Cal McCaffrey (Simm) has just spent six episodes leading his team of reporters through the labyrinth to nail down the story — a complex stitch of relationships based on greed, power, sex, murder, and all the other venal sins that fuel journalism. Battered to his core, McCaffrey makes his way down into the belly of his newspaper office — to the press room, where tomorrow’s broadsheets flump out fresh-printed and newborn to be scattered across the doorsteps of London. That’s the completion of McCaffrey’s own story, when the story goes out the door in tangible, material form.

That image, of papers rolling off the press, was beginning to feel quaint in 2003, at least in the U.S. Maybe Britain, with its long dysfunctional relationship with its newspapers (as played out in the News of the World scandal), holds a different regard for the print product, so that image meant something different (eternal?) for viewers when the series originally went to air. Or maybe not. Maybe series writer/creator Paul Abbott and director David Yates (later to helm the Harry Potter films) meant the flow of print off the press to be seen as ironic, a last gasp, a dagger flung from newspapering’s deathbed.

There is not one mention in Abbott/Yates’ “State of Play” about the Internet, blogs, aggregators — some of these terms were still years from popular use. There’s an incriminating e-mail, but it’s printed out, and nobody’s even bothering to Google anybody when they want to find dirt. Instead, they’re cajoling, flirting, working short cons, archive-diving, buying off sources, even, yes, bugging hotel rooms and wearing wires. (Three of the things that separate British journalism from the American version: the casual, even reckless *coughNewsCorpcough* attitude toward covert surveillance; the arcane libel laws that handcuff legitimate and bloodsucking investigators alike; and the government’s leverage to restrain publication through the D-Notice, officially renamed the DA-Notice twenty years ago.) We’re led to believe the journalistic ecosystem is still quite healthy, with no predators large enough or parasites insinuative enough to cull the herd.

Compare that to the Hollywood big-screen adaptation of 2009, in which the central journalist’s main conflict is with an on-staff blogger, and more egregiously, we’re asked to believe that Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck are former college roommates.

Note the difference in dynamic: Crowe has no team, he has a partner/acolyte. McCaffrey is lead reporter on his story, but he’s one of many, each exercising a particular set of skills and strengths. The drama of a press run starting up — or being stopped — is undermined in the blog-oriented world by the fact that most news reported by American papers now appears online first, even if it’s accompanied by a traditional print edition later. An iconic visual pivot point in the journalism narrative, which in films since the 1930s has always landed like a gut punch, is now an afterthought.

“State of Play” has its antecedents in real life, and it cleverly inverts elements of the Profumo affair — the single biggest newspaper story in Britain’s history, the one by which all other political scandals are measured. Instead of sleeping with the Cabinet minister and perhaps passing intel to the Soviet Navy, the woman at the center of the scandal is sleeping with the MP and definitely passing intel to the oil conglomerate that stands to benefit from inside knowledge. Instead of Jamaican drug dealers whose missteps break the story open, we have a West Indian bystander accused of drug dealing, turned into a patsy to further sinister interests. And so on. McCaffrey and his team must apply pressure at various levels of London society — cops, socialites, working class families, administrative secretaries — to force the whole story to congeal. And their central Profumo figure (David Morrissey) is as frail and conflicted as any of them … no easy figurehead to topple.

All of it is a reminder that journalism is, at its core, about people. The human story is made of humans’ stories, whether it’s reported by newsprint or blog or bloody Morse code, and the truth is never found at the top. “State of Play” is about muckrakers — people as dirty as the epithet implies — without whom the topsoil would never be turned. Newspapers, in their ideal form, were the medium in which they best fulfilled that function. Time, technology, and economics have outrun both the truth and the fiction. —30—

(My favorite character in all of this? Insectile newspaper lawyer Adam Greene, played by Christopher Simpson. So still and calculating as to be dangerous, he’s exactly the attorney you want on retainer if your article proves explosive enough to topple Westminster. And Simpson is a damn fine actor.)

The Clash — The Leader
The Verlaines — Writing on the Wall 

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You had to wonder whether he got his name in the manuscript somehow. J.R.R. Tolkien, already partial to names like “Undómiel,” “Celeborn” and “Éowyn,” would surely have found cause to pay tribute to Rayner Unwin in such an encoded way: He owed the man not one, but two great debts for his career.

“All I remember about the start of The Hobbit,” the Oxford don Tolkien wrote to W.H. Auden, ”is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On a blank leaf I scrawled: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ I did not and do not know why. I did nothing about it, for a long time, and for some years I got no further than the production of Thror’s Map. But it became The Hobbit in the early 1930s, and was eventually published not because of my own children’s enthusiasm (though they liked it well enough), but because I lent it to the then Rev. Mother of Cherwell Edge when she had flu, and it was seen by a former student who was at that time in the office of Allen and Unwin. It was I believe tried out on Rayner Unwin; but for whom when grown up I think I should never have got the Trilogy published.”

That letter was written in 1955, two years after The Lord of the Rings was published by Unwin’s father’s firm. George Allen & Unwin was a small press by most standards, specializing in philosophical works by Bertrand Russell and other thinkers, but in 1937 it had rolled the dice on The Hobbit largely on 10-year-old Rayner Unwin’s erudite endorsement.

By the time Tolkien got the Trilogy out, it was not a trilogy but a thick, hard knot of a book, unpublishable at a cover price less than $44 in today’s U.S. terms. Talking the don into a three-parter was Rayner’s job. (Tolkien liked the idea of six books.) In terms of story, as critic Anthony Lane puts it, Tolkien was indeed “inventing one of the most successful commercial formulas that publishing possesses, and establishing the foundation of the modern fantasy industry.” But for his part, the young Unwin was enhancing that formula by spreading the epic across multiple books. Without three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, we wouldn’t have (for better or worse) fourteen volumes of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, three volumes of R. Scott Bakker’s The Prince of Nothing, or four volumes of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.

(I’m not certain, but given the text of some of Tolkien’s letters to Unwin [.pdf only], the publishing executive may have contributed to the individual trilogy titles too. Some of Tolkien’s suggested titles — “I The Shadow Grows II The Ring in the Shadow III The War of the Ring” — are pretty abysmal.)

Rayner Unwin didn’t become head of George Allen & Unwin until his father Stanley’s death in 1968. Tolkien remembered his debt, and returned small favors when he could: In 1969, he helped Rayner’s daughter complete a school report. Unwin proved a good overseer, but the firm’s size, and consultant efforts to expand it, proved its downfall. Like most publishers with weak market placement but valuable print assets, Allen & Unwin was bought out in a process Rayner called “messy, depressing, and, at times, outrageous for those at the receiving end.”

In his own writing life, Unwin too was a fan of adventure, of the real-world kind. A Winter Away From Home examines the icebound season Willem Barentsz spent in the Arctic in the 16th century. If John Ronald Reuel Tolkien didn’t write Rayner Unwin into his epic, he nonetheless thought of his publisher and adviser in epic terms. “I am singularly fortunate in having such a friend,” he wrote in a 1967 letter. “I feel, if I may say so, that our relations are like that of Rohan and Gondor, and (as you know) for my part the oath of Eorl will never be broken, and I shall continue to rely on and be grateful for the wisdom and courtesy of Minas Tirith. Thank you very much indeed.”

And because of Unwin, Tolkien had epic adventures: “… I was very deeply moved by my brief meeting with the Queen, & our few words together,” he wrote to Unwin in 1972, the year before his death. “Quite unlike anything that I had expected.”

Wishbone Ash — Warrior
Cream — Tales of Brave Ulysses

Condo Fucks — This Is Where I Belong

“Did the costumes make it good?” Laurie (Silk Spectre) Juspeczyk asks Dan (Nite Owl) Dreiberg, in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. The two are reclining nude at the time, although their lovemaking began after a dramatic rescue in the full gear of their superhero identities. Dan’s answer — and the reader’s, if he or she is honest — is an emphatic, Molly Bloomian Yes.

Watchmen deconstructs the sexual component of costumed roleplaying in the same manner it deconstructs everything else about the practice. If Fredric Wertham was a crank, it implies, he also wasn’t far wrong. Because masks are in our nature; it’s externalizing them that’s deemed unnatural.

That’s part of why superheroes are special: they can do many things we can’t do, and among these is the expression of their inner selves through an outer costume. “Normal people” would never do that.

Except normal people do, all the time. Leaving aside those couples who keep their kinks entirely in the boudoir, this element of the forbidden is the driving force of any number of fetish subcultures, all of which grow more mainstream every day. If costumed sex weren’t becoming more acceptable, it’s doubtful Batman and Catwoman could do what they’ve apparently done in the latter’s self-titled series, rebooted to issue #1 in the DC Comics New 52 line.

The mask needn’t be visible. Simple roleplaying (something as commonplace as “Call me ‘Ashley’ tonight”) is a component of many people’s sex lives. We toy with this bending of identity precisely because it carries a component of danger.

The young man leaned toward the window, rolled it down, smiled, and asked, “Where are you headed, miss?” “Are you going to Bystritsa?” asked the girl, smiling flirtatiously at him. “Yes, please get in,” said the young man, opening the door. The girl got in and the car took off.

The young man and the girl know each other very well already, of course. Motoring off on a shared holiday in Milan Kundera’s short story “The Hitchhiking Game” (1969), they are simply pretending unfamiliarity to enliven a long car trip. As the miles roll on they drift farther and farther from their daylight selves, as unnamed to each other as they are to us, free to take on any identities they choose.

In freedom lies release, but also torment.

“… I’m getting out at Bystritsa.”
“And what if I get out with you?”
At those words the girl looked up at him and found that he looked exactly as she imagined him in her most agonizing hours of jealousy. She was alarmed at how he was flattering her and flirting with her (an unknown hitchhiker) and how becoming it was to him. Therefore she responded with defiant provocativeness, “What you you do with me, I wonder?”
“I wouldn’t have to think too hard about what to do with such a beautiful woman,” said the young man gallantly and at this moment he was once again speaking far more to his own girl than to the figure of the hitchhiker.

They are trapped, just like superheroes are — trapped by expectation, by their own strangeness to themselves, by the new power dynamics they create. And by the thrill of it all.

There’s no escape from a game. A team cannot flee from the playing field before the end of the match, chess pieces cannot desert the chessboard: the boundaries of the playing field are fixed. The girl knew that she had to accept whatever form the game might take, just because it was a game. She know that the more extreme the game became, the more it would be a game and the more obediently she would have to play it.

Self-concealment can yield a feeling of power. Call it the Great and Powerful Oz effect. You speak from behind a mask, and it’s someone else speaking, someone stronger, with less to lose. Like a superhero. That is a thrill on par, and perhaps intertwined, with sex.

Nick Yee, who has studied the psychology of MMORPG for 10 years, has found that gender-bending is a frequent phenomenon. According to his findings, which came from self-selected surveys conducted among Everquest players in 2001, men were more than twice as likely to gender-bend as women. Nearly 50% of men tried a different gender, as did nearly 25% of women. In fact, in the popular game World of Warcraft, a female avatar is more likely to be played by a male than by a female—the odds are 1 in 1.82 (54.9%) that a female in the game is being played by a male in real life. — BookOfOdds.com

Sometimes the mask we wear is us.

(UPDATE: I’d be remiss at this point not to link to Laura Hudson’s thoughtful piece on the kind of objectification and disempowerment some of the New 52 works represent. There’s a way to discuss sexuality and identity play that’s healthy and forthright; in my view, “Catwoman” #1 is not that way.)

Mari Wilson — Dance With A Stranger
Elvis Costello & The Attractions — The Imposter 

What else is going on: Over at Film Freak Central, my dual Blu-ray review
of Vera Cruz (1954) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) is online.

Dream lovers are wondrous things. In our thoughts, they grow magnified until perfected, until there is no simple way to tell their story anymore. They’re archetyped. Emmylou Harris, who has loved and lost in a manner that immortalizes her even while alive, has a mythologized dream of her own.

Last night I dreamed about you
I dreamed that you were older
You were looking like Picasso
With a scar across your shoulder
You were kneeling by the river
You were digging up the bodies
Buried long ago
Michelangelo

Last night I dreamed about you
I dreamed you were a pilgrim
On a highway out alone to find
The mother of your children
Who were still unborn and waiting
In the wings of some desire
Abandoned long ago
Michelangelo

The object of Harris’ 2000 gem “Michelangelo,” it’s already clear, is long gone. Protagonist-lovers who are “dreamed” are most often in the past. This one is described in terms of a seeker frozen in time, who didn’t live to become as old as the singer now envisions him, and who while present brimmed with potential that was never discharged.

Were you there at Armageddon?
Was Paris really burning?
Could I have been the one to pull you
From the point of no returning?
And did I hear you calling out my name?
Or was it forgotten long ago
Michelangelo

Last night I dreamed about you
I dreamed that you were riding
On a blood-red painted pony
Up where the heavens were dividing
And the angels turned to ashes
You came tumbling with them to the earth
So far below
Michelangelo

“This song came to me in a dream. I read a lot and I find myself very moved by language. There’s almost a direct steal in this lyric by Carl Sandburg. I just kinda rewrote it. One of my favorite things about the recording is that is that it is a one-take vocal with just the three of us on the track-Malcolm Burn, Ethan Johns, and me.”

She had a box
with a million red silk bandannas for him.
She gave them to him
one by one or by thousands,
saying then she had not enough for him.

She had languages and landscapes
on her lips and the end of her tongue,
landscapes of sunny hills and changing fogs,
of houses falling and people within falling,
of a left-handed man
who died for a woman who went out of her mind,
of a guitar player
who died with fingers reaching for strings … 

In the most explosive portion of her career, Emmylou Harris knew just such a guitar player.

Last night I dreamed about you
I dreamed that you lay dying
In a field of thorn and roses
With a hawk above you crying
For the warrior slain in battle
From an arrow driven deep inside you
Long ago
Michelangelo

Did you suffer at the end?
Would there be no one to remember?
Did you banish all the old ghosts
At the terms of your surrender?
And could you hear me calling out your name?
Well I guess that I will never know
Michelangelo

Harris has never explained the intent, if any, behind the song, and she’s played coy when asked publicly. It may not be about Gram Parsons at all. But dream lovers are made up of imagination and memory, and Parsons surely looms large in Harris’ memory, just as he does in ours.

Last night I dreamed about you
I dreamed that you were weeping
And your tears poured down like diamonds
For a love beyond all keeping
And you caught them one by one
In a million silk bandannas that I gave you
Long ago
Michelangelo

I read a Phil Kaufman quote: ‘If Gram hadn’t been married, then definitely something would have happened between the two of them.’ Do you think that’s true?

“Oh yeah. And if he hadn’t died. We were definitely moving that way. A couple of weeks before, I’d finally accepted the fact that I was in love with him. But, you know, why even tell him? I was going to see him in a few weeks. I had all the time in the world. And then he died, so I never even got to tell him.”

Emmylou Harris — Where Will I Be

Near the climax of the final film in his franchise, wizard/Chosen One Harry Potter awakens in a pure white space to commune with his slain mentor, Albus Dumbledore.

He is far from the first film hero to visit this chamber.

The protagonist, in the moment of great adversity, en route to completion of his destiny, may at some time find himself in the White Room. It is, if you will, sort of a Room of Requirement … an Antechamber of Secrets. It is the hinge on which the adventure turns, and the place where he is girded for the Last Battle.

In the White Room, time is suspended. If the story were a piece of music or a poem terms, this would be its caesura. There is no motion, no conflict, just a pure state of being, and the hero must be ready to arrive at this point, or the door is closed to him.

The white light of the skandha of form in its basic purity, the mirror-like wisdom, dazzling white, luminous and clear, will come towards you from the heart of Vajrasattva and his consort and pierce you so that your eyes cannot bear to look at it. … At that moment, do not be afraid of the sharp, brilliant, luminous and clear white light, but recognize it as wisdom. Be drawn to it with faith and longing, and supplicate it, thinking, ‘It is the light-ray of Blessed Vajrasattva’s compassion, I take refuge in it.’
— The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Fremantle & Trungpa translation

In the White Room, we meet with our elders or betters. Harry Potter colludes with the late Dumbledore one last time. Dave Bowman is a guest, interface, and tool for the fantastically advanced aliens who dispatched the Monolith. Percival meets the Grail King. The original “Battlestar Galactica” shows its Mormon roots with a lecture from creatures who might as well be angels.

And Black Elk comes to sit among the progenitors of his tribe.

Then as we walked, there was a heaped up cloud ahead that changed into a tepee, and a rainbow was the open door of it; and through the door I saw six old men sitting in a row.  … And the oldest of the Grandfathers spoke with a kind voice and said: “Come right in and do not fear.” And as he spoke, all the horses of the four quarters neighed to cheer me. So I went in and stood before the six, and they looked older than men can ever be — old like hills, like stars. The oldest spoke again: “Your Grandfathers all over the world are having a council, and they have called you here to teach you.”
— “Black Elk Speaks,” John G. Neihardt

• With black curtains

One must have died, to all physical intents and purposes, to visit the White Room. The man entering the chamber  is lost to the material world, after great trials and self-sacrifice.

But the White Room is not the endpoint. It’s a branching of ways, a stasis before either the final reward, or the return to a place among the living.

Limbo (“Borderland,” from Latin limbus or border) was a region borrowed from the pagans but put to a new use. Christian tradition came to include three Limbos. Limbo infantum was for unbaptized babies whom nobody (yet) was willing to consign to Hell though they could not, without the sacrament, go to Heaven; down the centuries there would be many theological attempts to rescue these innocents. Limbo patriarchum was for pre-Christians, particularly Old Testament patriarchs, and limbo paganum honored pagans like Plato who were disadvantaged in that they had enjoyed no opportunity to believe in Christ.
— “The History of Hell,” Alice K. Turner

Crucial knowledge is available here — the Grail secret, the explanation of your life’s meaning, the next step to fulfill your fate. Here you may become empowered and return to your world with fresh armor and sword — but you’re also granted a new challenge, one you may not wish to face.

• Near the station

As a transitional point, the White Room is tied to other realms while still apart from them. There is usually some passageway leading onward, which beckons; the harder step is moving backwards. Neo has a choice of doors, but Trinity’s at risk. Warren Beatty has a plane to catch, but he still hasn’t met Julie Christie. Harry Potter has the option of stepping on a train in his mind’s-eye version of King’s Cross station and never looking back.

But that’s not what heroes do. The adventure shapes the adventurer. The White Room is the quenching after the forge.

Mia Doi Todd — My Room is White (Dungeon Mix)

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You could as easily give him credit in his better-known public identity, Fatboy Slim, preeminent DJ and pop collagist. But I’m more interested in where the collage materials come from, and in Cook’s deeds as a curator of sorts.

A Break From the Norm, released in 2001, was Cook giving props to some of the songs that composed his musical palette. He seemed stung by criticism that his success with the monster 1999 dance hit “Praise You” was owed mostly to a body-moving Spike Jonze video and the silky 1975 single “Take Yo’ Praise,” which he’d appropriated from singer Camille Yarborough, then sped up and flavored with other sonic enhancements.

When Camille Yarborough was recently interviewed on TV about being sampled on “Praise You,” she cruelly reminded me that I once stated that all I do is ‘nick bits from crap records and car boot sales.’ … Despite the fact that I take great delight in recycling charity shop records, I do occasionally take records that I thoroughly adore. Luckily these tend to be the ones cleared with the original artist & therefore available for compilations such as these. It is a joy to see these people, who I have sometimes cruelly repositioned in my records, finally getting props and exposure in their pure form …

— from the liner notes 

Among those treasures repurposed for Cook’s Fatboy releases was Bill Withers’ scouring antiwar song “I Can’t Write Left Handed,” its key phrase given a new incarnation as “Demons,” with Macy Gray.

Cook didn’t necessarily see himself as an acquisitor, but an archivist. This makes him a precursor to almost anyone toying with audio (or video) today. My suspicion is that a lot of people now engrossed in the homemade mashup/supercut culture see themselves this way, pointing back toward the sources of their inspiration while striving to craft something largely new out of it.

We may never see a day again when digital art is not created out of preexisting parts, but we can trace those parts back to their origins when we wish, and maybe discover older creations that uplift us in new ways. I might never have heard of Andre Williams without Norman Cook, and just listen to what I would’ve missed.

Ellen McIlwaine — Higher Ground

(What else is going on: I reviewed Nicholas Ray’s 1961 King of Kings for Film Freak Central, and ruminated on the blog thereon about the transformative narratives of fairytale movies [Hanna] vs. those of comic book movies [Thor].
It’s not as deep as it sounds.)

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Seriously, spoilers after the jump. But let’s get real, there’s an Avengers movie coming down the pike with Thor in it, and everybody knows that. This ain’t The Crying Game.

• Why did Agent Coulson let Thor walk out of the SHIELD compound, even when he knew he was not Dr. Donald Blake?

• So Donald Blake has nothing at all to do with Thor except … he’s Jane Foster’s ex? The Thunder God’s alter-ego from the comics is a peel-off nametag in the movie?

• Thor couldn’t lift Mjolnir (“Meow-Meow,” lolz) because he was being a dick. When he became selfless and offered to get blown up to save the world, the hammer flew out of the pit and came to him. Is that because he was suddenly worthy? Or because at that exact moment, as we saw, Odin woke up from the Odinsleep? That is to say, did Thor triumph on his own merits, or was he saved by the Dad Out of the Machine?

• There are four women with dialogue in this film. Do any of them ever talk about anything other than Thor and, vaguely, astrophysics and how not to drive in a blinding dust storm? (This review aside, I would argue that the answer is largely “no.”)

• Does Thor’s mom have a name? I mean, I know she does, but does anybody in the movie call her by that name?

• Does Thor even really like Jane Foster, in anything more than a courtly, thanks-for-helping-out way? She’s the one who gets all kerfuffily around him, and when he leaves for Asgard, she’s the one who shoves her tongue in his mouth.

• Loki’s mad at Odin for favoring his older son over him, and at the Frost Giants for leaving him to die by exposure as a baby, right? Because that wasn’t super-clear.

• But Odin said he found Blue Baby Loki in the Jotunheim temple. Is a temple the kind of place one leaves a child to die? Wouldn’t there be lots of other Frost Giants there going, “Hey, did somebody forget a baby?”

• Every upswept ponytail in this movie leaves an unsightly thatch of hair decorating the back of the neck. Hair colors offer no complement to actors’ skin tones. Every male has hair that is either ridiculous (Fandrall, Odin, Hogun) or simply there (Selvig, Loki). Every woman has hair than can be described as simply “long.” Not one wig looks like anything other than a wig. Is hairstylist Amy McHale (TV’s “Cavemen”) the worst cosmetic artist working in Hollywood today, or did she simply build and apply all the hairpieces using only her elbows while recovering from Lasik?

• Do you think Kenneth Branagh, the foremost Shakespearean adaptor of our day, sees any parallels between the story of Thor and those of Hamlet and Lear? Any parallels between Volstagg and Falstaff? Do you think you could ask him that question and build an entirely useless trend/feature article out of it, Houston Chronicle? Isn’t asking a Shakespearean star to point out Shakespearean parallels in drama kind of like asking a physicist to point out gravity during a basketball game?

• If Thor can so seriously get shit done once he’s carrying his hammer … and for real, Thor with his hammer gets shit done … why does he even need to join the Avengers?

• So … are the Frost Giants okay?

Jay Ferguson — Thunder Island

1. Belle & Sebastian: The Boy With the Arab Strap

2. Big Star: #1 Record/Radio City

3. Miles Davis: The Capitol/Blue Note Years

4. Neil Diamond: GOLD — Recorded Live At the Troubadour

5. The Best of Ella Fitzgerald: First Lady of Song

6. John Wesley Harding: It Happened One Night

7. Mickey Hart: At the Edge

8. Charlie Parker: All Stars Live At the Royal Roost

9. Tito Puente: The Legend

10. Parliament’s Greatest Hits: Uncut Funk … The Bomb

11. Wagner: Greatest Hits

Sinead O’Connor — You Made Me The Thief Of Your Heart