A proud day!

A proud day for the Klinger family

Today I was sent this article by the world famous philosopher John Gray via Mike Hodges, director of the film my father produced, "Get Carter". Also this week I was being interviewed for an American radio station about my career and they called one of the films I produced, "The Kids are Alright" about The Who, "The best rock movie documentary ever made". How fortunate for me that these two wonderful tributes to me and my family should arrive at the same time as we put the final touches to my latest documentary, "The Man Who Got Carter" about my father, Michael Klinger!

Ironically my film title could equally be given to John Gray since his article proves he really does Get Carter.

Without further ado here is the very excellent and perceptive philosophical analysis by John Gray to whom we pay tribute and on behalf of all concerned with "Get Carter" say thank you. By the way this article will stretch your brain a little, but that won't be a problem for all you intelligent people?

John Gray says that today’s cinema and television reflect a subliminal sense that catastrophe is no longer a transformative moment, but the daily norm

17 DECEMBER 2018 09:00

The wastelands of the Zone in Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979) and the desolate landscape of The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009) are familiar images of a post-apocalyptic future. The world has changed beyond recognition, and what remains is barely habitable by humans. In these and countless other less memorable films, apocalypse appears as a catastrophic event – a sudden and complete disruption of everyday life. Vampires and zombies, rabid mutants and pitiless aliens invade the human world, leaving it a place of horror such as it has never been before. Yet none of these gruesome transmutations proves to be final. All of these films end with a hint of redemption – a drop of rain on the parched Earth, a child watching tumblers move mysteriously on a table. Some saving miracle, it seems, might yet restore the world that has been lost.

The apocalypse evoked in this strand of film is that of western theism. Time comes to an end and another world comes into being. Yet this new world can vanish as suddenly as it arrived. A punctuation mark in the regular pattern of human events, apocalyptic change can never be normal. Apocalypse has the hope of deliverance built into it. Our secular culture likes to imagine it has shed the myth of apocalypse along with religion. But the prospect of a world different from any that existed in the past survives in the faith in continuing improvement – the assertion that human beings can reshape their lives and leave the troubled past behind. Inherited from theism, the hope of redemption lives on.

There is a strand in popular culture, though, in which this hope is absent. In long-form television and streaming series such as The Wire(2002-2008) and Breaking Bad (2008-2013), catastrophic loss is not abnormal. Walter White may not know it until he is struck by terminal illness, but his life is governed by the same remorseless forces that rule the city of Baltimore in David Simon’s portrayal. The civilised order in which Walter imagined he lived until he fell ill is a dream; the nightmarish violence of the drug economy is the abiding reality of society. Since it cancels a world he believed to be indestructible, this is an apocalyptic vision. But – except in death – there is no prospect of deliverance for him. Apocalypse is not a singular event that could somehow be reversed, but an ever-present reality. In films that express this vision, the human world is a site of recurring conflicts that play out according to their own laws. No saving miracle can redeem the protagonists, and no exercise of will can release them from their fates.

Going all the way back to Sophocles and Shakespeare, this is not a recent genre. But its expressions in the last couple of decades were foreshadowed by a film masterpiece that is still under-appreciated and misunderstood. Get Carter (Mike Hodges, 1971) is celebrated as having inaugurated a new type of crime thriller, using Tyneside locations to import American film noir into British cinema. More interestingly, the film has been interpreted as reviving Jacobean revenge tragedy. Set in a decayed and corrupt milieu in which crime and the law are interwoven, it is the story of an attempt by Jack Carter – who has left his home town and become an enforcer in a criminal organisation – to achieve a simple kind of justice. Caught up in the seedy economy of porn and slot machines, Carter’s brother has been killed. Carter travels from London, where he works for a gang with links to the Newcastle underworld, to uncover the truth and exact retribution on those involved in his brother’s death. The weekend that follows sees him kill and use others ruthlessly in his determination to achieve this end.

In the novel by Ted Lewis from which the film was drawn, Jack’s Return Home (1970), the story takes place in an unnamed Northern steel town. Shifting the action to Newcastle was a shrewd move. Throughout the Sixties, the city was dominated by a mafia of politicians and property developers who razed working-class streets for private gain. (Some of the film’s locations were already scheduled for demolition when it was shot.) The ambitions of the syndicate were futuristic. Its central political architect, the Labour councillor T. Dan Smith, wanted to remake the city as the ‘Brasilia of the North’. Behind a veil of deception, immemorial human impulses of greed and predation were at work as they have always been.

One of the criticisms of the film is what has been seen as its relentless amorality. The central protagonist kills without a flicker of remorse, and the world in which he moves is ruled by Hobbesian calculations of profit and survival. Yet Carter is not amoral. When he seeks to avenge his brother’s death he is obeying the morality of the streets from which he came – an ethos of family loyalty and communal ties. At the same time, he is defying the criminal nexus of which he is a part. His bosses in London have connexions they need to protect, but he feels no loyalty to his employers. Sleeping with the wife of one of his bosses, he plans to leave with her for a new life in South America. As well as being an attempt to achieve justice, Carter’s is also the story of a struggle to escape from fate.

If the apocalypse is an event that turns the world upside down, Get Carter shows the world was upside down all along. There is nothing in it of the heroic mythology of Peterloo (Mike Leigh, 2018). Lethal injustice is woven into the fabric of human action, and Carter has no hopes of altering this fact. He acts as if he can avenge the wrong done to his brother, and then – the slate having been wiped clean – depart from the scene. But the fates pursue him even as he is killing the chief culprit in his brother’s murder. A hit-man hired by the local crime boss shoots Carter dead at the moment when – having seen off his brother’s killer – he is exulting in his triumph. If he has righted a wrong, the price is that he must die.

If the apocalypse is an event that turns the world upside down, ‘Get Carter’ shows the world was upside down all along.

Carter’s death is intimated in the first scenes of the film. The hit-man who shoots him dead is shown sitting in the same railway carriage in which Carter journeys north from London. Even before he leaves, Carter’s end is foretold. Standing at the window of the high-rise apartment of his criminal employers, who have warned him against going north, he seems detached from the world below. The curtains close, and it is as if he has already died.

The action that follows is not a linear narrative but a moment in a never-ending cycle. Carter is trapped in circular time. Acting to enforce an inherited sense of communal justice, he is also asserting himself against the criminal society of which he has become a part. His ultimate destination is South America – seemingly another world. But there is no other world. Human events unfold in an everlasting recurrence, regardless of any assertion of will – collective or individual.

From one angle, Get Carter subverts the very idea of apocalyptic change. As understood in western religion, apocalypse connotes a sudden transformation in the human world, initially terrifying but ultimately redemptive. Carter’s world contains no such possibility of transformation. From another angle, the film records an apocalypse in which particular human worlds are continuously disappearing. The streets and urban landscapes the film records would soon be gone, along with the communities for which they were home. Seeking justice on behalf of this vanishing world, Carter is a figure from the past.

Made nearly half a century ago, the film explores a central paradox of the present time. The worlds in which human beings have lived in the past are fast fading, and yet nothing new is emerging. A continuing apocalypse has become the normal human condition. The landmarks of daily life are changing faster than the human mind can process. The city in which the film was shot no longer exists. The street communities whose values Carter enforces are barely memories. Yet what has replaced them is not a futuristic Brasilia of the kind T. Dan Smith and his accomplices promoted. Instead, post-industrial cities are maze-like intersections of traffic islands and entertainment venues. The slot machines of Carter’s day continue as fixed-odds betting terminals, while spice and crack have joined heroin as sources of distraction. The Hobbesian nexus has been renewed as part of a process of modernisation in which power and crime are linked as before.

From being a genre in which extremes of disruption are represented as stories of the end of the world, apocalyptic film has become a way of rendering a world from which there is no exit. The omnipresence of crime is a theme that pervades popular culture. In Scandinavian noir, criminality and bourgeois life are not opposites but intertwined. Ray Donovan (2013-present) and Get Shorty (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1995) depict the glitzy economies of Los Angeles and Manhattan as operating through blackmail and threats of violence. In these popular renditions, the dark side of society is not a flaw that could someday be removed but an integral part of the way we live.

There is a contrast here that is worth exploring. Whereas politics is shaped by an adamant belief in improvement, popular culture is filled with images of non-progress. Get Carter mocks the faith in human agency that sustains meliorism – the secular faith that has replaced religion for most people today. If the film is amoral, this is the reason: it undermines the humanistic morality of autonomy and improvement. Our official philosophies insist that nothing is insoluble. Even catastrophic losses bring uplifting lessons and stir us to greater efforts, or so we like to think. But these mawkish creeds rarely produce great art, or even satisfying entertainment.

The strand in contemporary film that Get Carter foreshadows presents us with ourselves. We want to believe this world could end, and be replaced by another closer to our heart’s desire, but we know this apocalypse never comes. Instead there is an unending apocalypse in which human will is asserted and forever thwarted. It seems a hopeless vision, but we need the bitter tonic it provides. At its best, popular culture does not distract us from what we know. It connects us with a reality we fear and yet cannot do without. The genre of normal apocalypse is a response to this conflict. Portraying us as we secretly suspect ourselves to be, it entertains us with the truth.

John Gray is one of the world’s most acclaimed philosophers. His most recent book is Seven Types of Atheism (2018).

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