Page 402 – Cherwell

Review: Simulacrum

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11th December 2020

Written and directed by Helena Aeberli and Riana Modi, Simulacrum is the first play on the Oxford drama scene specifically designed for online production, and its focus on the radical power of technology fits in expertly with the form. The play chronicles a medical trial in which the consciousness of a recently deceased Julia (Cosima Aslangul) is uploaded to the Internet, enabling her to communicate with her family and friends. As the trial develops, Julia’s grasp of the real world is gradually erased; the play thus descends into a terrifying examination of the limits of human existence that drives its audience right to the edge of comfort.

Simulacrum – a term defined as ‘an unsatisfactory imitation or substitute’ – is an apt title for this new breed of student drama, the ‘webcam play’. Can an online play live up to its real-life counterparts, or is it doomed to be an unsatisfactory imitation of ‘normal’ plays?

Written and directed by Helena Aeberli and Riana Modi, Simulacrum is the first play on the Oxford drama scene specifically designed for online production, and its focus on the radical power of technology fits in expertly with the form. The play chronicles a medical trial in which the consciousness of a recently deceased Julia (Cosima Aslangul) is uploaded to the Internet, enabling her to communicate with her family and friends. As the trial develops, Julia’s grasp of the real world is gradually erased; the play thus descends into a terrifying examination of the limits of human existence that drives its audience right to the edge of comfort.

Simulacrum interweaves a huge range of topical themes, exploring everything from death to religious extremism in a concise one hundred minutes. In a coronavirus-ridden world, the fraught online relationships between Julia and her family seem particularly poignant – the description of Julia’s strange world as a ‘bubble’ evokes confused government advice, and her best friend’s exclamation that “I wish I could give you my hand, I wish I could!” will ring true to anyone who has suffered through endless Zoom calls and FaceTimes with loved ones. Yet references to the pandemic are pleasingly subtle, adding to the play’s tensions rather than becoming its epicentre.

Aeberli and Modi’s script is beautifully written, replete with poetic metaphors that echo in the audience’s ears long after they are spoken. Aslangul, the play’s focal point, plays Julia with a deep intensity that becomes intensely disturbing. Her perfect performance shuts down any doubts the audience might have about online acting—it’s incredible how much emotional change can be expressed through a web cam, and makes one eagerly anticipate Aslangul’s real life debut. Other stand out performances include Georgina Dettmer as Doctor Emma Greenways, whose sweetness constantly threatens to tip into creepiness, and Elise Busset as Julia’s disillusioned best friend Claire.

In a world forced online and devoid of physical contact, Simulacrum draws together all our doubts and anxieties about the mysteries of this ‘unprecedented’ existence. As the play’s protagonist puts it, “I am the simulacrum now…and this is how we see the world”. If Simulacrum is the new way we see the world, then perhaps the world isn’t so bad after all.

Image credit: Daisy Leeson.

Who’s who: Ai Weiwei

Jennifer Zhou

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11th December 2020

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On the 3^rd of April 2011, the inhabitants of Chaoyang district in northern Beijing woke up to a strange spectacle. A team of twenty policemen, dressed in plainclothes but armed to the teeth, were placing cordons around an empty building. Power to the neighbourhood had been cut off. In breathless darkness, the residents watched as officers advanced through the doorway, returning minutes later with laptops and a hard drive. Miles away in the Beijing Capital Airport, the building’s owner—a towering, shaggy-haired man in his fifties—was being forced, handcuffed, into the back of a squad car.

It looked like a scene straight out of a movie. Indeed, over the following days as news of the arrest broke across China, headlines would try to paint it in the cinematic colours of a nationalist propaganda film: the police triumphant, the public enemy detained, the state saved once again from the threat of sinister treason. But the deserted building in Chaoyang was no criminal lair—it was an art studio. And the man arrested at the airport, far from being a hardened felon, was Ai Weiwei: filmmaker, visual artist, and one of the most outspoken political dissidents in China.

To understand Ai’s history, it is vital to understand his childhood. He was born in 1957, one of a generation of children growing up amidst the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. His father, the writer Gao Ying, had been imprisoned by the Nationalist government for Leftist activism. Now that Mao’s Communist Party had taken power, Gao—in a twist of events that even among the extreme politics of the time seemed cruelly ironic—was accused of being a Rightist and exiled to a labour camp in distant Xinjiang. It was here, amongst a community of outcasts, pariahs and political prisoners, that Ai grew up.

When his father was finally released, Ai attended the Beijing Film Academy and became one of the first members of ‘The Stars’, a group of rebel artists who wanted to reintroduce art as a method of self-expression instead of a tool of the state. In 1981 he moved to New York, where he led an impressively eclectic life: dropping out of Parsons after six months, rubbing shoulders with names like Warhol and Ginsberg, and becoming so adept at blackjack that he was chauffeured to casinos in a stretch limo each week. His first solo show, ‘Old Shoes, Safe Sex’, was shown in New York in 1988.

Five years later, Ai returned to Beijing. The Cultural Revolution had ended, but Ai’s continuing defiance of Party rule showed clearly in his artwork. A photo series published in the early 90s depicts him leaping across the frame, naked and contorted into ridiculous poses. Ai titled it “grass mud horse covering the middle”—a name which in spoken Mandarin sounds like a slur about mothers and the Communist Party. His later work is even more scathing: his most celebrated pieces include surveillance cameras wrought from marble, Han Dynasty vases defaced with Coke logos, and a series of porcelain shards bearing the words “free speech” which piece together to form a fractured map of China.

Ai is famous for his eccentricity. In the face of a puritanically conformist society, his art showcases a bold, transgressive individualism: his 1999 exhibition in Shanghai, for instance, was simply titled “F**k off”. Ai’s larger-than-life personality and fiercely anti-government works have earned him a global cult following. His Twitter account has 375,000 followers—impressive, considering Twitter is technically blocked in China—and his studio, Fake Culture Development Ltd, became a local landmark before it was shut down. In 2011, following his arrest, ArtReview named him “the most powerful artist in the world.”

The official reason given for his arrest was tax evasion, but it ignited such a media firestorm that Ai was released just three months later. Since then, he has fled to Cambridge, UK, where he now lives with his family. Over the last three decades, he has made global headlines, become a national fugitive, and even had his life adapted into a play at the Hampstead Theatre. Ai, however, still seems surprised by his own fame. “The secret police told me,” he said to Smithsonian, “everybody can see it but you, that you’re so influential.”

Ai’s career has been both prolific and diverse. It has taken him from laying bricks in Xinjiang to opening galleries in Europe, from casinos to prisons to political exile. His most recent creations include an exhibition on surveillance, a documentary about the refugee crisis, and an installation of repurposed explosive devices due to be displayed at the Imperial War Museum. Whatever he makes next—sculpture or video, photograph series or performance art—we can be sure that it will ignite the popular imagination for years afterwards.

All I Want for Oxmas…

Jill Cushen

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11th December 2020

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All I want for Oxmas is my two front teeth. And a vaccine, and a foreign holiday, and a live gig, and a night in a crowded club… Forget the teeth, all I want for Oxmas is normality, or whatever we consider normality to be: that’s not a lot to ask for, surely!

2020 has been a year of unprecedented change, forcing many of us to re-evaluate various aspects of our lives. But after a year devoid of traditional cultural experiences, are we craving a return to what we deemed to be culturally satisfying, or have our priorities changed? Film, television, and music have always been a form of escapism, providing a source of comfort in our hectic lives. This year has been no different, except that our lives have been less hectic and more terrifyingly confusing.

The natural disasters and political turmoil which marred the commencement of the new decade were merely the tip of the iceberg for what was to come in 2020. Culturally, however, the year began as it always does: the Grammy Awards and the Oscars. Billie Eilish’s Grammy triumph, taking home four of the most coveted prizes and setting a new record for the youngest solo artist to win album of the year, and Parasite making history as the first foreign language film to bag the title of Best Motion Picture both seem like a lifetime ago, and, to be frank, largely insignificant considering the circumstances we are living in.

Back in March, our cultural calendars looked pretty bare, but 2020 was certainly not lacking in influential movements. Slouchy tracksuit bottoms and oversized hoodies stole the runway, replacing the oversized Victorian sleeves and chunky boots paired with floral dresses, styles which were predicted as 2020’s major fashion trends. With the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, gaming was reinstated as the go-to past time for many people, allowing them to create and roam in a world free from any threatening virus or anything frightening (bar the odd spider). Streaming services such as Netflix and Prime Video have found an essential and lasting place in the cultural sphere. Few would have guessed that the release of Frozen II on Disney+ would have, despite its title, quenched our Covid woes for an evening, replacing them with an evening of cosy family fun and sing-alongs.

The dramatic changes induced by the pandemic rippled through all areas of society, and likewise we saw some cultural institutions buffeted by storms. The fall of Ellen DeGeneres was disheartening, being such a modern icon and forward thinker. Her catchphrase “be kind” is tinged with irony following the emergence of allegations about bullying and intimidation behind the scenes of her eponymous show. These reports shed a new light on celebrities and the slow pace of Covid-life meant that we have more time to mull over such developments, making us less willing to accept things the way they are. In September, E! announced that Keeping Up with the Kardashians would end after fourteen years and twenty seasons. The pandemic has provided us with some much needed perspective. Our interest in the lives of the Kardashian-Jenner clan is dwindling and people are less willing to tolerate Kim expressing her gratitude over being able to celebrate her 40th birthday with a “humble” party on a private tropical island, while the rest of us probably won’t step foot on an aeroplane for the foreseeable future.

A standout moment on social media this year was a painful cover of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. Actress Gal Gadot and her crew of celebrities attempted a rendition of the song which was randomly compiled, pummelled and punctured, much like our hopes and dreams for 2020. What was inspiring about the video, though, was the group’s collective vulnerability. It was thrown together, but its chaos is entertaining: they weren’t concerned with making a musical debut, but were simply having a bit of fun, another thing which 2020 needed to be injected with, in large doses. Many predicted that over the course of the decade the importance and influence of social media would start to fade, but throughout the pandemic, social media has been a lifeline, diminishing our sense of isolation from the world and connecting people. Whether we were joining Florence Pugh for a sourdough cook-a-long or Joe Wicks for a workout, social media has allowed us to reconnect, a connection we have forged through a shared crisis.

The Covid culture shock has been significant but the pandemic has not eradicated culture, it has simply transformed it, and continues to do so. Numerous aspects of culture serve to entertain us and enrich our lives, and rarely before have we needed it so much, but the sector has been devastated by the effects of Covid-19, leaving us to consider whether a return to cultural normality is feasible. Will we appreciate these after our first cinema trip or live performance, though? We may very easily slip back into taking the sector for granted. Some things will never change. The idea of a two-hour commute to work may never seem attractive again, but the BBC’s Glastonbury Experience will never replace the real thing: watching Miley Cyrus rocking on a screen in your sitting room can’t top the constant pounding in your chest and the lingering smell of spilt beer for a weekend.

When the crystal ball was dusted off in January 2020, The Atlantic predicted that the next decade would “look very different from what most people expect.” Little did we know how true that statement would be. The transition from the 10s to the 20s felt like a cultural shift, looking back on the past ten years and towards to the coming decade, reminiscing on everything that has changed, and looking forward to what the next few years had in store. After one of the strangest years in living history, time feels like a mysterious concept. Predicting how the next decade will unfold is inconceivable given the rate of unforeseen change in 2020. Anticipating what will happen next week is futile, never mind next year. That crystal ball has been obscured in uncertainties. Life has become so unpredictable, and maybe that’s exactly what we needed: predictability is boring.

Forgive me, Katherine Mansfield, for I have sinned.

Ben Jureidini

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11th December 2020

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Forgive me, Katherine Mansfield, for I have sinned. I thought I was being very clever, is all; I thought I was re-inventing the wheel, re-writing the short story. Katherine Mansfield, if I had not, sitting on the sofa in my great-aunt’s living room, surrounded by statuettes of frogs, read a letter from Flannery O’Connor to [English professor], I would have submitted for publication to this very paper an article suggesting your work to be a phenomenological rendering of both Einsteinian space-time and Sartre’s bad faith. Whilst I cannot imagine this being too devasting to your legacy, it would have been slander on a level worthy, perhaps, of incarceration. I have no business talking about Einstein, Katherine Mansfield!

I understand that this apology may require some context. Born into the New Zealand social elite of 1888, Katherine Mansfield would go on to rub shoulders with the English literary elite. Granted, this shoulder-rubbing occasionally tended towards shoulder shoving – “I thought her cheap and she thought me priggish,” wrote Virginia Woolf – but Mansfield’s impact on literature is undeniable: “and yet we were both compelled to meet simply to talk about writing.” Woolf, incidentally, was somewhat hung up on Mansfield’s smell: “I mean she could permeate one with her quality; and if one felt this cheap scent in it, it reeked in one’s nostrils.” Olfactory oddities aside, Mansfield’s “quality” was pretty much exclusively dedicated to short stories. It was her mastery of this genre that meant Mansfield was the topic of a Hilary Term essay on ‘The Modernist Short Story’ – it was either this or Dubliners and, having groped my way through Ulysses that Christmas the prospect of reading any more Joyce was offensive on a cellular level. The question I chose, priggishly, was ‘Discuss the Presentation of Space and/or Time.’ I apologise, Katherine Mansfield, I really do. The essay I would go on to write, and, reader, the article I had drafted and readied for this very publication, would, I see now, have Mansfield, alongside pretty much every other writer of fiction, willing to cross both space and time in order to beat me around the head with a copy of Crime and Punishment. Having read Bliss and Other Stories and The Garden Party and Other Stories, I took these two seminal texts and, through some pretentious undergraduate alchemy, managed to come out with:

In light of Joseph Frank’s argument that short stories are organised through spatial form, whereby webs of patterned images construct meaning rather than logical, coherent, and temporal plot movement, and WJT Mitchell’s notion of ‘spatiality’, whereby the short story is structured around the space of the world, the space of temporal moments, and the spatial ‘map of the possible hypotheses for the structures of meaning a text might contain’, it becomes clear that Mansfield associates this sense of existential liminality with her depictions of space.

Try reading that in one breath, I dare you. It most definitely does not become clear. With a sentence as bloated as an Aldi three-bird roast dinner, and with equal literary merit, this theorisation, problematisation, and various other thumbscrew-like -isation words, sucks every ounce of emotion, every ounce of bliss, from Mansfield’s work, reducing her to academic jargon and what I’m sure is a painful misunderstanding of theoretical physics. I confess this was the main thrust of what used to be this article. I confess I went into that tutorial thinking I’d pretty much sussed the short story. I confess I stood by the phrase ‘existential liminality’. This is where Flannery O’Connor comes in.

A titan of the form herself, O’Connor received a letter from an English professor who, having discussed “A Good Man is Hard to Find” with his undergraduate class, wrote to the author with some questions:

“Bailey, we further believe, identifies himself with the Misfit and so plays two roles in the imaginary last half of the story. But we cannot, after great effort, determine the point at which reality fades into illusion or reverie. Does the accident literally occur, or is it part of Bailey’s dream? Please believe me when I say we are not seeking an easy way out of our difficulty.”

O’Connor, to her credit, replied: “The interpretation,” she wrote, “of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intention as it could get to be.” Her writing, she tells the professor, is not an academic exercise in abnormal psychology. She cautions against reducing fiction to a “research problem”, for which “any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious”. “Where feeling for a story is absent,” she warns us, “theory will not supply it.” Joseph Frank’s spatial form, WJT Mitchell’s spatiality, Sartre’s existentialism, nor Einstein’s whatever are necessary to describe why Mansfield’s stories are so enchanting. Mansfield herself already has.

Can you ever forgive me, Katherine Mansfield? let me try to make some kind of amends for this disfigurement of your work. There is an abundance of theory on what makes a short story a short story: it is not, apparently, by virtue of not being long. I really, really hope, however, that spatiality and spatial form are all that describe the form. The clue, I think lies in the titles of these collections: and other stories. These are not novels, cannibalistic behemoths culminating, apparently, in Joyce’s Ulysses, but stories. Like a bundle of fairy stories, these brief descriptions of a journey, or a moment, or a party, are ephemeral, to be read in one sitting. Mansfield’s stories are not comforting by any means, they are often disturbing, following a character coming to terms with the realisation that the world might be a nastier place than they once thought. This process of learning, of confronting ageing, heartbreak, and death for the first time, of understanding that wolves and men lurk in the shadows of seaside villages, is a pre-cursor to Angela Carter’s bombastic The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. Whilst these tales are more overtly rooted in fairy stories, albeit it with the x-rated content magnified, they look back to Mansfield’s portrayal of a Cinderella silently terrified of the ball that marks her first step into adulthood, or two (step)sisters coming to terms with what meaning life has after the death of their father.

The phrase Bliss and Other Stories reminds us to view our own experiences as just that, to look at the ephemeral moments in our lives as tiny fairy stories. Try it, as an experiment: Making Toast and Other Stories, The Trip to the GP and Other Stories, Sitting on the Sofa for Eight Hours Straight because it’s Illegal to Leave the House and Other Stories. Garden parties, train journeys, sitting in the park being a bit sad, Mansfield turns moments into miniature fairy tales. She is, naturally, aware that this can’t always work: the heart-wrenching Miss Brill is a six-page silent breakdown as an elderly woman realises her life is not a play; there is no script, and no one is watching. But there is something to be said for imbuing moments of your life with the watercolour intensity of a short story rather than the dodgy physics of a research problem: sometimes you really can be the main character. Do it for Katherine Mansfield.

La vita davanti a sé: Sex, death and Sophia Loren

Culture
Film

Kiri Ley

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8th December 2020

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La vita davanti a sé: Sex, death and Sophia Loren

Long time, no see! Sophia Loren, Italian star of ‘60s classics such as 1963’s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and 1964’s Marriage Italian Style, commands the screen in her son, Edoard Ponti’s new Neflix film, La vita davanti a sé (The Life Ahead) after a decade’s well-earnt rest from the camera.

It is clever casting. Loren is a renowned sex symbol, but her acting career has approached the female body and issues of sexuality with nuance. In the anthological Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow she portrayed an overrun, working-class, Neopolitan mother of many (many, many) children; an elegant member of the Milanese bourgeoisie engaging in a marital affair; and a Roman prostitute, all in the same film, but her Academy-Award winning performance came in a lesser-known, grittier release several years beforehand.

La Ciociara (1960 ‘Two Women’) centres on the rape of a Roman businesswoman and her teenage daughter. They flee to the mother’s rural home from the bombing of Rome in the Second World War, to find that violation rather than refuge awaits them there.

So Loren has depth. Her profile spans female sensuality, yes, but also the fierce protectiveness of motherhood and the brutality of trauma.

All these elements unite perfectly in her depiction of Madame Rosa, an Auschwitz survivor and retired prostitute, in Edoard Ponti’s adaptation of Romain Gary’s 1975 novel, La vie devant soi. A photograph of the iconic young Loren features in La vita davanti a sé, but Loren’s weary, wise Madame is far more arresting.

La vita davanti a sé is streaming on Netflix after Covid concerns prevented its release in cinemas. Ponti’s decision to shift the French story to an Italian setting and context is an interesting and risky one. Holocaust survival is a more frequent theme in French artistic culture than it is in Italy. La vie devant soi was first adapted as a French film, Madame Rosa (1977, d. Moshé Mizrahi), and these resonances continue in the recent Italian release.

But the shift works. As does the concept of Madame Rosa’s creche for the children of local prostitutes, transferred from post-war Paris to Bari, a coastal town in the southern Italian region of Puglia.

The film is a meeting of traumas rather than the retelling of the aftermath of a singular experience. Madame Rosa’s presumed PTSD from her imprisonment, accompanied by a decline into old age (perhaps Alzheimer’s), is preceded and juxtaposed by joint protagonist, Momo’s, history.

Newcomer Ibrahima Gueye is spectacular as the Senegalese orphan who turns to drug-dealing for a sense of autonomy and community after being shunted through the Italian care(less) system. His mother, another prostitute, is implied to have been murdered by Momo’s father after she decided to stop her sex-work.

We are not kept in the dark about these tragedies, but La vita davanti a sé’s timeline tracks the period of reconstruction following loss, rather than the dreadful grind towards crisis. It draws here on the key principle of Trauma Studies: that trauma is first processed, and therefore experienced, after the event has occurred. The understanding that Madame Rosa and Momo build together after a rocky start embodies Cathy Caruth’s message that history ‘[…] is never simply one’s own […] history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas’. The same statement could, in fact, be applied to La Ciociara.

It would make sense, then, that Ponti’s creation is heavily Freudian. Lost and rediscovered parents crop up all over the place. Momo has lost his mother, but finds an alternative in Madame Rosa; as does Iosif, the child of another prostitute who endures a long separation from his mother before she comes back for him; Lola is a prostitute who is reunited with her estranged father after he asks to meet his grandchild, Babu. It is through allowing Momo to finally be a child that, ironically, the parent-child roles are reversed and Momo cares for Madame Rosa in her decline.

That’s not all. Sex and death structure the film, with its framework provided by prostitution and the looming threat of Madame Rosa’s demise. Madame Rosa retreats to tunnels underneath her apartment block in order to reflect, using them as a safe space. Ponti suggests that the character feels most secure in her subconscious, the place where most of us fear to go.

These structural Freudian elements are elegant: but some other features are overdone. It seems too much of a coincidence that (the presumably Jewish) Dr. Cohen bears more than a passing physical resemblance to Sigmund Freud. Momo’s subconscious desire for affection and protection is symbolised by a CGI lioness; in the leagues of computer-generated clumsiness, it is second only to Katniss Everdeen’s horrific baby closing Mockingjay: Part Two.

La vita davanti a sé’s strength lies not in its subtlety, however, but in its simplicity. The cast shines brighter for being small. At a time when the future is particularly uncertain, and the longer-term psychiatric effects of Covid-19 are receiving more media coverage, the film’s emphasis on trauma, and on that which lies ahead, strikes home. Covid does not feature at all in the film, so it is an interesting overanalysis to point out that the two protagonists are elderly (Madame Rosa) and Black (Momo) respectively, representing two of the demographics most at risk of contracting the virus.

We close on the image of a pathway and the tones of Laura Pausini’s song, ‘Io sì’: ‘Non lo so, io, che destino è il tuo’, ‘I do not know what your future is’.

Cheesy? Absolutely. True? Completely. As is the major take-away: that we are by nature connected, and we cannot help but rely on each other as we go on surviving.

The HAPPIEST SEASON to be queer

Culture
Film

Lily Sheldon

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8th December 2020

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With Christmas comes family and with family comes movies. It’s that time to cuddle up cosy on the sofa and watch yet another Reese Witherspoon or Emma Thompson Christmas movie and wonder how they are still churning out Santa-centric plotlines after so many years on the big screen. These movies are classic because they hit home right when we’re in our homes drawing on themes of family, fights, food and friends. But the most common, most cringe worthy and most nostalgic theme, is that of romantic love.

But romantic love for who?

Love Actually, the most famous of Christmas films, presents us with ten different “complex” romantic love stories. You have your hopeless romantic in Colin Firth, you have your interracial relationship in Kiera Knightley and Chiwetel Ejiofor, you have your nostalgic young love story in Thomas Brodie-Sangster and we mustn’t be forget your inappropriate arsehole who we love anyway romantic in Hugh Grant. The movie, supposedly, presents us with ten different pairings from all walks of life. Accept, of course, from those walks of life happen to not be *gasps* heterosexual.

The invisibility of LGBTQ+ romance stories in Christmas movies is another theme which links them all together. Whether it’s Kate Winslet’s straight romance in The Holiday or Emilia Clarke’ in Last Christmas, a non-straight person would be lucky if they saw themselves portrayed as an extra trailing behind Reese Witherspoon when she’s running away from a various cheating boyfriend in one of the classics. We have been living in a cinematic reality where it has been deemed more palatable to watch an oversized, magical elf-man who grew up in the north pole come home for Christmas for the first time and fall in love with Zoe Deschanel, then it is to see a same sex couple as the protagonists in a romantic festive story.

That is until the release of Happiest Season this Christmas. Happiest Season takes place in Pittsburgh. The plot revolves around Harper Caldwell, played by Mackenzie Davis, bringing home her girlfriend Abby Holland, played by Kristen Stewart, for Christmas. Abby is considering proposing to Harper this holiday season. It sounds pretty typical so far: romance, food, family… until Abby learns that Harper has not yet come out to her family. And so Abby spends Christmas at Harper’s being shoved back into the closet, only this time it’s a closet situated in her girlfriend’s childhood bedroom.

The movie taps into the complexities of being in a homosexual relationship at a heterosexual holiday time of year. Christmas is about family, but when your family doesn’t know who you really are it’s about deceit and the choice between self-acceptance at the potential cost of familial love or continuously spinning lies that you’ve wanted for so many years to be true.

Unlike much of cinema, the Happiest Season does not settle for having an overtly, stereotypically gay couple as the side characters, but it rather depicts a lipstick lesbian (femme presenting) romance. Much like Santana and Brittany in Glee or George in the show ‘Feel Good’, Happiest season is expanding the representation of Lesbianism to mean something more than the ‘Butch’ archetype. Movies like Happiest Season and TV shows like Feel Good are additionally challenging the determinist idea that people are stuck with, and know for sure about their sexuality from a young age. Instead it introduces the concept of sexuality being a spectrum, with Harper in Happiest Season and George in Feel Good growing up liking boys and then getting serious with a girl. The movie therefore introduces a protagonist who is flexible in their sexuality, a direct challange to the older generation’s fixed conventions.

Christmas time serves as a daunting, periodic reminder for us to think about who we were “Last Christmas” and who we have become this Christmas against the static backdrop of a family Christmas dinner. We are therefore forced into reflection over what we’re doing with our lives and who we’re doing in our lives. There is a reason that so many movies and TV shows either premier, end or centre around Christmas. In Emma Thompson’s film Last Christmas this translates as Katarina reassessing her attitudes towards her job and life. In the coming of age movie Let It Snow a range of teenagers have to confront their romantic intrigues. Life queries at Christmas dominate cinema and have traditionally promoted the conventions of nostalgic hetero-sexual nuclear family dynamics. Happiest Season is working to change that convention.

Cinema has always served as a type of socialisation, guidance to our subconscious as to what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour and what is acceptable and unacceptable love. Therefore, Kristen Stewart has certainly outdone herself in re-guiding our subconscious away from the Team Edward or Team Jacob dichotomy and towards an organic twenty first century romance that many need to be exposed to. Thank the gay gods that she is no longer entertaining that scary vampire-werewolf Twilight romantic triangle but is in fact engaging in something which, in cinematic history, has been seen as far more scary and unnatural then kissing a werewolf: a lesbian relationship.

Perhaps, after watching Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis’ love story develop, that 16 year old girl questioning her sexuality in Liverpool will not ask Santa to be straight for Christmas for the tenth time in a row. But, instead, with Kristen Stewart’s side-parting in her subconscious, will rather ask Santa for something just a bit more scientifically sound, something just a bit more achievable, something that is love, actually.

A Worm on What If

Anna Roberts

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8th December 2020

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A little worm slimes its way through the grass and the bracken, and looks up to the sky. Learned in the classics and, indeed, abreast of current ‘pop cultural’ events, his little brain cycles around his slimy head. A delicate chain bobs around his neck (his neck being the whole length of his body, which is just one long neck really); he bought it after watching Normal Worms. Maybe if he looked like worm-Connell, he imagines, things would have been different. Maybe worm-Sharon wouldn’t have left him for worm-Darren. But, he reflects, there is no point in ruminating on the what-ifs. After all, worm-Darren will have to put up with worm-Sharon’s obsession with true crime documentaries now, not him. Still, though, what if?

What if, when the leaves turn green in the spring they brought with them a scent of fresh apple, and the dappled light through the green leaves was apple-dappled green? Wouldn’t the stream that ran through the rocks that your grandparents showed you, with the stones that hop across like a passage to Fairyland, smell beautiful if it was apple-dappled in the growing light of a pregnant spring? If the beams of great Phoebus lit up apple-green leaves and when the moon rose the smell lingered like a beautiful pre-Covid breath on the air, wouldn’t you look back on the apple-green spring days and covet them in your head when you were forty-years-old and tired?

And what if, when Orpheus went to the underworld, the age-old ague of uncertainty had not plagued him because he could smell, so very close to the surface of the world, the apple-green smell of Persephone? Wouldn’t the nights (apple-scent lingering but fading) feel far safer if his lover was not, as she is as we speak right now, in hell?

But what if, when every year at apple-time (as spring would come to be known) the apple-smell appeared, everyone would feel sick and would moan at the apple-smell and the dappled-appled light? Would people sneeze and would their noses drip when the apple-smell stung their eyes? Would we curse those apple-smelled months and wish the dappled light of the green-leaf springtime were un-appled?

Such is the nature of a haunting what-if. Conjecture is the bane of a life lived in the world: we must, like Orpheus, live in a now that is dappled by the strength of what is.

The worm shakes his slimy little head. ‘But what do I know?’ he asks, and utters the age-old maxim:

‘I’m just a worm’.

The perfect vegetarian Christmas

Food

Emily Urquhart

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8th December 2020

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British Christmas dinners tend to be quite meat heavy, and can cause a lot of tension for vegetarian family members as the festive season rolls around. The discovery of the Macsween Veggie Haggis (which is in fact vegan) has entirely revolutionised my experience of roast dinners. A source of consistent deliciousness, a veggie haggis leaves nut roasts in its wake. Made primarily of oats, seeds, kidney beans, carrots, onions and lentils, a veggie haggis is free from any unmentionable cuts of meat which understandably put people off traditional haggis.

Waitrose seems to be the only shop that consistently stocks veggie haggis, but don’t be put off by a reputation for bougie prices; a Macsween Haggis usually costs less than £4 and can feed three to four people. As a vegetarian roast it seems almost insulting to refer to the veggie haggis as merely an ‘alternative’ to traditional meats. The veggie haggis should indeed gain a position as a roasted staple around the British dinner table; cheap, healthy, easy to cook and universally delectable.

Paired with a caramelised onion gravy, roasted potatoes and veg I find myself free of a yearning for tender turkey or pigs in blankets at Christmas time. Haggises (haggi?…) can be cooked easily in the oven and even microwaved, making it a cheap and easy option for plant-based roasts.

Gravy at the Christmas dinner table is, of course, absolutely vital. Since becoming a vegetarian I have made it my mission to perfect a vegetarian gravy. Though I firmly believe that no two gravies should be the same, below I’ve laid out how I usually throw together a gravy in what can loosely be described as a recipe.

Emily’s Idiosyncrasy Gravy

Ingredients – don’t worry if you don’t have some of these things, gravies can be somewhat made up as you go along!

Onions (1 or 2, finely chopped)
Mushrooms (a large handful, finely chopped)
Sugar
Butter
Veggie gravy granules
Marmite
Garlic
Salt
Ketchup
Wine

Method

Soften the onions and mushrooms in the pan with some butter and a little sugar.
Mix a couple of teaspoons of gravy granules with some boiling water (I find a big mug is good to do this in) and add in a teaspoon of marmite, pour this in with the caramelised mushrooms and onions.
Add in crushed garlic/garlic powder/garlic paste and season with salt and pepper.
Add in a little ketchup and some wine (red, white or even pink works!) and leave to boil for a while.
You can use a hand blender to make the gravy smooth and add in more granules/water mixture if the gravy needs to be thicker.
Other tasty things that can go into gravy include mustard seeds, fruit jam, vegetable water – basically whatever yummy bits are laying around the kitchen!

I’d always recommend making large amounts of gravy, not only because it’s completely scrumptious, but also because it is the perfect condiment to Boxing Day haggis potato cakes. Mash up any leftover potato and mix with any veggie haggis you didn’t scoff on Christmas day, add an egg if needed to bind the mixture together and shape into little potato cakes. While you fry the haggis cakes some of the seeds and lentils can pop and jump in the pan like tiny pieces of popcorn.

Emily’s favourite veggie Christmas dinner

In Conversation with Colin Wilson

Sasha Mills

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8th December 2020

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In September, it was announced that in the journal Nature that phosphine had been discovered in the atmosphere of Venus, sparking a debate about the possibility of life on the planet. Dr Colin Wilson of the Oxford department of Physics cautions that the question of life on Venus is not necessarily a simple one.

“Its interpretation needs to be somewhat nuanced. And it’s never as simple as the presence of phosphine means life.”

Phosphine is a biomarker, which means that it is considered a sign of possible life. This is because, on Earth, much of the phosphine in the atmosphere is made via biological processes. “Most of the phosphine, almost all the phosphine found in the atmosphere comes from biological sources. So because it’s from anoxic environments, you get it formed in the gut. You get it formed in swamps, away from the air.”

Still, “there are lots of other ways you can get phosphine. So other sources of phosphine in the Earth’s atmosphere include the breakdown of phosphorus containing dust and minerals, possibly some kinds of volcanism. You can also have lightning breaking down atmospheric phosphine containing molecules and having phosphine as a by-product.”

“It’s only by eliminating all other abiotic forms of production of phosphine that we would be able to conclude that phosphine [on Venus] is produced by life.”

“Even eliminating all the abiotic forms of producing phosphine wouldn’t be enough because life as we know it cannot exist on Venus either. So before saying it must be life, you’d have to find the kind of life which could be producing it.”

Even the presence of phosphine on Venus is contested. “One of the first things we have to do as a science community is follow up on that detection to try to see whether it’s repeatable as a detection. Lots and lots of corroborating observations are going on as we speak from various telescopes on Earth.” So far, the researchers have already found a processing error in their original data. They say that while the phosphine signal is still present, it’s fainter than before.

Dr Wilson’s work focuses on the three primary candidates for life in our solar system: Venus, Mars, and Titan, one of Jupiter’s moons. Atmospheric physics, his field of science, is one filled with both potential risks and challenges.

“I did my PhD here in Oxford working on the wind sensor for Beagle to Mars Lander, UK Mars Lander, which went to Mars in 2003. Unfortunately, that Mars Lander crashed and I managed to get that same wind sensor on the next European Mars lander, which went in 2016. And unfortunately, that crashed as well. So this illustrates certainly some of the high risk nature of planetary exploration.”

“There’s a limit. Fundamentally, it’s a spatial resolution limit. It’s what you can tell. So we can tell sort of large scale weather patterns. But a lot of the details of what’s going on on the planet can’t be sensed from ground.”

The next step for many planetary scientists is to send an orbiter to the atmosphere of the planet, but often chemistry and composition still can’t be fully understood from that vantage point. The ultimate aim for scientists, then, is to get landers, rovers, and balloons onto the planets that they are studying.

The Titan Dragonfly mission, which Dr. Wilson is developing a wind sensor for, is aiming to do just that. The Dragonfly is a nuclear powered rotorcraft which is capable of flying to a new site on the moon every few weeks, and is currently set to launch in 2027.

“Titan is a world like no other. It has. It’s the only moon we know of in the solar system with a substantial atmosphere and the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen. So the only nitrogen rich atmosphere, which we know is the earth, really. And so Titan is another body like that.”

“It’s also [got] lots of organic chemistry. It’s got huge amounts of methane and ethane. You may raise your eyebrows thinking, you know, where do hydrocarbons come from on earth? It’s sort of fossil fuels, decaying ancient forests. So we don’t think that’s where Titan’s hydrocarbons have come from.”

An area for investigation, then, is the origin of these hydrocarbons. “In some ways, this is an ideal laboratory for understanding sort of prebiotic chemistry, the organic chemistry stages you go through before you get to life.”

Other bodies in our solar system are often gateways to furthering our knowledge of things here on Earth. Dr. Wilson has also been involved in a proposal known as EnVision Venus, which sets out to explore the geological character of the planet. In the past, he worked on the Venus Express, an orbiter focused on the atmosphere of the planet. “But actually, some of the most intriguing and tantalising results it sent back were about current geological activity on the surface”

“It’s covered in volcanoes. There may be a million volcanoes or more on Venus and lots of rifts and signs of tectonic activity. We have a global map of the surface showing all this, but it was effectively a static picture obtained in the early 90s by one of the first planetary radar missions. And we don’t know whether any of these volcanoes are active today.”

“Why do we care about this? Well, it’s like a parallel earth. It’s the same size as Earth, made of the same sort of materials formed around […] the same amount of time ago. But it’s evolved really differently with this huge greenhouse effect.”

“The science is split […] between whether Venus used to be Earth-like and inhabitable with liquid water oceans in the past, or whether its evolution bypassed that stage of being nice and clement and inhabitable. And so our investigations of its geological state should tell us that difference, whether it was once an earth-like planet.”

Coming back to the question of life on Venus, it is some of these very conditions that make life on the planet a complex issue. “The surface of Venus is up at four hundred fifty degrees centigrade or so. So nothing, nothing is going to survive there.”

“Even life adapted for other environments is going to have difficulties because really most life as we know it, or as we can conceive of it, needs liquid to mediate the interactions between different parts of the cell and so on.”

Life on Venus, then, would not necessarily be life as we’re used to seeing it. “People have been talking about life surviving in the clouds, because as you go up in altitude, as on earth, the temperatures drop. And by the time you’re 50 to 60 kilometres above the earth, above the planet’s surface, you have environments which are rather pleasant, rather comfortable even.”

“I don’t think anyone [is] suggesting that you’d have birds or condors soaring around because it takes great big evolutionary processes to get to that stage. So we’re probably looking at bacteria.”

“Some of the very, very earliest rocks we can find on Earth already bear the signs of life having evolved very soon after the Earth became habitable as an environment for billions of years. […] So that tends to suggest that it’s maybe it’s quite easy to create single celled, single cellular life, relatively easy.”

Still, Dr. Wilson seems to think that the most likely version of Venus with life is one that no longer exists. “I think that the places most likely to form some sort of life would be possibly ancient Mars and ancient Venus, because there are strong suggestions that both of them were once more habitable in their climates.” With no orbiters currently able to confirm phosphorus directly from the planet, it might be a while before we hear more on the subject.

‘Buying Myself Back’: Emily Ratajkowski and the Male Gaze

Opinion

Zobia Haq

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6th December 2020

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‘Buying Myself Back’: Emily Ratajkowski and the Male Gaze

Emily Ratajkowski’s essay published in September, entitled ‘Buying Myself Back: When does a model own her image’ is a beautifully written piece tracing her increasing awareness of and struggles with the stark insistence of others in holding a claim to her image. A claim to their own version of Emily, as she calls it, asserted by photographers, artists, and ex-boyfriends alike. In the essay, she details her sexual assault by photographer Jonathan Leder, at her first and only shoot with him in 2012, when Ratajkowski was 20 and Leder was 40 years old. Leder later published several books of her nude Polaroids without her consent, and without informing her.

There was one detail that stuck with me long after reading Ratajkowski’s words: her innate feeling of being visible. She writes that, when Leder picked her up from the bus station to go to his house for the shoot, she remembers “feeling watched, aware of our proximity and my body and how I might appear from his driver’s seat.” The exhausting feeling of being watched is one that I believe is familiar to most women. In 1972, sociologist John Berger published ‘Ways of Seeing’, a book based on his BBC television series, where he explored what it means to see, and the relation between the art of gazing and the establishing of our place in the surrounding world. He writes:

“To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men…A woman must continually watch herself…Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually…And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman…Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.”

Is my shirt rumpling up as I sit down? Do I look sloppy as I eat my sandwich on the tube, eyes to the floor, shameful, for daring to do such a thing in public? A distinct picture of the tiny wrinkle that appears between my eyebrows when I frown, emerges in the back of my mind almost simultaneously to the frown flooding my face. Such images, questions and checks accompany women almost constantly throughout the day, myself included, until I reach home and shut the door – and even then, I am somewhere dimly and instinctively aware of my silhouette as I hunch over, head bowed, to make an evening cup of tea.

The problem with feeling so visible, with a constant running stream of scrutiny in your head, is that it leads you to start doubting your credibility. I am female; I am different; therefore, am I wrong? Ratajkowski in her essay describes wanting to “impress” her disdainful photographer. She describes explaining to him that modelling “was just about making money” for her, an insistence that she wasn’t “dumb”, that she knew “modelling has its expiration date”, and that her true intention was to save money to “go back to school or start making art” – an explanation that she “was used to defining myself with…to men especially.” When Leder dismisses this ambition, stating that she would never be able to save enough money as “you girls always end up spending too much money on shoes and bags”, Ratajkowski doubts herself and starts believing him despite not even in the habit of buying expensive bags. “What if he was right? What if at the end of this I really would have nothing?” This is symptomatic of a society that ridicules women for being women, that insidiously makes women insecure simply for assuming the connotations that come with being a woman. Leder, at another moment in the shoot, also sneers at Ratajkowski for being “’obsessed’” with Instagram when she turned to open her phone. How ironic, then, that he first posts his prized Polaroids of her on that very same medium.

When the feeling of self-consciousness and visibility is synonymous with experiences as a woman, this opens the door not only to doubting your own credibility, but to allow others to also doubt it for you. If a woman commits the crime of being ‘sexy’, her sexuality becomes all-defining, the essence of her very being, and consequently is used to perversely negate her capacity to ever be sexually assaulted. When Leder heard of Ratajkowski’s allegations against him, he dismissed them not by defending himself but by describing the ‘type’ of girl she supposedly is: “You do know who we are talking about right? This is the girl that was naked in Treats! Magazine, and bounced around naked in the Robin Thicke video at that time. You really want someone to believe she was a victim?” And here, I think, is the most devastating aspect of this lived ordeal: existing as a woman in a patriarchy, where the male gaze intrudes on all areas of life, completely delegitimises your experience in favour of any man’s definition of you. This toxic undercurrent to issues of consent is what leads to police confiscating phones of sexual assault victims in order to pass judgement on their private life, and to female and male commentors alike on Instagram claiming that the fact that Leder published a book of nude Polaroids without Ratajkowski’s consent doesn’t matter, because she could have just kept “’her clothes on’”.

And this is pervasive throughout society: I am reminded of Jimmy Kimmel’s 2009 interview with Megan Fox, another woman revered and reviled for being ‘sexy’, where she shares her experience of being sexualised and sexually exploited as a 15-year-old on the set of Bad Boys II. Kimmel responds with a crass joke and the insinuation that all men would have sexual fantasies of an underage Megan Fox. Another reminder is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘scandalous’ leaked video, intended to humiliate her as she was sworn in as the youngest ever US congresswoman in 2019, which depicts her simply dancing on a roof in college. Writer Rebecca Solnit relates that such acts are intended to give a stark warning to any woman wanting to publicly achieve: “You thought you were a mind, but you’re a body, you thought you could have a public life, but your private life is here to sabotage you, you thought you had power so let us destroy you.”

What can we do to remove the male gaze from our lives and imagination, and move forward into a world where being attractive, working, or dancing on a roof, whilst simultaneously a woman, are not inherently offensive? I’m not sure. Ratajkowski wonders: “what does true empowerment even feel like? Is it feeling wanted? Is it commanding someone’s attention?”

She describes Leder publishing the book of her revealing Polaroids without her consent as a “violation”, the “using and abusing” of her image for profit. In a tweet at the time, she decried the act as a perfect example against what she stands for: “women choosing when and how they want to share their sexuality and bodies”. What is striking is her emphasis on the amount of attention she naturally paid to her violation as it happened. She staged a “very public protest” at the book’s publication, and shares how she looked him up occasionally thereafter, checking in on a part of herself, the part “he now owned”: “it was intoxicating to see what he’d done with this part of me he’d stolen”.

With time and distance, Ratajkowski recalls feeling a “deep twinge of shame” at her “posturing” and her desire to impress the photographer with highbrow talk of art-making and culture, as he subtly and disdainfully dismissed her. By promising herself that she “wouldn’t look him up anymore”, she begins the work of reclaiming her image. Despite the multiple reprints of his book, posing as high art so long as it bears his name as the creator, and despite contemplating the possibility of draining herself to entangle him in a legal lawsuit, she concedes that expending her resources on Leder would not be “money well spent”. Perhaps this is what real empowerment is: a focus, however taxing to maintain, on one’s image as whole, and not on the fragment that was stolen long ago. Whilst Leder will run out of his “crusty Polaroids”, Ratajkowski will forever remain as the “real Emily”.

As you consider these questions for yourself, read Ratajkowski’s essay. Here is an example of a woman who has sought to reclaim her image, deafen her quiet inner second-guessing by speaking out loud, and as she puts it, “carve out control where she can find it.”

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