Hat tip: Derek Wall

Spirit Level Film is offering a special deal exclusive to readers of The Third Estate. You can now get their two hit films The Fear Factory and Ministry of Truth together for a special discount price of just £9.95 (RRP £24.90)

To take advantage of this special offer, simply click on one of the links below and enter the following discount coupon at the checkout when you buy both films together: 3RDSECT

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The Fear Factory

Manufacturing fear into reality isn’t cheap – especially on a national scale. For decades the media and politicians have played the “law and order arms race”, the Fear Factory reveals how, why and the price we’re paying.

“An important piece of work… terrific. Makes the case for change urgent and unarguable” Lord Puttnam

“Five stars!” Helen McNutt, The Guardian

“Exposes our criminal justice crisis with forensic precision.” Chris Huhne MP

Ministry of Truth

Dom (Trigger Happy TV) Joly’s “Professor of Deceit” takes apart Ministers and MPs as only he can – separating the men from the boys in this highly irreverent, exposé. Lead to the Elected Representatives (Prohibition of Deception) Bill being introduced into Parliament.

“Utterly compelling… never have so many politicians ducked and run for cover” The Daily Telegraph

The Right Honourables – Jack Straw, George Osborne, Alan Duncan and a who’s who of Westminster as you’ve never seen them before.

Pick of the Week/Day in 18 national newspapers and magazines.

If you would like to advertise with The Third Estate, drop us an email at: thethirdestateadmin@googlemail.com

When I received my review copy of Spirit Level Film’s latest documentary, The Fear Factory, through my letterbox a few days ago, I had little idea what to expect. A few seconds in, as the ominous music begins to play and the image of a foetus looms into view accompanied by the voiceover telling us that young offenders will be growing up in gaol and that we are heading for the largest prison population that any country could imagine having, it became clear to me that this was a film that was attempting to ask a number of crucial questions of deep moral and social significance. But did it answer them satisfactorily?

The timing of The Fear Factory couldn’t have been more appropriate, emerging as it has just as the return of John Venables to prison for an unspecified violation kicked up a media storm and a renewed public outcry over the murder of James Bulger. The central point that the filmmakers want to get across is that when it comes to crime and punishment, we are as far removed as one can possibly imagine from the evidence-based policy that this government claimed to represent. Instead what we have is moral panic fed by an hysterical media in which the public’s fear of youth crime is wholly disproportionate to any real statistics. What this has led to is an “arms race” between the main political parties over who can appear toughest on crime as both engage in a race to the bottom to bring in tougher penalties and build more prisons whilst the population behind bars soars.

These points are, for the most part, conveyed through a series of somewhat awkwardly cut interviews with prominent talking heads. Having managed to bag the likes of Cherie Blair, Dominic Grieve, David Howarth and an eloquent murderer who now writes for The Guardian, the filmmakers have clearly assembled an impressive roster. However, with very little else besides the odd flash here and there of what could be archive footage, a stereotypically deep and menacing narration and a second or two of questionably selected music, the overreliance on truth by authority makes for a documentary that is informative, but not terribly engaging. The most entertaining moment comes when the Deputy Editor of The Sun attempts to tell us that because politicians listen to the bullshit he puts in the editorial on a whim, they have no principles.

It is quite evident, of course, that The Fear Factory is not there to entertain, or even to inform, but to persuade. Whilst it features a few comments from oppositional figures, they are largely there to look stupid and look stupid they do. This is not an expose or investigative journalism. This is a propaganda film and it should make no apologies about that. Besides decrying the rising prison population and the media and political hysteria that have caused it, the film asks us to question whether people are born bad or if their crimes are a product of the society in which they grew up, and it touches upon the philosophy of prison itself – whether it should be a means of reform or retribution.

Where the filmmakers stand on this issue is quite clear, but my personal feeling is the message, which at times sounds like it is being shouted from a soapbox, will divide opinion. It is easy for bleeding heart liberals like myself who studied Foucault in their second year Social & Political Sciences paper at Cambridge to agree with everything The Fear Factory has to say. I very much doubt those who are paid £700k a year to demonise Britain’s youth in the country’s most odious tabloids will be swayed and for them this film, much like prison, will sadly be more retributive than reformative.

In any case, The Fear Factory is well worth a look and is available for pre-order on DVD now.

There isn’t a lot of love for illegal downloaders on this blog, and to some extent I think that’s fair. But even if we accept that the activities of Pirate Bay and their ilk are ultimately unjustifiable, the jaw-dropping stupidity of some of the comments from the anti-piracy camp shouldn’t be allowed to go through unchallenged.

Illegal downloading need not be morally equivalent to theft of material goods, as James Murdoch (and those hilariously overblown ads at the beginning of DVDs) would have you believe. If I shoplift a DVD, then the shop selling the DVD can be said to have lost out in two different ways. First, they fail to get the money that they would have got had I bought the DVD, rather than stolen it. Second, they can’t sell the DVD to anyone else because I’ve nicked it.

I realise that those two sound pretty similar, but they’re not equivalent. Imagine that I don’t really want the DVD that much – I only steal it because it’s easy and the odds of getting caught are low. Clearly the first way in which the shop loses money now no longer applies. Now imagine that I also don’t actually steal the physical DVD – instead I walk into the shop, get out my laptop (complete with DVD-cracking software), put in the DVD, copy it, burn it onto a blank disc, and walk out of the shop, leaving the original DVD behind. Now the second way in which the shop loses money from theft doesn’t hold either. So is it still stealing if the shop can’t be said to have made a loss? And if not, why is illegal downloading any different?

What I’m seeking to demonstrate is that, paradoxical though it might seem, whether or not online piracy is theft might well depend on who’s doing it. If someone illegally downloads something they would otherwise have bought, then whoever owns the rights to what’s downloaded demonstrably makes a loss (and as I’ve said, I acknowledge that in cases where this does hold, online piracy is pretty hard to excuse). If not, (and, given that the stereotypical illegal downloader is a teenager – not the richest of demographics – I suggest that a significant proportion of illegal downloading comes into this category) then we seem to have the archetypal victimless crime. How one would go about proving this either way in a court of law I have no idea, but can we please bear this in mind when people start making hyperbolic claims about what is and isn’t theft?

Like Starsuckers, reviewed last week, Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public is a confused film. It’s a documentary about ‘the most brilliant dot.com millionaire you’ve never heard of’ [actually that would probably be all of them] ― a chap called Josh Harris.

Not that even if you had heard of him, you’d necessarily have recognised the brilliant dot.com millionaire, since he seems to have spent much of his life, including many of his board-meetings, dressed as his fully made-up, alter-ego ‘Luvvy the Clown’. An unusually hideous look even for a man who during his better moments (and in this film they’re precious few) appears damply constipated.

Whether getting the jump on the market in online porn chat and cheap-as-chips MTV really marks out Harris as a media visionary, I’ll let you decide. Nevertheless he oversaw two projects which have eerie resonance with much of contemporary online culture.

The first project ― part art-installation, part monumental vanity-project ― involved locking up and catering for, about a hundred volunteers in a windowless New York apartment block, filled with cameras and televisions, which allowed the participants to snoop on one another, in any location, at any time. Harris’ prototype Big Brother in fact went rather further than any of the progressively more gruesome TV versions, by including a basement filled with automatic weapons, and a white-tiled prison cell in which theatrical interrogations were held, the tone pitched somewhere between the Stanford Prisone Experiment and a Max Mosley wet dream. Ultimately the police shut the event down though not before most of the inhabitants had gone from a short-lived orgiastic euphoria into a black hysterical mania; while Harris (who had by now sold his own business to become ‘an artist’) had burned through most of his personal fortune.

Harris’ next project was to Big Brother his own life online, by sticking cameras up throughout his flat (with a dedication that extended to a spy-cam in his toilet bowl) and streaming the resulting film online 24 hours a day. Surprisingly Harris had a girlfriend at this point; less surprisingly she soon left him ― though whether this was because of the project itself or the simple result of living with a lunatic sociopath isn’t really discussed. The most interesting aspect of the project came from what was initially one of its by-products― the couple’s online chats with their viewers. For both of them the chats became an obsession, craving sympathy from their unseen arbiters; those capable of judgment but not punishment. Or more prosaically it reminded me of watching relationships explode on Facebook.

Like a character from Evelyn Waugh, Harris is last glimpsed living in deepest Africa as far away from new technology ― and by his own admission, his creditor’s ― as Luvvy and himself could manage.

Whether Harris’ story really does suggest the future for the rest of us is a moot point. In spite of a somewhat breathless commentary, and being at least half an hour too long, Timoner’s doc is worth looking out for on DVD because, whilst it is currently showing at select art house cinemas, it’s unlikely to make a much wider appearance.

Following our review of his new film, Starsuckers, we caught up with BAFTA-nominated director, Chris Atkins. Atkins made his name with the much admired Taking Liberties, a documentary on the erosion of civil liberties in Blair’s Britain. His latest offering, which premiered this year at the 53rd London Film Festival, is an exposé of the cult of celebrity and media misinformation. Talking to him about celebrity, media and politics, we found out why he finds Tony Blair a terrific liar and just why Simon Cowell would be a terrifying Prime Minister.

The Third Estate: So tell us about your new film.

Chris Atkins: In PR speak: it’s a romp through all the reasons we’re hooked on fame and then an expose of the people who are dealing it to us. I think that’s what I settled on. It a thesis led movie. I wanted to look at why we’re attracted to something so blatantly harmful and to look at the real reasons behind that from a scientific point of view. Then to look behind the curtain of the media, not celebrities themselves but the institutions and individuals who profit from it.

The Third Estate: I was thinking about that. There struck me as being two strands to the film: why we’re affected by fame and how the media manipulate us by abusing this knowledge ― but I wasn’t always clear on the connection. It seemed to have a lot of targets – the public are a target for being gullible. Celebrities for being stupid. The media for doing several things wrong – not reporting hard news, creating a myth of celebrity, giving into PR on the one hand but toppling governments on the other…

Chris Atkins: Yes, it’s a complex, messy area, so to paint an honest picture, you need a complex messy film. My last film, Taking Liberties, people seemed to get more, although Taking Liberties wasn’t a particularly honest picture. It was an argument about how the government, specifically Tony Blair, had taken away our liberties. But that isn’t the case; it’s a very simplified image. In Starsuckers I wanted to be more honest. The problem is it’s very complex. I wanted to build up a thesis to say there are a group of individuals holding the cards here. They pretend they have our better interests at heart but they don’t. That’s the core of it really.

The Third Estate: You do believe there’s almost a cabal of individuals then?

Chris Atkins: No, it’s not in the standard conspiracy theorist sense at all. It’s more of a kind of attitude than a secret society or anything as clear cut as that. A contract should exist between the media and the public. The public trust news media to have their interests at heart ― and they fundamentally don’t. They don’t care about the public; they don’t really care about the truth. And I say this as an insider: I’ve worked in the media for twelve years and we certainly don’t give a stuff about the public. We give a stuff about our wallets and having a jolly good time. Which is fine if you’re honest about it. But if you’re not honest about it, which most of the news media isn’t, they still have this facade of requiring trust and they don’t repay that trust.

The Third Estate: Much of the film reminded me of an aside in Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent where he talks about sports programmes as being a deliberate irrelevance people get sidetracked into so that they aren’t more politically engaged. But isn’t the truth about celebrity less sinister? Isn’t it simply cheaper to report, a by-product of an economic shift in the media?

Chris Atkins: Absolutely. It’s all economic. Well no, it’s initially economic, without question. It’s cheap, it’s reliable, it’s not controversial and it sells papers. People watch it for the reasons we list in the film and it starts delivering that media to us in a very predictable and affordable way. It’s almost replacing content. When you talk to commissioners the first thing they ask is what celebrity is in this television programme ― before they ask you what the programme is about. The celebrity is more important than what they’re surrounded by. That’s a wholesale shift in the way the media is generated. That’s happened in the last five years in both commercial channels and sadly the BBC as well. Yes, it’s initially commercial but once it starts being used for political reasons, for charities and activism, it starts becoming a real problem. It’s not just – here are some entertaining people doing some entertaining things – yes they’ve completely devalued truth in news – some people don’t seem to have a problem with that, I do – but when that moves into the political sphere, good causes, charities ― you’re in a whole heap of shit. Because what people are basically saying is that when celebrities are involved, truth doesn’t matter. Those are the dots we try to join together.

The Third Estate: I was just wondering; you say five years ago ― I’m sorry I’m looking at your Taking Liberties poster – and I’m reminded of the Gilligan affair. Was that perhaps the turning point for news reporting?

Chris Atkins: It certainly was a turning point, but I don’t see that it sits immediately inside this argument. Still it was a turning point on both sides. Gilligan didn’t check his facts. He went out on a limb, made something up. One thing out of 99 other things that were rock solid and they pulled him apart on it. I always look at Gilligan whenever I tempted to guild the lily, which is extremely frequently. So our Live 8 sequence – everything in that is bullet proof – because every night you think Gilligan: the entire argument could be pulled apart by one loose fact or slip of the tongue.

The Third Estate: Which reminds of the question I meant to ask at the start – how are the lawsuits going?

Chris Atkins: We’re in Private Eye this week. We’re front of media news. We had two Guardian front covers that doesn’t mean anything – Private Eye ― front of media news… We haven’t been sued by anyone this week. The whole Carter-Ruck thing was absolutely hilarious. At the time I was half-laughing, half-screaming. They shot themselves in the foot on various levels, one they’re wrong in law, two they managed to pick the world’s most unpopular law firm to initiate the injunction and three, most importantly, they managed to get the timing of the screening wrong. So they started trying to bring an injunction, not realising the press screening had already begun. We had to tell them ‘that’s happening now, 250 journalists are watching your client who’s 50 foot high in a Leicester Square cinema at this moment in time. The cat’s slightly out the bag.’

The Third Estate: So you’re not allowed to reveal anything that was bleeped out during the Max Clifford sequence?

Chris Atkins: No, absolutely not. For two reasons – one is obviously a libel point of view. I can’t back it up. I don’t know if it’s true or not. It’s Max rambling. Secondly, more importantly, I don’t want the film to become a source of celebrity gossip as we are critiquing sources of salacious, celebrity gossip. We would have been quite rightly burned by the critics if we had. The purpose of that sequence is to show what Max Clifford is prepared to do to protect his critics, which is contrary to the chubby nice guy image he portrays in the media.

The Third Estate: On matters litigious: you take a small shot at the Press Complaints Commission…

Chris Atkins: I’d hoped it was as big a shot as I could, but…

The Third Estate: Sorry. I noticed that one of your contributors, Nick Davies, was in the news recently. The News of the World has just beaten off the story he published in the Guardian about their phone tapping techniques after a PCC investigation?

Chris Atkins: Well they would, wouldn’t they? An organisation controlled by newspaper editors comes down on the side of newspaper editors.

The Third Estate: So would you support a state run PCC?

Chris Atkins: No, I’d support an independent run PCC. We manage to have these for all sorts of things; we have an independent police complaints commission. We’re about to have something independent for MPs and banks. Why not for the Press? Why can’t you and I do it? This is what the newspapers are terrified of. The PCC is purportedly there to protect the public from the press. It’s not. Everyone knows it’s not. It’s there to protect the press. As always the public suffers. You have newspaper editors winding up to tell you how scared they are by the adjudication of the PCC and reporters on the ground flatly contradicting that. We’ve not heard anything from the PCC about the revelations in the film and I think that proves our point.

The Third Estate: Going back a bit: you mentioned the character of the film. A lot of the character of the film comes from your voiceover, which is slightly grating – the kind of voice that you associate with voices that are deliberately patronising you.

Chris Atkins: Yes, that was actually deliberate.

The Third Estate: I guessed, but I was wondering whether you were trying to anger your audience into reacting? What was the thinking?

Chris Atkins: It’s a fair point. People have said he’s patronising, he’s glib and annoying and yes that was all quite deliberate. Whether I would make those deliberate choices again, I don’t know. What I was trying to do was create a Tony Blair. I needed a central villain. I didn’t want it to be about any one media corporation; or about Rupert Murdoch or Viacom or Max Clifford. I wanted it to be about all of them and none of them. So I created a satirical, ironic entity to bind them all together. He’s not there to be liked. There’s an artistic question opened up as to whether that’s a sensible thing to do: to have a central narrator you’re supposed to hate. That happens all the time in literature, in fiction. I’ve never seen it done before in a doc. Some people like the concept, some people absolutely hate it. I had a situation where I was trying to pull together a thesis about something most people believe they know a lot about. If I was to present it in a straight way – ‘I’m Chris Atkins I think celebrity culture’s bad’ – that would be absolutely ghastly. Who am I to tell people not to trust the media? So I wanted to turn it on its head and make it flippant. The voice encapsulates the editor of The Sun, the editor of the BBC News website when he puts up an article on Cheryl Cole rather than a news article.

The Third Estate: After the press screening, you mentioned that the material for the film lacked a top or bottom and I was wondering if, say, a Marxist had come along they would say ‘Well there is a bottom, it’s embedded power structures etc, etc’ but you’re not heading down that line?

Chris Atkins: When I said it didn’t have a top or bottom, I felt that was more to do with a creative film making problem. We had ten points in the thesis so it was deciding in which order do they come? Actually the order is quite straight forward. It’s where the fuck do you start, where the fuck do you end? That’s what I meant. In terms of ‘embedded in power structures’ ― celebrity is the face of capitalism. That’s a given. It is a mechanism for selling and giving an illusion of contentment. I believe all the arguments we gave on how celebrity is a means of control are essentially reheating the same argument that capitalism and money are a means of control. So yes I would concur that it has a starting point in the ability of those with power to control those without.

The Third Estate: A section of the film talks about celebrities in the Lithuanian parliament. I was just wondering if you could comment on that part of the film, and whether the true message of the film isn’t that people should be wary of celebrities entering politics, but that socially conscience people need to turn themselves into celebrities in order to affect change?

Chris Atkins: I think we just need to treat celebrities as dangerous. Just as 20 cups of coffee in a day is dangerous. Celebrities have a place we need to be extremely wary of allowing them to move spheres. I know that’s stating the obvious, but it’s happening a lot. In Lithuania you had a situation where, in young democracy, which at the same time was discovering new media – it was in a sense natural that entertainers quickly entered politics. Reality television was a massive success there, partly because voting was new to them. Voting for politicians and voting on reality shows seemed similar and in fact became one and the same thing. It became natural for celebrities in reality shows to stand for government. So they formed a party, became part of a government coalition and it’s a disaster. Their popularity rating has gone through the floor. It’s a kind of metaphor for what could, and I think may well, happen in the West. Consider the poll among young people taken recently about who they’d most like to see as Prime Minister: Simon Cowell came top of the list.

The Third Estate: That’s terrifying.

Chris Atkins: So people say, well it’s crazy ― those crazy Lithuanians, but it is happening here. Once you put celebrities into this sphere, damaging things happen. But nobody in the media questions it. The media are trained to be nice to celebrities and not question them. When we got our passes to film on red carpets, we were briefed not to ask celebrities anything challenging. So when they go into politics, with the level of scrutiny politicians receive, there’s a fundamental contradiction.

The Third Estate: So your message to celebrities would be to stay out of politics?

Chris Atkins: No, celebrities are irrelevant to the whole thing. If I was a celebrity being paid five million pounds a movie with people telling me I was brilliant every day, I would think I could change the world. That’s natural, the human mind does that to anyone. It’s called Acquired Narcissism Syndrome. I don’t blame the celebrities from thinking they can stop wars. That’s just natural; they’re cretins. The problem I have is when the media doesn’t challenge that. It doesn’t stand there and go ‘hang on a fricking minute what the hell is Angelina Jolie doing in Iraq?’

The Third Estate: To play devil’s advocate there’s an argument which I think is well expressed in a Kundera novel – there’s a march in Cambodia against land mines. An American actress goes along with what are mainly a group of French academics one of whom challenges her ‘what are you doing here? This isn’t a beauty parade.’ The actress replies that it is her social duty. Without her, the academics aren’t going to attract any attention to the problem and so she has to be seen there.

Chris Atkins: That’s a common argument. The problem again is the media. Why do the media only cover something if there’s some airhead blonde fronting it? Why don’t they cover it anyway? The celebrity is like a band aid, a much deeper problem with our media. For the celebrity to say I alone can change this problem is again part of this Acquired Narcissism Syndrome. This happened to Tony Blair a lot – my being somewhere will change things just by my presence. I’ve worked with actors for a decade. That’s how they feel, as if they’re the centre of the universe. It’s natural for them to get on a plane once a year and go somewhere a bit cold and pretend they’re making a difference. The problem is where the media follow in droves and repeat their banal state-the-bleeding-obvious points without question, but don’t go there when the celebrities aren’t around.

The Third Estate: If God is dead, Communism is the God that’s failed, we don’t believe in progress any more, Capitalism is on its knees and the American Dream has turned nightmare – isn’t celebrity all we have left to believe in? What’s the alternative?

Chris Atkins: God knows. I certainly would concur there’s a deep seated need for it to the extent it’s genetic, that we have behavioural urges to congregate around strong figures. In terms of what we do instead? When you have a world evermore mediatised and celebrity is the best way of delivering it; celebrity is here to stay. I think we need people to be more honest or more responsible. If the media said ― what you’re about to read is harmful and very little of it is true – I would have no problem. But we’re coming to a stage where media corporations are as powerful, if not more powerful, than governments.

The Third Estate: Which is strange when so much of the media is shrinking.

Chris Atkins: Well it is and it isn’t. Traditional structures are falling apart and in a sense all that remains is celebrity driven entertainment news. That’s doing well. Hard news is falling by the wayside and we’re left with a homogenised celebrity entertainment ether, which is everywhere but says nothing.

The Third Estate: Someone at the premiere asked a question about whether you’d prefer a weaker media – and argued, going back somewhat, that Anthony Eden, for example, would simply refuse to answer questions he wasn’t interested in. Surely that’s not preferable?

Chris Atkins: No, I’m not sitting here saying the media’s a terrible thing. Certainly from a political perspective we have this fantastic scrutiny, so that Twitter and blogs are able to protect the Houses of Parliament from a bloody law firm. It was absolutely astonishing. I was in the Guardian when all that kicked off. The whole Little Brother thing, the way people can take photographs of police beating newspaper vendors ― of course the media can protect us and scrutinise those in power more than they ever could. I would be the last person to try and roll any of that back. But it also means that the News of the World, with all the terrible ghastly things it does, hides behind the freedom of speech argument. It’s used as a shield for all kinds of illicit practices.

The Third Estate: I was struck by the Eden comment because, although he may have ignored the press, he ultimately fell on a lie. By comparison Blair lied continuously, and was caught out lying, but he survived. Doesn’t that suggest there’s too much competing media perhaps – the cacophony argument?

Chris Atkins: Well no, Blair just lied better. He used the media better. He changed how Downing Street briefings were done, by using that fantastic tool of celebrity PR – access. If you toed the line, ran the report the way the government wanted you to, you would get photos of Tony and Cherie. But if you didn’t and you ran an article asking ‘Where the fuck are these weapons of mass destruction?’ you’d be shut out of the briefing. No copy and as a journalist you’ll be in shit. That’s why Blair could get away with everything. It was a Max Clifford technique – there’s very little difference between Max Clifford and Alistair Campbell. Both in getting things written they want written, and stopping the publication of things they don’t want to see. It’s a celebrity PR trick.

The Third Estate: I can see some media commentators arguing that perhaps we don’t mind having liars at the top, culture has shifted. Rather than the media leading the public up the garden path, the media is simply reflective of contemporary mores.

Chris Atkins: Personally, I don’t want to think that’s true. Maybe it is true, in which case it’s a sad state of affairs if we’ve become desensitised to the idea of liars in office. I like the idea people trusted Tony Blair and that trust was simply misplaced. But people can get very angry: look at the row over MPs expenses. That was unheard of, certainly in all the time I’ve been watching politics. They were fiddling just a few grand.

The Third Estate: Compared to the bankers.

Chris Atkins: Compared to the bankers billions, yes. But I think it was more about trust and honesty than the money. Yes, it’s very annoying it happened in a recession – but literally more got written about that duck house than about RBS. We as people want to trust our leaders. We get very angry when our trust is abused. Celebrity reporting, PR spin coming from the world of entertainment into politics, brings with it this unbearably toxic effect.

The Third Estate: Where should people go for their news?

Chris Atkins: I get asked this all the time. I don’t have any particular answer. It’s interesting how many news outlets just recycle newswire. I’d say cut out the middle man, go to PA and Reuters. But I really don’t know. Hopefully out of this catastrophe in news people will come who want to invest in investigative journalism. Journalists who take their time to generate copy and charge for it, so that people go to those suppliers in a way that people go to a good brand. A lot of brands are in trouble at the moment. I read the Guardian but they run a lot of PR nonsense as well ―they ran our stories! Not that there wasn’t news value in that but we were essentially trying to sell our movie. Ultimately I don’t have a good answer.

The Third Estate: Why have you chosen to put this documentary into cinema ahead of television?

Chris Atkins: From our point of view, there’s no way this would be made for TV. Look at TV docs ― Dispatches: reporter in a taxi shouting at the camera. Panorama: Jeremy Vine shouting at the camera. Investigative journalism in television is pretty much dead. Certainly making a stand and taking on something as powerful as the tabloid press wouldn’t be thought of. Television makes things like Jeremy Clarkson going on a wine tasting course or Ross Kemp in Afghanistan, except he’s only a hundred miles away from the actual fighting. If you want to do something ballsy and revelatory in Britain it has to be done for the cinema. Then once it’s been out in the cinema, we’ve got our 4* reviews and people have tried to sue and failed, television comes sheepishly crawling in saying this is far more exciting than anything we’ve put on this year. Please can we buy it from you and start it with a big caveat saying ‘this is nothing to do with Channel 4, we’ve just bought, we didn’t make it, this is not our opinion’. That happened with Taking Liberties and will happen with this.

The Third Estate: You’re selling to Channel 4 rather than the BBC?

Chris Atkins: Yes. The BBC feature quite prominently in it. No one else picked up on this, but in fact the guy who commissioned the Live 8 documentaries, we feature as Bob Geldof basically rewriting history, is Richard Klein. He’s head of BBC 4. If we were going to sell to the BBC, he’d be the person buying.

The Third Estate: What would you say to people who want to make this kind of film?

Chris Atkins: Well you can’t ― that’s the problem. You can’t go to the BBC because they were part of it. Richard Curtis is a god at the BBC. Look at Comic Relief. People at 4 buy stuff from Brook Lapping which is Bob Geldof’s company. They’re all mates. It’s part of the problem. When you start to do something that criticises the media it becomes almost impossible. You need them to help. You say ‘there’s this oil company I want to doc on’, they say go ‘ahead here’s some cash’. You say, ‘there’s this media company I want to examine’, they say ‘my wife works there’. You have to lock the doors and do it independently.

www.starsuckersmovie.com

‘Starsuckers’ is the new documentary film by Chris Atkins, (Director of the Blair-baiting polemic ‘Taking Liberties’) which created a bit of a stir at the London Film Festival both by preleasing clips of tabloid journalists offering cash for trash stories about celeb boob-jobs, whilst being simultaneously sued by Max Clifford. The Guardian particularly loved the exposé of tabloid malpractice which chimed with the work of their reporter Nick Davies (who himself appears in the film).

The film is a jaunty, if uneven, investigation into the public’s, apparently insatiable, appetite for celeb gossip, alongside the media’s manipulation of this rather unsavoury diet. And it has a number hits: Clifford filmed secretly boasting about news stories he’s fabricated and covered up, examples of the seepage of ‘celebrity news values’ (or rather lack of them) into the reporting of politics, the corresponding movement of celebrities themselves into politics and a meticulously researched critique of the grossly smug Live8 concerts, which will doubtless have Bob Geldof’s apparatchiks vetting Youtube for years to come. Ultimately, however, the film’s guiding thesis, that celebrity is used by the media to control the masses, is both too obvious and too reductive to be especially interesting.

At a cinematic level it also suffers from a grating voiceover, intended to represent the media as a whole, but which seems more like a gimmick used to disguise an intrinsic lack of faith in the film’s own suppositions. Perhaps unsurprisingly this voiceover tends to vanish during the strongest sections in which ‘good old fashioned’ news reporting, truth as the voice of authority, takes over.

It’s a pity ‘Starsuckers’ is so hit and miss because as the media shifts into a digital age something fascinating is happening, not simply in the dispiriting thought that our main news sources are now PR companies and press officers rather than journalists, but in the distinction between media and the general public, and between the public figure and the private citizen.

As regards the media overall? Personally I’m with Baudrillard’s assessment (from a book first published in 1985 – no, there’s no new news)― ‘We should agree neither with those who praise the beneficial use of the media, nor with those who scream about manipulation, for the simple reason there is no relation between a system of meaning and a system of simulation’.

The net result for individuals, as he saw it, was ‘stupor; a radical uncertainty as to our own desires, our own choices, our own opinions, our own will. This is the clearest result of the whole media environment, of the information which makes demands on us from all sides and which is as good as blackmail.’

Stay tuned for The Third Estate’s exclusive interview with director Chris Atkins, coming to a computer screen near you tomorrow…

It’s extremely easy to criticise the politics of cultural products if you don’t agree with absolutely everything they say. If you consider your understanding to be more nuanced, it is very easy to say that a book, a film, or an article doesn’t go far enough. The point is that not every great film is like a glass slipper to each Cinderella viewer, but regardless of this fact these sorts of cultural products can be hugely valuable in changing consciousness and changing the world. It feels a bit silly to preface my review of The Age of Stupid with this, but I am all too wary that whilst I am writing a relatively critical review, I see this film as extremely important, and something that really should be disseminated as widely as possible. Or as Ken Livingstone has put it “Every single person in the country should be forcibly sat down on a chair and made to watch this film.”

The film is set in 2055, in a world in which almost all life has ended on earth. Pete Postlethwaite stars as an archivist, who looks back to the early 2000s, seeing how we got to a state in which the environment caused the collapse of civilisation. He follows a number of stories from different continents around the world ranging from a mountain guide in Chamonix watching glaciers melt, to an entrepreneur setting up a budget airline in India. The main political focus is on inaction and how we (the Western viewers) can do more to cut carbon emissions, and ultimately on how we must lobby in advance of the meeting on climate change in Copenhagen at the end of the year, which will decide on an international strategy on carbon emissions for the coming 15 years.

There are some powerful arguments here, and the film attempts as best as possible to be scientifically accurate, or at least as scientifically accurate as one can be with these sorts of projections. Real changes are shown, along with some of the realities of abject poverty and misery caused by both the use of oil and the industry that maintains its production. The message is loud and clear: if we do not act now, it will be too late.

The problems come, then, in the political messages of the film, or rather what is lacking in the political messages. We are told over and over again that the problem is consumption. Consumption on a scale we’ve never seen before. Consumption so large that it somehow alone makes people poor. Only once is capitalism ever mentioned, and the film-makers are far happier to rely on the rhetoric of consumerism. The problem is, though, that what makes people poor is categorically not in the field of consumption. Yes, over many decades this may be the case, when we exhaust the world’s resources, but there is a fork in the argument: why is it that when we are producing more than ever, when we are pumping trillions of pounds into the market that people are still poor. The point is that poverty is completely inadequately explained by consumerism, and that we need to look at production. A little is said of the so-called curse of resources, but this is never explained in any depth.

I can understand why the makers of the film stay away from this – add a bit of Marxist economics to your environmentalism and your world leaders are less likely to accept it. The trouble is that in ignoring this important debate the arguments for how we can transform the world, and avert crisis, disappear. If we found a clean way to run capitalism (that’s environmentally clean, of course, capitalism is never morally clean), then it is perfectly possible that global poverty would be worse rather than better. Well I mean people would be poor rather than dead, but we can’t be accepting this as a solution.

The film concludes with an argument for people to live in a way that is as close to carbon-neutral as possible. This suggestion seems aimed solely at the Western middle-classes. No advice is offered to, say, the Chinese about how despite rampant growth improving living conditions they should probably curb it a little. In fact there is no challenge to the consciousness of people in the developing world, which ultimately is about them demanding better quality of life, and often this isn’t a very green process (although it has been sometimes – I think back to Chico Mendes and the struggles of the rubber-tappers in Acre in the 1980s.) We can all do our own little bit, but in reality the redistribution of carbon emissions can only happen alongside the redistribution of wealth. Quality of life is not simply relative, and cutting standards of living in the West will ultimately not help people in the most oppressed regions of the world feel better about how they are forced to live.

Despite these difficulties, and the rather fluffy economics of the film, it remains important. We must act now, and the Age of Stupid is proposing a way forward. It’s a shame that the dissemination of the film is not as wide as it could be – I can only assume that there are rights issues that stop it being put up on Google Video or similar. Needless to say, there’s information about the campaign and screenings on www.ageofstupid.net and I encourage you all to watch the film, and show it to others too.

Guest post by Jon Small

The latest character from Sacha Baron Cohen’s entourage of grotesques to hit the big screen is Brüno, the gay-as-a-lamp-post presenter of Austria’s number one fashion show, Funkyzeit. Brüno began life as a minor character in Baron Cohen’s television shows for Paramount Comedy and Channel 4’s Da Ali G Show. As with the Borat film in 2006, Brüno’s transition from the small to the big screen has given Baron Cohen and his team of writers (including The Day Today’s Peter Baynham) an opportunity to widen and deepen the character’s satirical reach from the absurd skits and fake interviews which characterise the TV appearances to a sustained assault on good taste and mediocrity wherever they are found.

Borat is a tough act to follow, and some elements of Brüno will seem remarkably familiar. This film’s “plot” also centres on a peculiar foreigner who travels to the USA, engaging on a somewhat pointless quest. The film has the same story arc as Borat, and we even find some of the same scenes repeated almost verbatim, such as when Brüno, abandoned by his only friend, finds himself destitute and alone and has a sudden moment of self revelation: he must become straight! The plot is of course merely incidental, it’s simply an excuse to string together a series of carefully edited encounters with minor celebrities, PR gurus and ordinary people. Brüno’s faux-naivety acts as a tool to expose the prejudices and mediocrity of mainstream America.

The targets for Sacha Baron Cohen’s satire in Brüno are varied. Starting off in Brüno’s native environment of high fashion, the opening of the film reprises the TV series’ attacks on that absurdly shallow and self-important world. But a satire directed entirely against catwalk fashionistas would be thin indeed, and this was one of the limitations of Brüno’s character in Da Ali G Show: the fashion world is self-parodying and is in little need of even more comedic absurdity than can already be seen in haute couture and the journalism industry that surrounds it. Thankfully, then, after a faux pas involving a velcro suit, Brüno is sacked from his role as presenter of Funkyzeit and travels to America to seek global fame. Cue a series of encounters with members of the fame industry in LA: Brüno meets a high-power celebrity agent and two clueless valley-girl PR consultants. These can’t string together a coherent sentence and try to decide which would be the best cause to adopt in order for a newcomer to make a name for himself: “global warming is big these days,” “oh, fantastisch!”

Along with vapid celebrity culture, Brüno also tackles politics. He briefly travels to Israel and attempts to solve the Palestine question, in a parody of empty-headed celebrity meddling in the world of “issues”. Brüno brings together a former Mossad agent and a Palestinian politician, making huge advances towards peace in the Middle East by getting them to agree that hummus is actually a good thing. Sacha Baron Cohen even manages to interview a (genuine) member of the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade terrorist organisation, telling him that “King Osama looks like a dirty wizard,” demonstrating not only his own bravado but the dexterous verbal wit that marks the script’s intelligent humour. Most of the film’s subjects are either unsuspecting or actively hostile, and Brüno’s raison d’etre is to be abused and thrown out, which Baron Cohen pulls off with fearless disregard for his personal safety.

Half the fun is trying to guess which of the situations Brüno finds himself in are set ups and which are genuine unscripted encounters. As with Borat, there is a mix of both: it is part carefully-written and skilfully executed physical comedy and planned improvisation, and part genuinely dangerous and edgy media pranksterism. The interview with ex-Presidential candidate Ron Paul that turns into an attempt to make a celebrity sex tape is the latter, with an obviously shocked and flustered Paul storming out, declaring that the man is “as queer as blazes.” (Brüno apparently thought he was RuPaul, an easy mistake to make.) There is of course an element of cruelty in Sacha Baron Cohen’s pranks, but most of the people he chooses as the butt of his jokes are putting themselves in the public spotlight, or worse, declaring themselves authorities on their chosen subject. As such, puncturing their self-regard is fair game.

Those few subjects who respond with humour and largesse come off well, though Brüno keeps on pushing until he gets a response. One aspect of Borat which made me slightly uneasy was the inclusion of so many ordinary people who, while hilariously stupid, were nonetheless unsuspecting, and revealed nothing more than their own stupidity. The satire in Brüno is more sharply focused, with more minor celebrities and self-declared experts being lampooned. Those ‘ordinary’ members of the public who become the target of Baron Cohen’s penetrating derision in this film often turn out to be genuinely nasty pieces of work rather than simply dim.

The Alabama hunters with whom Brüno spends a night in order to overcome his gayness respond at first with strained good humour and some great comebacks, but when confronted by a fully nude Sacha Baron Cohen in the middle of the night (and Sacha is an impressively large man), they are pushed beyond breaking point. The satire is not consistently focused though, and some elements descend into what appears to be simply baiting for the sake of response. The studio audience of Richard Bey’s chat show may be homophobic and crass, but showing them Brüno’s adopted African baby being photographed with a swarm of bees or present at a gay orgy seems to be an attempt simply to enrage with no purpose other than to provoke an emotive reaction. What impresses about Sacha Baron Cohen’s humour is that it is consistently at the edge of what is acceptable, it is never comfortable, predictable or safe: this kind of comedy has to be dangerous, it has to make you cringe. Sometimes this film misses its target, but more often than not it hits it squarely between the eyes.

Criticisms of Baron Cohen’s approach are levelled quickly and loudly by those on all sides who miss the point he is trying to make. When Borat came out we were earnestly warned about the dangers of stereotyping and belittling the population of Kazakhstan, Borat’s home country. But anyone who regards the surreal representation of Borat’s village with its cast of clinically insane misfits and inbreds, and its annual “Running of the Jew” parade as a belittling stereotype has fallen right into the bear trap set by the satirist. Stereotypes have to be at least partly accurate, and this one is so absurd that to be offended by it demonstrates your own prejudice. The characters of Ali G, Borat and Brüno act as magnifying mirrors to the minds and personalities of those they interview, and of those who watch. Your response to these creations reveals your own assumptions, and we’re all tricked into revealing more about ourselves than we think. That’s where the genius of these characters lies, and it is the mark of successful and incisive satire. Brüno has quickly attracted the criticism that Baron Cohen’s creation presents a harmful gay stereotype: an image of mindless camp tastelessness. But it is precisely this lampoon which acts as possibly the sharpest tool of the film’s satire, revealing unthinking and viscerally prejudiced responses and attitudes towards homosexuality. What some seem happy to take as being broadly representative of homosexuality is in fact simply representative of crass stupidity, regardless of sexual orientation. Sacha Baron Cohen has a knack of pinpointing the small-minded assumptions of those who think they’re being politically correct.

Those who criticise this film for its supposed detraction of homosexuality utterly miss the point. Brüno uses his flamboyant and shameless gayness to reveal what are often aggressively homophobic responses from his interviewees. The deep south Christian “gay converters” and the Westboro Baptist Church’s “God Hates Fags” picket line are prime targets for Sacha Baron Cohen’s attack on prejudice, small mindedness and ignorance. Brüno telling the rather effete gay converter that he has “blow job lips” and becoming physically entangled with the God Hates Fags brigade while in flagrante, dressed in full bondage gear are not only hilarious but important and damning social criticism. At its best this film is true satire: an attempt to puncture and deride stupidity and prejudice. By confronting these bigots with their own worst nightmare Baron Cohen sometimes reveals the intriguing dichotomy at the heart of homophobia: the audience for the cage fight at the end of the film are eager to shout so loudly about their heterosexuality that you wonder exactly what they’re trying to hide. Brüno’s beautifully choreographed fight with his personal assistant turns into a tender scene of homosexual intimacy right before the eyes of the baying crowd, and he is confronted by an aggressive mob of individuals who can’t decide whether to cry or do him physical harm. The best comedy challenges and disrupts expectations, and this film is full of surprises and shocking absurdity; quite an achievement after Borat, which this film matches or betters. This is barbed satire with no tolerance for prejudice and ignorance. It’s a joy to watch because while the satire is pitiless, Baron Cohen’s insightful, intelligent and generous humanism always shines through. It’s funny as hell, too.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley

A while ago, I was asked to talk about my favourite film. Now this is never an easy task. Not because I find discussing the things I’m passionate about particularly difficult, but because naming a favourite film in the first place is a rather daunting. Much harder than trying to pin down a favourite band or a favourite author. I could list any number of films that I’ve particularly enjoyed or that have had particular significance for me and I’m sure the budding film geeks out there will be queuing up to shoot me down for a fair few of them. Withnail and I would get an honourable mention, the Danny Boyle classics 28 Days Later and Trainspotting would be in there, The Warriors would be coming out to play, The Motorcycle Diaries, Crash, American History X, This Is England and Rabbit Proof Fence would make the final cut, as would The Lord of the Rings trilogy and possibly, depending on how I’m feeling, the Star Wars series. But if I had to pick one film, just one film, that from recent memory has moved me quite unlike any other and takes on a special contemporary significance, it would have to be Ken Loach’s 2006 Palm d’Or winning, The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley follows Damien (Cillian Murphy) and Teddy (Pádraic Delaney) O’Donovan through the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War that followed in its wake, depicting their journey as they fight side by side and then on opposing sides as circumstance tears them apart and each seeks radically different means to achieve their common ends of a free Ireland. It is at once the classic tale, common in fiction, of the parallel paths of two brothers that must ultimately diverge at right angles to one another with heartrending consequences, and also a powerful portrayal of the brutal realities of British rule in Ireland, the struggle against it and the civil war that all too often did divide brother from brother, splitting families and friends between supporters of the Anglo-Irish treaty that formed the Irish Free State as a British dominion and the Anti-Treaty IRA.

Whilst the film is quick to decry the iron fist of British imperialism, depicting as it does the everyday injustices faced by the Irish under the occupation of a foreign power and the naked brutality of the Black and Tans, this is not where its greatest strength lies. After all, these are questions with comparatively straightforward answers for a sympathetic audience. It would have been easy to have Damien played by Mel Gibson and make the film an Irish Braveheart. Much more difficult to deal with the deeper moral questions faced by those struggling against oppression and against their own consciences. And whilst one might cheer every Black and Tan – thoroughly dehumanised by their actions in the film – shot by Damien and his IRA comrades, I doubt anyone would find themselves cheering when Damien finds himself forced to shoot his very human childhood friend turned reluctant informant. It is harrowing scenes such as these that make us question our own sympathies and loyalties and whether the ends truly can justify the means.

The answer for Damien, who holds fast to his socialist principles, and no doubt for Loach as well, though not an easy one, is clear. The ends must justify the means for it is the right of all oppressed people to resist their oppressors. And this is where the film becomes more than simply a portrayal of the struggle against British rule in Ireland and instead takes on resonance for more recent struggles against oppression. When the question is raised how free and fair elections can be held in a country under the occupation of the greatest superpower on Earth, one wonders whether it is Ireland we’re talking about, or Iraq. And though some reviewers have been quick to criticise the film for the intentional parallels drawn between British rule in Ireland and the occupation of Iraq by British and American forces, for me its strength lies in its contemporary significance and the links it forges between these two great injustices. And when Damien rails against the Church’s support for Anglo-Irish treaty with the immortal words, “and once again, with honourable exception, the Catholic Church sides with the rich” it is a reminder of the timeless poignancy of the film and the lessons we must take from history. And when we have stripped away time and place, when the cultural context is removed, what’s left is a naked imbalance of power, the subjugation of one people by another and the inevitable resentment and resistance that this will foster.

“History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present.”

- Ken Loach