Ray Davies – A Well Respected Man

I’ve just been reading X-Ray, an amusing, semi-autobiographical work by former Kink (and darling of certain gushing members of the current British pop aristocracy) Ray Davies. The book follows an anonymous narrator who, captivated by our hero, sets out to penetrate the mind of the enigmatic Mr. Davies. By writing in the third person, Ray indulges himself in a few rather embarrassing literary flourishes, and he seems just a little too well pleased with his substantial back-catalogue. But while Ray’s observations of himself are often hilariously conceited and self-consciously overwritten, it is easy to forgive his obvious pride in an admittedly rather brilliant career.

The Kinks started their life like so many other British bands of the Sixties – playing raw, nihilistic R n’ B. Their seminal, proto-punk recordings are short, almost violently catchy variations on the “Louie Louie” theme which flirt with distorted guitar. While songs like “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night” managed to attract the praise and envy of arch Sixties icon Pete Townshend for their simplicity and power (“I was influenced more by the Kinks than any other group..”) and are still enjoying heavy rotation on most plodding golden hits radio stations in this universe, Raymond Douglas Davies’ did not capitulate to the status of urban poet until the last years of that decade, when everyone in the rock world, apart from the stubborn Mr. Davies, was ready to shed their kaftan and plunge into the era of the muddy festival.

At the end of the Sixties, when the music and style of the American hippie counterculture took hold and became entrenched in the popular imagination, the Kinks retreated into campy social critique and the symbols and myths of their own (quintessentially English) cultural heritage rather than mimicking the musical inflections of American performers, as so many British artists had done before them to remain commercially afloat. There are three albums by the Kinks which every self-respecting riff-stealer should own – Something Else By the Kinks, The Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur: Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire. As well as containing timeless anthems like “Waterloo Sunset”, “David Watts” and “Shangri-La”, these albums were richly melodic, poignant and socially relevant – and commercially overlooked.

By the end of the decade Ray Davies’ songs were taking as their subjects not bombastic political tirades, nor love and peace; but such small-time concerns as the progress of technology, and the little familiarities (and mundanities) of English life – semi-detached suburbia, holidays in Blackpool, village greens, steam locomotives. His songs were positively bristling with references to a bygone era. The concerns of Davies’ lyrics were founded in the peculiarities of British history and the class system, and in many instances he assumed the role of social critic. “Sunny Afternoon” and “End of the Season” both featured the endearing yet chiding caricature of an idle upper-class dilettante. This city gent appeared again in “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”, in which Davies poked fun at the frenzy of consumerism which had been occasioned by the transitory fashions of subcultures and countercultures of Swinging London, (of which he was, by this time, firmly a part), and on “She’s Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina”, he gently mocked the English obsession with keeping up appearances in the face of adversity.

While the records of the time were increasingly “prog”; multi-layered, inaccessible and (often self-indulgently) lengthy, the Kinks retained the format of the three minute pop song, maintaining efficient, and for the most part ebullient melodies which drew satirically upon the pre-rock culture of their parents. Each song had one prevailing lyrical theme which would be echoed by its instrumentation. “Tin Soldier Man” is set to a simple Victorian military marching beat, while “All of my friends were there”, a song about a nervous public house entertainer, is executed in the English music hall tradition; sung in a cockney accent with a touch of the George Formbys about it. Indeed, the lyrical style of some Kinks songs, particularly on Something Else By the Kinks, positively flaunts the style of pre-war British culture. Rhyming slang, occasional upper-class affectations, and ever-so-decorous references to ladies abound. Musically, rolling piano, harpischords and an assortment of fairground noises take precedence over the humble guitar. Yet the progressive nature of these songs is rarely recognised, or understood by contemporary copycats.

The music of the Kinks provided subtle social commentary, using the very mannerisms and music of the class at whom they directed their criticism. Davies subverted the old time music hall theme through his vocal affectations. While his lyrics appeared to be an ode to the good old days, his lush, nasal, effeminate singing voice took his terribly pompous caricatures of the boys club into the realm of the camp, expressing a subversive theme of homosexuality which belied (and made a mockery of) the facade of innocent nostalgia. This theme was made explicit in 1970, when in “Lola” Ray joyfully proclaimed that “girls will be boys and boys will be girls”… In 1994 – on an album that unabashedly borrowed from the Kinks’ tradition of parochial British pop – Damon Albarn and Blur finally took heed.

Some commentators compare the Kinks unfavourably to the music of the time:

At a time when psychedelia, kaftans, dayglo and incense were rife, the Kinks’ more down-to-earth concerns were highly unfashionable. Worse, the musical verities in which the Kinks traded were mundane by comparison to the new experimentation of ..Jimi Hendrix or Pink Floyd.

But the Kinks, far from being old-fashioned, proved themselves to be timeless, and way ahead of their generation. Davies’ endearing, idiosyncratic vocal was often the focal point of a song, and the odd assortment of individuals he portrayed and mimicked became the prototypes for the urban parody of bands as diverse as the Buzzcocks, the Smiths and Denim; to more obvious (and inept) contemporary devotees like Sleeper who moan on about being lower-middle class kids from Ilford. Ray Davies is, whether or not he likes it, the most readily identifiable influence on the current British scene.

Appeared in Britpack fanzine January 1997.

Genre studies – final essay

What role does spectacle have to play in definitions of genre? Do different genres deal with different kinds of spectacle or does spectacle cross generic boundaries? In your discussion you may want to compare the different types of spectacle to be found in epics and melodramas.

Spectacle is central to the appeal of cinematic entertainment. It may exist as a stylistic flourish contained in the mis-en-scene – for instance lighting, costuming and set detail – which exists within the diegesis; or it may be a scene in itself, intended either to propel or stall the narrative, and almost certainly for its thrill or shock value. An analysis of the different types and purposes of spectacle – as style, as shock, as sexuality, and as a means of generic definition – will help to determine whether spectacle in the melodrama or the epic crosses generic boundaries, or has ends specific to its genre. A great deal of the spectacle in melodramas and epics is either implicitly or blatantly sexual in nature, and this allows an investigation of whether spectacle is gendered, just as genre categorisation is gendered, if we are to accept the appraisal of theorists like Schatz. In my study of the nature of spectacle, I will discuss three Douglas Sirk films, All That Heaven Allows (1956), Written on the Wind (1957), and to a lesser extent, Imitation of Life (1959), as examples of the family melodrama of the 1950s; and two epic films of approximately the same period, Ben Hur (1959) and Spartacus (1960).

Epic films are characterised by spectacle at every level. Visual, aural and narrative flourishes and excesses abound; cinemascope, Technicolour and casts of thousands are mandatory, as are grandiose sets, mammoth production budgets and lengthy running time. Yet the recognition that these spectacular semantic elements are central to the concept of an epic film also leads to the misconception that they define the genre. Thus, the term epic has been loosely applied to mean any blockbuster production with the aforementioned characteristics. I have used David Elley’s more narrow definition and construed the word epic to refer to a particular type of historical film, usually set in pre-Christian times. The use of an ancient context is important, as it allows a particular types of spectacle, unique to the genre, to be played out. Many of the films set in early or pre-Christian films have religious overtones which present possibilities for special effects; momentous occasions involving the male body, not only as competitor, but as weapon/site of violence in itself (such as crucifixions, gladiatorial combat and chariot races); certain types of pre-Christian behavior which would probably otherwise be frowned upon in conservative 1950s America; and, because of the settings, (usually ancient Rome or the Middle East) spectacular scenery. Thus, in Spartacus, when Crassus speaks allegorically about bowing down before the splendour of Rome, it could be taken literally as an invitation to the audience to take in the elaborate visuality of the film.

Spectacle in the family melodrama of the 1950s resides not only in the narrative – which assaults the viewer with coincidence, misunderstanding and calamity – but also in the lavish way in which the text is presented – resplendent in hyperreal Technicolour, overwrought supra-diegetic music and opulent costumes. Thus, in the way that it prioritizes its semantic elements and visual style, the melodrama could be described as similar to the epic. Fred Camper suggests that the pleasure of looking at a melodrama, of taking in its formal qualities, is part of the spectacle. For him, aesthetic beauty is an end-in-itself.

The whole point of Sirk is not to lead us to some more physical experiencing of things, but to show us the beauty of his anti-physical, two dimensional perspective….Ultimately, as an artist, Sirk does not deal in despair but in aesthetic beauty.

Other theorists hold the more likely view that Sirk’s penchant for vibrant colours and lavish set design served to undercut and problematise the narrative, showing the characters lives as somehow too rosy to be true. Thus, the beauty is an ironic statement which, far from rendering the narrative two dimensional, serves to highlight the tragedy and falseness of the opulence, which belies the despair and plight of the characters. Thus, the view that in Sirkian melodrama, style is a spectacle in itself, independent of narrative, is to ignore the true spectacle of melodrama – emotion.

The stylistic spectacle in melodrama serves to critique the stultified, materialistic 1950s American dream. With the notable exception of the Rock Hudson character, the central characters in Written on the Wind are all intrinsically unhappy, despite the fact that they are successful, socially mobile and attractive. The use of vivid colour, luxuriant settings and costumes (which throw into stark relief the bleak emotional states of the characters) and mood-altering orchestral scores also serve to heighten the sense of fatalism and melodrama, with the effect of drawing the audience into the tragedy of the events. The use of tragedy as spectacle might be said to be unique to melodrama. Whilst the notion of emotional turmoil and distress crosses generic boundaries, only in melodrama is it so heightened, so intense as to constitute a spectacle in itself – provoking tears. Within melodramatic narrative, one expects to feel remorse, regret, loathing – a multitude of excessive emotions which would be bearable or ‘normal’ had they not been magnified or exacerbated by

“chance happenings, coincidences, missed meetings, sudden conversions, last-minute rescues and revelations, deus ex machina endings.”

Indeed, the epic uses melodramatic emotion in a similar way to the melodrama, (causing it to be dubbed ‘the male melodrama’); but it does so with a resigned acceptance – even optimism – which forbids tears, and relies less on such devices to propel the narrative. The final scene in Spartacus bears comparison with the corresponding final moments of Imitation of Life. In Spartacus, Varinia says good-bye to her husband as he hangs dying on the cross, before resignedly being driven away from him by Batiatus. In Imitation of Life, Sara Jane, having rejected her mother and started a career as a showgirl, returns too late, and cries over her mother’s coffin having never had a chance to say goodbye. The scenes are similar in some respects – there is grief over the death of a loved one, final good-byes are being said, and both films end with the future of the surviving character being of vital importance to the continuation of the story beyond the credits. Yet in Spartacus, emotion gives way to fate, to more transcendent goals. Characters are imbued with a righteousness which compels them to accept their plight. There is at least an implied understanding between characters of their destiny, and a feeling that events have unfolded as they should. In Imitation of Life, there is remorse, self-hatred, despair, and little hope of redemption, despite the seemingly happy resolution of the finale. It is this excess of emotion and contrivance of fate which combine to create the spectacle. While this particular type of spectacle is unique to melodrama, Linda Williams argues that its impact and consequence, in terms of audience response, is universal, and compares its excess with the fear and repulsion evoked by horror, and the sexual excitement and arousal of pornography. In effect she asserts, spectacle affects all orifices. Thus, it could be argued that the effect of spectacle crosses generic boundaries, with similar consequences for audiences – what differs is the way in which the spectator is “thrilled”.

Yet the uses of spectacle in melodrama are so complex and varied that it is difficult to discern a pattern by which to determine genre on the basis of spectacle alone. For example, spectacle in melodrama does not elicit the same response from all who see it – as Sirk himself said of his happy endings ” It makes the crowd happy. To the few it makes the aporia more transparent.” Thus, the final union of Cary and Ron in All That Heaven Allows, and the funeral scene at the end of Imitation of Life, both with their almost artificial vibrancy, and abundance of signifiers – such as the deer wandering up to the window on the picturesque snowy evening, adding the final touch to the cliché, and ultimately confirming the scene as such – involve a conflict between narrative and mis-en-scene, both of which are of equal importance in contributing to the spectacle of melodrama. Thus, the viewer of the melodrama is cued to so many conflicting forms of spectacle, that the ultimate response is either one of disbelief, or suspension of disbelief.

A melodramatic spectacle of a very different kind is Rock Hudson, who starred in both All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind. He has an important symbolic, signifying function within the narratives of both films (in which he portrays similar characters) as well as being pure spectacle, an unproblematized “nature man” around which the other more complex characters revolve. Unlike the characters which surround him, he has no guilt or repression, and is not bound by the etiquette of the class and status conscious sociopaths who surround him. In Written on the Wind, he is the focus of the envy of males (particularly Kyle, his best friend), and he is coveted by the women. The audience, similarly, views him as an object of envy and/or desire – and he is clearly projected as such in the frames in which we observe him – the ideal of hulking masculinity. In both Written of the Wind and All That Heaven Allows, he is the passive, stoic ‘eye of the storm’. He is the cause of the injudicious, impulsive decisions made by those around him, yet he assumes an (unusually) passive male role, as does John Gavin in Imitation of Life. He leaves his relationship with Cary in her hands until it is too late; he is subordinate to her in status and in age. He is a straightforward male spectacle and object, leaving the control of the narrative, and the gaze, to those around him.

Steve Neale suggests that Rock Hudson is feminized by the camera in order to be safely depicted as the object of an explicitly erotic gaze. Underlying this is the assumption that women alone are supposed to be sexually objectified. He does not attempt to describe exactly how Hudson is feminized. Perhaps a better argument would be that because melodrama was – as it was pejoratively described – a “women’s” genre, it thus catered to women’s (heterosexual) desires in the same way that the rest of the film industry catered to men, and was therefore ’safe’ from accusations that it might be encouraging homo-erotic voyeurism in its viewers. Perhaps this is the reason why the musical, also, was able to offer depictions of masculinity on display – because, as genres of order, rather than disorder , the melodrama and the musical catered to a largely female audience. In this way, types of spectacle can be said to have been divided at least across gender, if not genre lines.

It has been contended that in epics and other action films, the male body cannot be put on display unless that display has a purpose or is in some way justified – usually possible charges of homo-eroticism are diffused under a pretext of the propulsion of the narrative, or of an action sequence. Often the objectification of a male in an action, western or epic film is presented as unnatural – it would not occur if the status quo were not somehow ruptured by an evil, bad form of patriarchy. The enemy, for whom the hero’s body is usually bared (in order to be punished) is depraved, and (especially in the epic, where there is scope for the portrayal of the decadence of pre-Christian ‘amorality’) often coded as homosexual – for example, Crassus. In Spartacus, Draba the Ethiopian pays, supposedly for having refused to kill his opponent; or, by another reading, for the gratuitous display of his body, and the refusal to make it a purposeful display. For this transgression, he must be violated in some way, to justify this display. This necessity is most blatant when his (by now ineffectual, and thus no longer sexually threatening) body is strung up for the perusal of the other gladiators. The pretext for this display of his naked, gleaming body is thus defiantly re-asserted by his death. As Steve Neale notes:

We see male bodies stylised and fragmented by close-ups, but our look is not direct, it is heavily mediated by the looks of the characters involved. And those looks are marked not by desire, but rather by fear, by hatred or aggression.

Unless, of course, we are female, in which case our gaze is directed by the women within the text – in this case, the two Roman women whose thinly veiled purpose is to objectify the gladiators in an unequivocally sexual way. This is obvious by the criteria on which their choices are predicated – they must be physically pleasing to the eye. It is interesting to note that the only male who takes part in this particular appraisal of the gladiators is Batiatus (Peter Ustinov), who is depicted as amoral and effete. The audience is placed more or less exactly in the position of the decadent Roman spectators. Thus, under the guise of historical accuracy, it is possible for the gladiators to be displayed as more explicitly sexualised than would be possible in a genre set in contemporary society and thus bound by its mores. Ina Rae Hark notes that in Spartacus, the gladiatorial combat serves no real narrative purpose but to thrill – the Romans are watching for precisely the same reason that we, the audience, have come to watch the film – to be entertained. Thus, the spectator is implicated in the proceedings, and the spectacle of the film becomes somewhat self-reflexive. This can be contrasted with the chariot race in Ben Hur – between Ben Hur and his one-time friend Messala – which is excusable as it is not mere spectacle, but a matter of honour.

The term spectacle appears to have a number of applications. It may be extra-diegetic or it may be stylistic. It may have the more weighty function of propelling the narrative, or causing the audience to call the narrative into question, or it may be pure spectacle. Trying to categorise spectacle seems to be as exhausting a task as attempting to categorise and define genre. Suffice it to say that certain forms of spectacle, when used in conjunction with other forms of spectacle, may help to establish a film as belonging to a particular genre. For example, both the epic and the melodrama use grandiose scores and vibrant technicolour. However, the ends to which these are used are different, and they are used in conjunction with other forms of spectacle. The spectacle of the epic – its attention to history, to detail, to realism of set design and to producing the genuine article, might be said to have a purely commercial motive, and thus be spectacle intended for its sheer crowd-drawing potential, predicated on authenticity. By contrast, the stylistic flourishes (excesses?) of melodrama are not intended to increase realism; they work to precisely the opposite effect, undercutting the truth of the ‘happy’ ending. The use of emotion in these genres differs in that in melodrama, emotion is heightened to become spectacle in itself. In this regard, the types of spectacle employed by melodrama and the epic respectively are completely at odds – in melodrama the narrative itself acts as spectacle, whereas in the epic, spectacle is often presented at the expense or delay of the narrative. Although both genres use masculinity as spectacle, the narrative outcomes of such displays are very different, even though the erotic impact on the audience may be equally as strong. The epic requires some justification for its objectification of masculinity, whereas the melodrama to some extent reverses the roles of subject and object of the classical Hollywood film.

Class Paper: Counter-cultures and sub-cultures of the 1960’s

Had the Hippies not so arrogantly seen their movement as the apotheosis of youth rebellion, had they not had such sweeping agendas and lofty rhetoric, they would not be eligible for the sort of analysis which I am about to undertake. However, they posited themselves as a political or countercultural movement rather than a merely stylistic or subcultural one, and must therefore be investigated as such, and judged by the same standards. I intend to illustrate the incongruity between the rhetoric, the style, and the reality, and to show that Flower Power ultimately succeeded as (and should be viewed as) a subculture rather than a counterculture.

The Hippies claimed great empathy with the poverty stricken and destitute, the social outcast, the wandering Bohemian. Yet the whole notion of ‘turning on, tuning in and dropping out’ was an intentional contrivance on the part of the Hippies, in that most would have had the means to ‘drop back in’ to the mainstream of society had they so desired. Thus Hippiedom was quite removed from the existence of those members of the community who were permanent societal exiles through real educational, social or material poverty. The Hippies’ glib, synthetic association with the underclasses did nothing to improve the latters’ situation – in fact, by glorifying the aesthetic of poverty, the Hippies trivialised the cause of the poor, by converting a social concern into a style.

The exponents of the counter-culture attacked the work ethic, and the notion of having to work in order to earn the privilege of leisure. They condemned the mundanity of the typical nine to five job, and sought to avoid this horror in order to enjoy the higher pursuits of enlightening their consciousness. In this they alienated the working-classes, who did not have the comfortable financial position necessary to be able to choose pleasure over work. In their leisure, they unwittingly lived off the toil of the working classes whose cause they were supposed to champion, and existed on the social system which was there to support the genuinely needy.

Another contradiction of the vague Hippie rhetoric were the simultaneous cries for the communality of a “global village”, contrasted with the yearning for the triumph of individualism and the importance of ‘doing your own thing’. The ideal of a commune is very much ‘counter-cultural’ in the sense that it rejects free-enterprise, capitalistic competitiveness and selfishness and the bourgeois individualism of the dominant society. However, the cry for retreatism and the ‘each to his own’ mentality appears to have been much louder – and it triumphed. This concept runs in direct contrast to the plight of the factory worker, for whom the solidarity of the union is a vital source of political power. As Hall comments “Hippie individualism is rooted in the same soil as the American Constitution and the manifold myths of free-enterprise, every-man-his-own-president society. From these roots many wild and contradictory variants have flowered – populism, frontierism, free-enterprise capitalism, resistance to the gun law, and the cowboy to name but a few.” In short, Hippies, in many ways, embodied the American Dream, rather than being – as they would probably would have preferred to have been viewed – the antithesis of it.

The rhetoric of Equality constantly propagated by the Hippies seems more a matter of style than a true counter-cultural concern. The littering of words like love, peace, freedom and everything being trippy, groovy and beautiful seems to be at best a sub-cultural trend, at worst a heavily mass-marketed, exploitable cultural style, completely divested of any political significance, or true egalitarianism. The travesty of the so-called equality of the flower children was the almost irreconcilable gulf between the sign and the practice. Perhaps the most stark example of this was the treatment of women by the Hippies, which at the time seemed “liberating”, but is now viewed by a body of current feminist theory as having had the effect of undermining the right of a woman to say ‘no’ and be respected, rather than be viewed as ’square’, ‘uptight’ or ‘frigid’. The concept of ‘free love’ included the notion that sex should be obtainable wherever and whenever the average (male) Hippie desired it, without going through all the necessary preliminaries (such as asking first?) which were seen as inhibitions of the parent culture. Ultimately, it would seem that love was only “free” to males. Yet the fallacy of the Hippie rhetoric of equality extended to all who were less privileged than the Hippies. The basic assumption that everyone is equal, with the same access to resources, and similar social status and political influence actually breeds inequality in failing to recognise certain power imbalances, which need to be addressed before all social groups can truly be equal. Certainly, not all social groups were able to purchase the sub-cultural paraphernalia described below, (or, if they did, were not educationally equipped to impute its higher cultural importance) which may indeed have granted Hippies a degree of implicit exclusivity.

Drugs – which had earlier been used by the Mods purely for fun, and as an escape from their daily lives – were, according to the Hippies, to be used for the purposes of exploring the mind and expanding the consciousness. Thus, the cultural tools of the two groups were in this instance the same, but the Hippies attempted to justify and glorify, through rhetoric, their reasons for imbibing drugs, arrogantly believing their cultural practice to be of greater social significance.

Acid rock and protest music was similarly glorified by the Hippies as the music of change and revolution; it was not simply pop music, which has always been used by sub-cultures as a form of mute rebellion, but music which would be instrumental in a worldwide revolution. In this the Hippies failed to see mainstream music as an inherent part of the same capitalist system which they sought to undermine. Ironically, by the time psychedelic music had percolated down to the lower classes, the mass media had bought into the Hippie idea, and rendered it politically impotent for mass consumption. Flower power became a hugely lucrative consumer industry, spawning hideous would-be drug-inspired album covers to boost the sales of bands who had no concept of ‘hip’, let alone psychedelia; and creating new markets in tie-dyed T-Shirts and kaftans. If this was a counter-culture, then mass culture certainly had no objections to it in its incarnation as the insipid “love generation”. A disgusted member of the revolutionary underground press in London noted that “Hippies represent about as powerful a challenge to the power of the state as the people who put foreign coins in their gas meters”.

The flower children were particularly fixated by the costume, culture and lifestyle of the American Indian. They did not, however, stretch their multi-racial empathy to include the plight of the Black American whose cause was too current and sensitive. It is telling that their interest resided in cultures with a remote actual presence in American social life – this illustrates their inability to confront real issues directly. It is also distinctly subcultural in that it involves the reappropriation of a cultural symbol into a sort of bricolage in which the original meaning is lost, or at least absorbed into the new meaning. In this case, the visual manifestations of the ideal of an alternative lifestyle, rather than the lifestyle itself. Thus, the Hippies’ lingering legacy is style, much in the same way as the lingering memory of the Mods, Rockers and Teds is style. Perversely, style was also the major political contribution of the Hippies. They created “activist fashion”, which is still very much in evidence on university campuses today; where the wearer lives out, or wishes to be seen to be living out, an alternative, or counter-cultural lifestyle.

The Hippie phenomenon refused to acknowledge its status as a subculture, or its location in youth culture as being primarily stylistic in nature. Its exponents consistently, articulately asserted the ascendency of its signifiers, in order to imply a radical difference between it and other youth sub-cultures. Whereas the inarticulate aim of most youth sub-cultures was to pervert the symbols of the dominant culture, the counter-culture claimed to go further, to subvert them. It claimed to have an alternative to the dominant culture, yet its manifesto consisted of simple binary oppositions which were naive reactions to a complex structure. This resulted in fundamental contradictions, which caused the ultimate failure of the movement.