ghetto, and Nazi-occupied Poland. Random murders on the street, children used by the SS for target practice, betrayals and denunciations – the child Polanski witnessed all of this. One of Polanski’s most vivid memories from the ghetto was of women being rounded up to be taken to Auschwitz, bewildered, terrified, suitcases in hand. How could this have not influenced the scene where a panic-stricken Rosemary runs away from Sapirstein’s office with her suitcase, dodging the traffic. Polanski’s pregnant mother was gassed in Auschwitz, and he had been close enough to murder on the Krakow streets to hear the gurgling of blood from bullet wounds. He escaped denunciation and betrayal by going on the run using false, non-Jewish names, in constant fear of being given away, trusting nobody other than the Polish peasant family that hid him, at great personal risk (in 2020 Jan and Stefania Buchala were posthumously awarded the Yad Vashem title of Righteous Among the Nations, which Polanski gave to their grandson, Stanislaw). Time magazine cover, June 1972 Levin was also Jewish, and his 1976 novel The Boys from Brazil  was about Nazis holed up in South America attempting to resurrect the Third Reich. Seven of his novels were adapted into films, the most successful being Rosemary’s Baby , the superior noir A Kiss Before Dying (1956), The Boys from Brazil (1978), and The Stepford Wive s (1975), another satirical horror, like Rosemary’s Baby , but more explicitly, dealing with conformity and misogyny. Levin had his finger on the pulse: by 1968 in the US there was an epidemic of drug addiction and thousands of middle-class teenage runaways like Terry, there was Vietnam and the Mail Lai massacre, an attempt to finish the Holocaust in the Middle East with the Six Day War, a wave of political assassinations including that of John F Kennedy, and a huge, unprecedented rise in the number of homicides. White bourgeois domestic terrorism was sweeping across the US and Western Europe, and hard-core porn was going mainstream. In short, evil was in the air. White, bourgeois liberals in the US had also begun to embrace gurus, pseudo-science, satanic and other cults, fringe religions, communes – often loci for male sexual opportunism and rape - irrational beliefs, and totalitarian ideologies. The mumbo jumbo that has reached its dangerous apotheosis in our own era was taking off. Despite its nihilism the film is funny, not least because of the comic turns of Ruth Gordon and Patsy Kelly as coven-member Lara Louise, the simple-minded witch living on the floor above. Like the other cranks of the coven, Minnie and Roman are both obviously mad. But the borders between madness, evil, stupidity, and the closely related credulity are porous, shifting, variable. There is never one without a portion of the others: who is to say what are the proportions of each are for your average urban satanist, terrorist, cult member, dictator, serial killer, or fanatical activist? In Guy, calculating evil predominates, in Roman, madness, in Lara Louise, stupidity. Evil is often grimly comedic as is manifests itself visually, and the grotesque humour of horror and of evil-doers has been explored and visualised by many directors. The final scene, where the coven members, ranting maniacs gathered to pay homage to Rosemary’s baby, with their chant of “hail Satan” will, depending on what mood you’re in, either chill your blood or make you laugh out loud, like the footage of a gesticulating Hitler. Polanski chose some of the actors for their odd-looking, comical physiognomies, and Minnie and Roman are deliberately cartoonish, something which only serves to make them more sinister. However bloody and destructive they are, totalitarian regimes, cults, communes and covens are funny, often a haven for cranks and the half-mad, the desperately lonely. Often it takes less than a generation for an ideology or cult to become a mockable madness. All cult leaders and cults, prophets and demagogues have something comic about them, often perceived as such by outsiders at the time. Putin topless astride a horse, Mussolini’s jutting chin. Hitler was many things, and a clown was one of them. Charles Manson was also a pathetic, odd-looking clown, and the Manson trial a grotesque burlesque – those shaven heads, the absurd swastika tattooed on the forehead. The grotesque physical comedy of evil (Hitler; Manson Family cult members) There really were nude gatherings of middle-class Satanists intoning black masses in the 60s and 70s  across America and the UK.  Satanism and in particular Aleister Crowley had been made hip across these two decades by celebrity dabblers such as David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page, and there was a slew of books, films, magazines and TV shows dealing with the occult. Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan in California attracted celebrity members such as Jayne Mansfield and Sammy Davis Jnr., but it was only one of many cults - there was The Children of God, Hare Krishnas, Esalen, Jim Jones’s Peoples’ Temple, and the Rajneesh movement amongst others. If  Rosemary’s Baby  is archly satirical of this penchant for cults and middle-class intellectual fashions and fads, it also satirises showbusiness ambition in the character of Guy (Cassavetes’s oleaginous performance is so creepily convincing that whenever I watch him in another film I immediately feel dislike for him). Guy is desperate for the shirt he’s seen in the New Yorker , and Rosemary uglifies herself with a modeish Vidal Sassoon haircut. This was an economical move by Polanski, he could at once satirise the conformist nonconformity of liberal New Yorkers and visually reference the denuded humanity of the death camps – and point to the conceptual connection between the two. The dynamics of recruitment to any cult or ideological movement are similar: the propagandising and bribing, the crazed, fanatical leaders and true believers, and those who go along with it for gain, whether it be for power, money, career success, a sense of belonging, or even just somewhere to stay, like all those teenage runaways. The opportunity to victimise and harm, and to control the speech and actions of others is also ever-present.  Klaus Mann’s 1936 novel Mephisto  treats of an actor’s selling his soul to the devil of Nazism, and he could have based the protagonist on any number of people in the milieu of German cinema, entertainment and academia. However, though Faustian bargains never end well, unlike Mann’s Hendrik Hofmann, Guy Woodhouse remains unpunished at the end of the movie and Rosemary, too, compromises with evil, having in the end got what she so badly wanted, albeit in satirically monstrous form. The characters of Roman and Minnie also highlight another aspect of totalitarian societies and the inner dynamics of cults: the function of nosiness, loss of privacy, snooping and spying. Loss of privacy, isolation, the exclusion of wrongthinking outsiders (Guy assiduously keeps Rosemary away from her friends, and Hutch is done in) are linked to the demand for total loyalty central to all cults and extremist parties. Nazi Germany and post-war communist Poland were both societies of spying, denunciation, informing, betrayal, and the victimisation of those that don’t want to join; this was formative of Polanski’s worldview, one based on the absolute precarity of trust and goodness.   Anatomy of a Scene Rosemary and Guy arrive for dinner at the Castavets’ apartment. They had met on the street the night before, part of the crowd surrounding the body of Terry after her jump from the Castavets’ window. As the Castavets’ apartment door opens, the film darkens, the scene is soft focus. Up until now, yellow has dominated the palette, now red is predominant. Red didn’t make an appearance until we saw the blood that haloed Terry’s broken head two scenes ago, but from now on it will regularly bespatter shots, always indicative of violence or the Luciferian: following Rosemary’s rape Guy fills the flat with red roses, and when Minnie and Roman come around to celebrate her pregnancy they apologise for bringing red wine – which is drunk at black masses – instead of champagne.  Pre-dinner drinks in the living room. Roman’s sweater is bright red; he serves vodka blushes; the furniture, carpets and book spines are all shades of red. We’ve moved from a bright, modern, Scandi-ish interior into a rubeus Gothic lair. As they take their drinks on the sofa, Roman spills a little vodka blush on the carpet and Minnie fusses over the stain. This has been interpreted as highlighting her ordinariness, making a point about the ’banality of evil’.  But it is deft characterisation. Minnie is in charge, not Roman; she’s interested in power and control. In the previous scene Rosemary had heard through the apartment wall her termagant berating of him for letting Terry in on their plans too soon (“I don’t know how you got to be the head of anything”), and over successive viewings Minnie seems less and less comical and more and more minatory (Ruth Gordon won an Oscar for Best Supporting actress for her performance). A deal is struck Roman, a slightly pompous raconteur, moves over to an armchair, framed by two red curtains like a stage, and talks of his theatrical past, his travelling: “name a place, I’ve been there” (like the Devil). As in the rest of the film, the dialogue is loaded, proleptic. Alongside his chair is a small side table with a lamp that splits the space in two; it is the space that will later be filled by the crib of the progeny of Rosemary and the Devil. We cut to the dining table and the quartet are eating undercooked steaks and drinking red wine. It takes a keen viewer to notice on a first viewing that there are marks of missing paintings on the wall – we’ll see them replaced later in the scene where Rosemary is raped, nightmarish scenes of bloody rapine and apocalyptic devilry. It's our first look at Roman without a hat. Comparing photos of actor Sidney Blackmer, you can see that his eyebrows have been altered to give him a devilish look. Over dinner, after pouring scorn on organised religion, Roman obsequiously flatters Guy about his acting abilities ("Weren’t you Albert Finney’s understudy?”), while Minnie urges extra cake on him, like a favoured son. Candle flames, red meat, read wine: an antechamber of hell. Roman tells Guy that he’s noticed in him a “most interesting inner quality”. It’s a quality we’ve already noticed, too: he’s an asshole. Throughout the film he’s been controlling, manipulative and bossy towards his wife: he doesn’t thank her when she brings him food and drink, and later we’ll see him demanding she get out of bed to make him breakfast the morning after he’s let Satan violate her. Minnie and Rosemary go to the kitchen to wash and dry dishes, while the men remain behind in the living room. Minnie questions Rosemary about her family. The couple are being sounded out, one for her fertility, the other for his capacity for evil. “Oh, we’re fertile alright!” Rosemary exclaims in response to Minnie’s questioning, “I’ve got sixteen nieces and nephews!” For a change, Minnie looks serious and thoughtful. Rosemary and the infant anti-Christ There’s a close up of Rosemary’s troubled face followed by a POV shot of her looking from the kitchen over to the entrance to the living room, which is  a dirge of reds running from the palest pink to the muted scarlet of an empty armchair (suggesting that someone is missing or, more likely, immaterially present). The close-up is held for around 4 seconds so that we get a sense of Rosemary’s curiosity and disquiet, for Roman and Guy are deep in conversation, but can’t be seen. At several points in the film Polanski frames a scene so that we can’t see the people speaking, increasing the paranoid sense of plotting and secrecy, the most famous example being that of Minnie taking a phone call with her head obscured by a bedroom door that had cinema audiences leaning over to try and look around it. A column of smoke crosses the screen from right to left. Guy and Roman are smoking, but that column is somewhat unnatural in its volume, steady flow and horizontality. It is smoke from the fires of hell. Like the paired, red-shaded lamps dimly lighting the apartment, glowing malevolently like the eyes of demons, it signals the presence of evil, of Satan. On the mantlepiece directly above Guy’s head is a statuette of the winged goddess Lilith, or the demonic goddess Strzyga of Polish folklore. It seems not laboured but natural to me that Polanski had in mind the smoke from concentration camp crematoria, which after all were the real fires of hell, in which his mother and unborn sibling perished, after a whole nation became a demon-beguiled, victimising coven. When Minnie and Rosemary return to the lounge the men rise suddenly and both look serious, preoccupied, Roman’s mask briefly removed. Blackmer’s acting is extraordinarily subtle – he momentarily wears an expression of the utmost cynicism before seamlessly reverting to the dithering avuncular. A deal has been struck, and Guy has three new best friends, one of them horned, winged, and goat-eyed.

A look back at Narciso Ibanez Serrador's haunting 1976 cult horror movie Who Can Kill a Child?   Spanish Director Narciso Ibanez Serrador directed only two films, The House that Screamed , 1968, and Who Can Kill a Child  (AKA Island of the Damned ), 1976. The former is an influential high-point of the horror genre, the latter one of its masterpieces. Both were smash hits in Spain, but were heavily cut and badly distributed in the US and the rest of Europe. The Uruguayan-born Serrador came from a theatrical family that toured Spain and South America, specialising in stage adaptations of classic horror stories by such as Bram Stoker and Poe. Between 1959 and 1964 he and his father wrote and directed a horror anthology series for Argentina television, again using classic terror tales as source material. He went on to write, direct and present a similar series for Spanish television, Stories to Keep You Awake , which was hugely successful, running from 1966 to 1982.  He also originated the popular gameshow Un, dos, tres ... repond Otra vez , which ran from 1972 to 2004. It’s the most famous gameshow in Spanish TV history and was syndicated across Europe (in Britain it was known as Three, Two, One , and ran from 1978 to 1988). With a background so steeped in classic horror Serrador’s first movie, The House that Screamed , is exactly what you’d expect. A lubricious pulp Gothic set in an isolated nineteenth century private school for wayward girls - some of whom of have gone missing in mysterious circumstances – run by a sadistic headmistress, Senora Furneau (Lilli Palmer), somewhat overfond of her creepy Peeping Tom son. It’s a gorgeous looking proto-slasher, proto-Giallo, heavier on atmosphere than gore, with two highly aestheticized murders that look backward to Hitchcock, and forward to Dario Argento. Inventive, perverse, with heavy Oedipal overtones, suppressed lesbianism, madness, sadism, and a grand-guignol finale reminiscent of Psycho , it has all the familiar furniture of the Gothic, and is up there with the very best of the Hammer movies. Which doesn’t quite prepare you for Serrador’s next film, the provocatively titled Who Can Kill a Child?  Beautiful, provocative, sombre and harrowing, it's a film of tension and dread, entirely lacking in any of the cliches of horror. It’s a perfectionist’s movie, full of semiotically charged mis-en-scene, surreal painterly compositions, and a dreamlike use of colour, silence and negative space (the cinematographer, Jose Luis Alcaine, later went on to work regularly with Pedro Almodovar). The film is in the killer-kids tradition and is the very best, most intelligent and morally complex of this sub-genre, which includes The Village of the Damned , 1960, Children of the Corn , 1984, The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane , 1976, the grindhouse schlock of 1981’s Bloody Birthday , the campy The Bad Seed , 1956, Heavenly Creatures , 1994, and the startling pulp poetry of Don’t Deliver us From Evil , 1971. In Who Can Kill a Child?  you’ll see no mad staring eyes, robotic voices, identical bobs, or histrionics suggesting the extraterrestrial or the demonic. The film’s opening is artistically bold and was commercially risky, but is one of the most outstanding opening credit sequences in cinema history. It’s an eight-minute montage of black and white newsreels of various modern conflicts, some of them half-forgotten (Vietnam, the Biafran civil war, the India-Pakistan war, Auschwitz, and so on), and images of dead and suffering children, with a voiceover and a text banner listing the child-casualties of each conflict. This is intercut with the credits, over which we hear the chuckles of children and a child’s eerie, cracked humming of a lullaby. Whether this ‘works’ or not divides critics. Serrador has said that he regrets putting it at the opening and not the close of the film, but not that he wished he’d cut it. This rubbing of our noses in our shit establishes a sombre mood, and adds a dimension to and way of thinking about the story proper that would otherwise be lacking. Monochrome slowly resolves itself to colour in the image of a toddler playing in the sand on a crowded beach. The switch to colour signals our entry into the world of fiction, and that we should suspend our disbelief. The edenic scene doesn’t last long. The child finds the corpse of a young woman washed up in the shallows, one of several, we find out later (Hitchcock, whom Serrador idolised, began Frenzy , 1972 , in an almost identical manner, the beach replaced with the bank of the Thames). As the ambulance leaves the fictional resort of Benahavis it passes the coach carrying a young, middle class English couple, biologist Tom (Lewis Fiander) and Evelyn (Prunella Ransome) into the town. Evelyn is heavily pregnant and they have left two young children at home. There’s a long sequence – during which a second corpse washes up on the beach - where we see them enjoying their holiday and their time together, and it’s clear they’re still in love. This scene-setting, atmosphere and empathy-building, gives us an emotional investment in the characters, and the decision not to childishly bombard us immediately with action, plot twists and scares makes for a more harrowing horror later on. We find out that Evelyn’s pregnancy was unplanned which, though not stated, introduces the theme of abortion or, if you like, child-murder. Tom, inviting hubris, persuades Eveleyn to spend the rest of the holiday at Almanzora, a nearby, sparsely populated island, where he’d been ten years before, even though they’re told there’s no doctor on the island, or a phone line to the mainland. They rent a boat and arrive at the island. Some young boys are fishing and swimming, but they remain mute and stare. The village is empty and silent. They hole up for a while in an empty café and Tom goes to the village store for food. It’s also empty; he leaves money on the counter and the viewer, but not Tom, sees a corpse on the floor. Back at the cafe, the phone rings, it’s a terrified girl speaking Dutch, but they can’t understand what she’s saying, and she quickly hangs up. They find the town’s hotel deserted, and receive more desperate sounding calls from the girl. Tom sees an old man in the street who disappears around a corner, but before he can reach him a girl of around eleven appears, grabs the old man’s cane, and calmly batters him to death with it. We hear, but don’t see, the blows. When an appalled Tom remonstrates, the little girl just giggles and runs away. He moves the body to a barn. A few minutes later he hears giggling and chatter and peeks into the barn through a crack in the door. The old man’s body has been hoisted and become a human pinata, and a blindfolded little girl holding a sickle tries to decapitate him, a scene which rhymes visually with a more benign pinata the couple had witnessed in Benahavis. Tom returns to the hotel but tells Evelyn nothing. They encounter a man who’d been hiding in the hotel’s attic, who tells them that all the children in the town went crazy and, in roving gangs, murdered all of the adults on the island. “No one did anything”, he says, “because who can kill a child?” Tom finds two bodies upstairs, the parents of the Dutch girl who rings again, and who they trace to the telephone exchange, but are too late to save. The Spaniard’s tearful daughter arrives and begs her father to come home with him. They walk off hand in hand, and we hear him being despatched off-screen by the town's children. The couple make a run for it and find an abandoned jeep, struggling to start it as the children move in for the kill. This is scene is similar to a scene in Hitchcock’s The Birds , 1963, the presence of which is very strong in Serrador’s film. As with the birds, there's no explanation given for the sudden flocking together and turning murderous of the children. In the source novel a yellow interstellar dust falls on the town, but Serrador eschews any such pat rationalisation. They cross to the other side of the island and find a coastal cottage with a mother, grandmother and three children living there, untouched by the collective madness, and negotiate the renting of a boat. But children from the town arrive and meet those living in the cottage, and we see that the madness and telepathic bond between the children is produced through eye-to-eye contact. Tom and Evelyn drive back across the island: faced with a line of children barring the road, Tom intends to plough through them, but Evelyn grabs the wheel and they crash. They take refuge in the police station and are besieged in a cell by the children. Serrador drolly, cruelly, chose the most angelic looking possible preschooler to be the first child killed. At the window of the cell he’s trying, tongue out in concentration, to cock the hammer of a police pistol. You almost feel like helping him. Tom shoots him in the head with a police rifle, and this is when the full horror of the situation hits Evelyn. Prunella Ransome’s performance is a tour de force in in its subtly calibrated rendering of reluctance, growing dread, and final horrified acknowledgement. Her own baby murders her from inside the womb, in what is one of cinema’s most extraordinary, emotionally wrenching and finely acted death scenes. Tom, broken, leaves the police station, taking a police sub-machine gun with him, and heads towards the harbour. A line of smiling, sweet faced children block his way. He raises the gun and mows them down, makes a run to the harbour, trying to release a boat as the children attempt to board. As he knocks them down with savage blows to the head with an oar, filling the water with young corpses, a coastguard boat approaches. Misreading the scene, they shout for Tom to stop, then shoot him dead. For contemporary Spanish audiences this film would have had additional resonances. At that time there was tension between liberal, younger Spaniards, represented by Benahavista and Almanzora's children, who were leaving the countryside for the cities and tourist resorts, and more conservative, older, rural (and Francoist) Spaniards - the murdered adults of Almanzora. There was also resentment against tourists, particularly English tourists, and by the end of the 70s coastal Spain had been completely transformed, some might say destroyed, by tourism (this anti-tourist sentiment is much more explicit in Eugenio Martin’s campy and gruesome A Candle for the Devil , 1973, starring Judy Geeson). It’s to his credit that Serrador avoids didacticism, and it’s not cut-and-dried as to where stands on these issues. The final scenes – which of course I can’t tell you about – are apocalyptic. What makes this film so disquieting is the completely naturalistic performances of the child actors. Their violence is presented as innocent play and acted as if that’s how they perceive it, with no indication that they derive any pleasure from murder different to what they’d get from their customary games. What creates the most insidious disquiet is not that which lurks in the shadows, or impossible monsters, but that which has the appearance of the real, and betrays our expectations if it. The children in this film symbolise the way that reality can betray us, whilst continuing to look like itself. Reality can merely disappoint us through a slight misalignment with what we expected of it, or it can terrorise or derange us through some monstrous divergence: a child turning on its parents, the discovery of the the depraved secret life of a loving partner, the unassuming neighbour who turns out to be a homicial maniac, or a whole society curdled into a hell, full of murderers, as in Nazi Germany (this suspicion of reality, which is the beginning of horror, is also the beginning of philosophy). What can be more trusted not  to be a source of violence than a child, what could betray our expectations of reality more than a murderous infant? To be murdered by your own child from inside the womb is a darkly poetic symbol of the sudden undermining of causal determination, and therefore of death itself, the way in which reality, without warning, betrays us all. How much more fitting as a symbol for a contingent yet innevitable death than a grim reaper is a blindfolded child with a sickle, trying to decapitate a human pinata. The film’s opening montage answers the title's question. Lots of people can kill a child, in the obscenest ways, and at scale. When Tom and Evelyn arrive at the cottage on the coast, shortly before the children from the town come to absorb the children there into their hive, we see one of the peasant woman’s children being beaten by his mother, much to granny’s amusement. Shortly, they’ll get their comeuppance. Dostoevsky once wrote that if there's a child being beaten somewhere, then you’re in hell, and children experience the world even at the best of times as threatening, filled with a helpless animus against adults and their power over them, their commands and chastisements, oftentimes their abuse and exploitation. We can perhaps see the children in Who Can Kill a Child?  as enacting an ideal, righteous retribution for abused and murdered children, in which adults get their symbolic just deserts, though Serrador leaves whether or not he approves ambiguous. As with The House that Screamed , the dialogue in Who Can Kill a Child?  is in English, but some conversations are in Spanish. These are not subtitled or dubbed in the free version online, so currently you’ll need to buy a DVD or Blue Ray for English subtitles for these few, very brief exchanges.

"Energy is Eternal Delight" William Blake A still from Nikita Mikhalkov's 1980 film adaptation of Oblomov I Oblomov, the eponymous anti-hero of Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 satirical novel, is the living embodiment of inertia. He's widely considered to be the epitome of the ‘superfluous man’ of Russian literature of the 1840s and 1850s, but has none of the Byronism, glamour, or elegance of Turgenev’s Bazarov or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin . A man in his thirties living in rooms in Petersburg with his manservant Zhakar and cook Anisya, Ilya Ilych Oblomov came up to the capital from Oblomovka, the family estate in the provinces, to join the civil service, eleven years before the action of the novel begins. After two years in his job, using a faked sick note, he escapes work of any kind for good, and sequesters himself from society. Oblomov l ives in genteel squalor, due in part to the neglect of his irascible factotum Zhakar, himself an indolent buffoon. In his gloomy apartment are cobwebs, plates with mouldering scraps of food, and a few books and journals gathering dust, unread or somnolently glanced through. He never goes out, rarely gets up, and lives only for Anisya’s meals, wine, and coffee, and luxuriating in his bed. Recently I read an old review of the novel in The Spectator  that claimed the novel is a “guide to being idle”. It’s nothing of the sort, but this view of Oblomov, that he is a cultured proto-slacker to be admired and emulated, rather than pitied, and that the novel celebrates a life of idling, is a typical but perverse misreading. The same review referred to Oblomov as “a fizzing ball of energy intellectually”, but there’s no evidence in the text to support such a statement, yet this take too, that Oblomov is an intellectual, and a philosopher of idling, is also prevalent. But he doesn’t read (“serious reading exhausted him”), write, take any interest in art or politics, or in anything else. Goncharov was obviously against Oblomovism, but you wouldn't think so from much that has been written about the book and its pitiable anti-hero. Critics and reviewers have been altogether too kind to him. Oblomov does have good qualities, but his indolence isn’t one of them. “Flabby beyond his years”, he lives a depressive’s existence, in semi-darkness, attentive to and curious about nothing: “... for Ilya Ilich recumbence was never a necessity, as it would be for an ill or sleepy man, not an occasional occurrence, as it would be for someone who was weary, not a pleasure, as for a lazy man; it was his normal state”. Oblomov is “an exaggerated portrayal of one of life’s extremes”, as Goncharov put it. He was not aiming for psychological realism, but presenting a satirical personification of a feckless, parasitic upper middle class. Oblomov is a target of authorial ridicule (though the satire is unusually gentle) and to identify with him or to imitate his lifestyle would be absurd. Goncharov thought of Oblomovism  - the name given to this destructive apathy by one of the novel’s characters - as a tendency that was debilitating to Russia as a whole, to its peasantry, bourgeoisie, and its Civil Service. Oblomov is no dandy aesthete along the lines of Huysmans’s des Esseintes , no intrepid mental traveller to the depths of inner space, experimenting with new modes of living. One of the defining features of the 'superfluous man' of Russian literature is that he is overeducated, yet Oblomov's education is explicitly less than middling. His merits are modest, and he is an endearing but pitiful mediocrity. He makes a few broadsides against society to justify his withdrawal from it, but his comments could have been lifted from a novel, and are rationalisations to justify his permanent lie-in and etiolated existence. Oblomov has been liberated from labour by the serf system in Russia, and the essence of his existence is an inherited parasitism, his habitual state one of near stupefaction. If the satire is gentle, it’s because Goncharov was no stranger to procrastination and sloth. It took him eleven years to complete the novel and, like Oblomov, he retired from the civil service to rooms in Petersburg, shutting himself away from society. II We meet Oblomov as he receives a series of visitors from his bed, ex-colleagues and amiably lampooned social types, in his once opulent but now tatterdemalion oriental dressing gown. Subinsky and Volkov, social butterflies, Alexeyev, an exaggerated personification of nobodyness, Penkin, an up-and-coming young writer who observes that Oblomov is “the same incorrigible lazy bones”, and Tarantiev, an arrogant, scheming sponger. Each tries to persuade him to accompany them to Ekatarinof, a pleasure garden along the lines of Vauxhall Gardens. He refuses, and tries in turn to persuade each of them to stay and have dinner with him instead. Between callers, Zhakar entreats him to get out of bed. By midday he has made it to his armchair, though still in his dressing gown, and after Tarantiev has left he returns to his bed. The plot is driven by two long-unanswered letters that Oblomov has received. One is from the bailiff at Oblomovka informing him of the parlous condition of the estate and its drop in income, requesting that he come and personally put things in order. It’s obvious from the letter that he’s losing money from the estate’s mismanagement, and that he’s been diddled by the bailiff. The other is from his landlord, giving him notice to leave, as he wants to knock Oblomov’s flat together with the adjoining one. Oblomov knows he has to find a new accommodation, and that he needs to visit his estate, but can muster the strength for neither. Tarentiev offers to send an acquaintance of his to be Oblomov’s agent at Oblomovka, and also tells him that his friend, Ivan Matveyevich, has a house on the ‘Vyborg side’ of Petersburg (a semi-rural, less salubrious district, across the other side of the Neva) who employs his sister, Agafia Matveyevna, as housekeeper and cook. Finally, Stolz arrives. It is four-thirty and Oblomov is still in bed.  Stolz is Oblomov’s childhood friend, a man characterised by Goncharov as Oblomov’s opposite, although what he does for living is left unclear. Whatever, he’s a man of action who is “constantly in motion ... who both went in society, and read, but when he found the time for all this, God only knows”. Oblomov “sincerely loved and trusted him alone”, and only Stolz succeeds in getting him up, dressed, and out into society again. They agree that Stolz will stay with Oblomov, and while he unpacks Oblomov dozes and drifts off into a dream, really a dreamed memory, of his boyhood on Oblomovka. It’s given a long chapter to itself, and the life and scenes it describes are the psychological explanation for Oblomov’s passivity, lethargy, and gluttony. “The people of Oblomovka”, Goncharov writes, “had a hard time believing emotional upheaval. They did not accept life as a round of constant aspirations to go somewhere and achieve something. They understood life as nothing other than an ideal of tranquillity and inaction”. Life at Oblomovka is peaceful, and existence there is based around food, “the first and most vital concern in Oblomovka”, and his mother spends the whole morning conferring with staff about the menu for lunch, a meal followed by universal napping. She overfeeds him, ensuring that he does nothing for himself, even putting on his own socks, and is always looking for an excuse not to send him to school (a school run by Stolz’s father). His life is made up of meals, strolls, and vacant reverie, in an atmosphere of incipient dilapidation and slow decay. For Goncharov the estate stands for Russia as a whole. After Oblomov recounts his dream to him Stolz comments perceptively that “it all began with your inability to put on your own stockings and ended with your inability to live”. The dream shows that Oblomov suffers not from an excess of clarity about life, but is victim of a natal nostalgia. Uncorrupted by his privilege, it's true that Oblomov is kind and generous, and has remained artless, but he is at the same time useless - he just can’t get his shit together. As Stolz puts it in one of his several encomiums for Oblomov: “He has an honest and faithful heart ... having lost the strength to live he hasn’t lost his honesty and faithfulness ... his soul is transparent, clear as crystal. Such people are rare”. Yet there's not quite enough in the text to support such laudations. It's true that Oblomov does loan out negligible sums of money to former acquaintances and indulgently keeps on a servant at least as lazy as him. But as for ‘goodness,’ that’s about it, it’s just that he’s not actively bad. Things change for a while. That night Oblomov and Stolz go out for dinner with a large party. Oblomov overcomes his near agoraphobia and goes back into society, with difficulty, and with several scenes of amusing gaucheness. In his youth, we're told, Oblomov was attractive to women, but “because intimacy with women entails a great deal of trouble ... he tended to limit himself to a bow from afar, at a respectable distance ... his amorous intrigues never developed into full blown romances ... and in their innocence, simplicity and purity were not inferior to tales written by some lady lodger of a certain age”. Stolz goes on business abroad, expecting Oblomov to join him in Paris, after having introduced him to the vivacious, clever and teasing Olga Ilyinsky and her guardian aunt. He thought that introducing him to Olga “would be like bringing a lamp into a darkened room”, not foreseeing that the two would fall in love. With Olga, Oblomov’s “heart thirsted for life again”, and so follows the longest section of the book, and the narrative shifts from social comedy bordering on burlesque to the glandular fiasco of romantic love. All the transports, rhapsodies, lachrymal laments, declarations, doubts, obstacles, and sub-plots of their affair are recounted. The bathetic and almost baroque delineations of elevated emotion and fine feeling in this section I took to be satirical-parodic. Intentionally humorous or not, it is very funny. For Olga, “her love is justified by [Oblomov’s] meekness, his pure faith in good, and most of all his tenderness ... he was simpler than Stolz and kinder, and although he did not make her laugh, he made her laugh simply by being himself and easily forgave her teasing”. This is hardly propitious. Olga gives off a faint whiff of reform, and they debate his way of living together often. Oblomov is a rescue project for her, and his getting his act together in regard to his estate is an implicit condition for their marriage. But over this, even as he is systematically fleeced by Tarantiev’s agent, he continues to procrastinate, just as he continually makes excuses not to join Stolz in Paris. Oblomov writes a break-up letter that surprisingly shows he has the full measure of both himself and Olga, although they are briefly reconciled and plan to shortly announce their engagement to Olga’s aunt. But Oblomov was right, his love was a mere velleity. He makes excuses not to visit Olga. Meanwhile, he has moved to rooms in the house of Ivan Matveyevich on the Vyborg side, and the Neva freezes over, conveniently separating the lovers.   III So far, so farrago. The truth is that Oblomov started noticing his new landlady and cook Agafia, who eventually becomes his wife, as soon as he moved in. “What wonderful coffee! Who makes it?” he asks on his first day in his new apartment. He looks at Agafia, a widow with two small children “with the same pleasure with which he looked at a hot curd tart”, ogling her strategically uncovered shoulders, pneumatic embonpoint and “fat active arms”. His concupiscence is as much gustatory as carnal. She’s a wonderful cook and genius of household management. Her brother, a gourmand like Oblomov, lives in a flat upstairs and ensures that the household has the finest provender the city has to offer, with no expense spared. From the beginning Agafia has been seducing Oblomov. It’s a sly and sweet seduction, shy glances and smiles, teasing flashes of flesh. And above all, endless delicious meals, snacks and drinks. Agafia, seemingly a woman with little-to-no agency, knowingly steals Oblomov away from her undeclared rival, the sexy bluestocking Olga. What earns Oblomov her devotion is his lack of vulgarity, coarseness and guile, and his kindness to her children. Without doubt these are fine qualities, refinements Agafia finds captivating and to which up until now she’s been a stranger. She also, through her union with Oblomov, significantly raises the social status of her and her children. Stolz, shortly after Oblomov’s move, returns to Russia and puts affairs at Oblomovka in order, sacking the agent Tarantiev had sent and ensuring that Oblomov gets a comfortable income from his estate. Agafia repairs Oblomov’s dressing gown, signalling a return to his previous otiose mode of living. But it’s nowhere near as apathetic and desultory as before: the food is even better, he has sympathetic company, everything is clean, bright and bustling around him. At Agafia’s “everything of a hostile nature had disappeared from his life” and, smoking his post-prandial cigar “in a dull reverie”, his new life “reminds him of Oblomovka”. Ivan Goncharov However, there’s a temporary interruption of Oblomov’s idyll. Tarentiev and Ivan Matveyevich (who has in the meantime moved out, and no longer supplies top-quality groceries to the household), to make up for the loss of their share of the corrupt agent’s swindling of Oblomov, trick Agafia into signing a fraudulent promissory note claiming Oblomov is in debt to her, which must be paid off every month to Matveyevich, so that much of the estate’s income is diverted to the swindlers. For a while, the couple are on their uppers, their indigence, as was their plenty, described in terms of food, its quality and quantity. Stolz returns to Russia for good – by now having married Olga himself – to find Oblomov in this reduced state. He soon uncovers the dastardly plot by Tarantiev and Ivan Matveyevich, and Oblomov’s income from his estate is restored to him in full. Stolz and Olga take an estate next to Oblomovka, but Oblomov can’t be persuaded to move and take over the running of it. Agafia’s home returns to being another Oblomovka, where Oblomov lives "surrounded by good, simple, loving faces ... in a lazy crawl from one day to the next.” Occasional sleepy peasant rutting, steaming pies, tasty tarts and pastries, cake, vodka, wine, frequent naps, coffee, cigars. More, it’s true, than many could hope for and of which, no doubt, many dream. It’s a state of animal slumber, life lived in a struggle-free eternal present. Oblomov progresses from flabby to fat. He eats to excess, tries to sleep and nap as much as he can, and takes no exercise other than a resented daily post-prandial walk. He and the lovingly servile Agafia now have a baby boy, Andrei (she sets the rascal onto Oblomov’s recumbent body so that he can pull his nose or ear to wake him). Stolz is appalled at Oblomov’ marriage and paternity, and his persistent refusal to go and run his estate. Reminiscing about their romance, Oblomov observes of Olga that “she can sing the Casta Diva , but she doesn’t know how to make vodka like this, nor how to make a chicken and mushroom pie”. Oblomov dies of a second stroke shortly after Stolz’s final visit, brought on, in the words of his doctor by “lying about and eating fatty, heavy food”. It’s a sad end: “not having experienced the pleasures to be attained through struggle, he mentally rejected them and felt at peace only in his forgotten corner, which was alien to action, struggle and life”, and he “passed away without pain or suffering, like a clock someone had forgotten to wind”. Perhaps if the satire of Oblomov  had been just a little crueller, more venomous, and traitorous to Goncharov's class, not so many readers would have read against his condemnatory intentions and crassly taken Oblomov as an exemplar. Oblomov  is funny, but the humour is gentle and the protagonist treated with a little too much compassion. There’s room in the world for Oblomovs and Oblomovism, it’s a social type and human predilection, and sometimes a necessity as a method of recuperation. But its universality or permanence is baneful, an illness, the death of the human spirit. Baudelaire wrote of ennui , to which he was not immune, that it was a spirit of evil, one that “could swallow the whole world in a yawn”.