Book review: Who Moved My Cheese?

Possibly the worst book ever written is the toe-curlingly awful Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, MD.

It really is one of the most remarkably awful things I've encountered in book form, and no opportunity to scorn it should be missed.

Frighteningly, it sells by the ton and has received four hundred and thirtynine 5 star reviews on Amazon (so far ...) though, hearteningly, it has also received 398 1 star reviews. Websites have been set up to spread its trite message further and celebrate its unbearable naffness. Many people I know who are sensible and successful - far more sensible and succesful than I - swear by it, and cite it as a inspirational book, second to none. But it is awful.

I read it when my wife was loaned a copy through her work, when that company was going through one of its regular restructures (as it is again, now). The book tells you how to regard these changes as opportunites and challenges, not as obstacles. I suspect it's appearance in the soon-to-be-liquidated department was not exactly a coincidence.

So, basically, when your employer tries to piss all over you, instead of protesting or - Heaven forbid - involving the union - you have to thank them for giving you a chance to explore your potential elsewhere. I kid you not. It doesn't advocate biting the hand that feeds you, so much as kissing the hand that slaps you.

The means of putting this wondrous message across is ... um ... cheesey (I suspect I may not be the first person to make that joke. But, what the Hell?)

A group of old friends meet up and discuss their lives. One of them starts to tell a story that is mean to illustrate the correct way - in the opinion of the good doctor - to face up to change. Whatever happens to you, roll with it. Embrace change. Life gives you lemons, make lemonade. This is athe literary level the book operates at. And there isn't a sherd of irony in it.

The story teller mentions that , when his company was gonig through changes, some people clung onto their old fashioned ideas and sufferred losses as a result. How foolish of them to think they might have had any rights what-so-ever, or that anything other than acceting your redundancy notice with a smile and a heart felt thank-you was the right way.

The book is short, which is the best thing that can be said for it. Most of it consists of a parable recounted by the narrator in the group of friends, illustrating different ways to deal with change.

Everything below is absolutely true and faithful to the book. I have not invented it. This is true. This exists. Adults pay money to be told this, and say 'thank you.'

The parable describes the experiences of two 'Little People' (That is, proles, like you and me), and two busy little mice. For reasons that are never made clear, they live in a maze, and every day they eat cheese which is delivered to the same spot by POWERS UNKNOWN.

I repeat: I am NOT making this up.

Then, one day, the cheese isn't there. The little people sulk and protest, unable to accept that SOMETHING HAS CHANGED. The mice immediately scurry off through the maze, and find more cheese.

Eventually, the little people realise that they should follow the example of the mice and go in search of new cheese, instead of sitting about bewailling the change that has befallen them. As they go, they daub the walls of the maze with maxims, just inc ase the readers of the book are too dim to work out the lesson for themselves.

It one of the most patronising books I've ever read. And it is wrong. No consideration is given to the idea that a change may not be appropriate, or that the 'little people' should protest when their jobs are out-sourced to China, that workers - for the book is really telling workers that they need to accept just that sort of thing, hence the reason it appeared in Mrs Lurgee's workplace when the 'little people' were having their cheese moved - might have a say or a stake in the company they work for. Change is always good, especially if it involves you losing your job. Be grateful, grasshopper, for the chance to experience poverty, insecurity and hardship.

The only thing worse than the tedious, obvious, insulting narrative and preachy lessonering, is the way the book is written. It is written in a curdled style that made me want to puke. It made Woman's Day read like Raymond Chandler. Sugary doesn't begin to describe it.

And, I repeat, this book sells by the million, to successful, presumably intelligent, business people. What is so wrong with the world that this is allowed to happen?

Is there no God?

Film review: Elephant

Elephant (2003). Directed by Gus Van Sant.

I did not like Elephant. I appreciate the thoughtful reviews above, and I'm glad they were able to discern something in the film that I missed, but the fact remains, elephantine and unignoreable, that the film left me cold, and slightly repelled.

I suppose you might say, of course you should feel repelled, it is a film about a high school shooting. It isn't meant to be nice. I get that. My revulsion wasmn't aimed at the events on screen, however, but at the presentation of events by the film makers.

The film is technically superb. Van Sant has declined over the years. The talent that made Mala Noche two decades ago now produces - the verbs have been chosen judiciously - work such as Good Will Hunting and Finding Forester. Mid-brow crap. Good, polished, mid-brow crap, but lets not pretend it's anything more than it is. That said he's always been technically brilliant, no matter how banal thepiece he's attached his name to - beautifully images, adroit camera work and framing, excellent editing and that elusive quality of texture where a simple shot seems to convey some quality of depth or meaning beyond the disparate elements. And, at his best, he's always managed to make his films seem effortless, no matter how technically adept they are. Mala Noche has the feel of the Greatest Home Movie Ever Made, when in fact it is a densely wrought piece played by a group of excellent actors.

Elephant, for what it is worth, has many of these qualities. The cast in particular are superb. It is noteable that some of the characters they have to play veer towards caricature - the clique obnoxious Bratzb ,itching between their bouts of bulimia, the awkward, shy girl with her own body insecurities and, inevitably, spectacles. The film is at its best when it is avoiding such trite characterisations, when we aren't given obvious pointers to what sort of character we're being presented with.

It is also beautifully presented. Van Sant knows how to create a mood with lighting, how to create an effect by moving his camera. But herein lies my issue with Elephant. The narrative has been coyly constructed so events unfold from several different perspectives and in a nonlinear fashion. Obviously, you have to do something along those lines when you're dealing with a limited time frame and you have several different characters all in different places - I get that. But this film goes beyond that necessary parralell construction, and makes its irregular timeframe a feature of the film itself. So the opening minutes are - in digetic terms - only moments away from the final scenes, but seperated by an hour or so of screen time. We see the killers, armed and intent, entering the school, then the timeframe shifts to earleir in the day, as we follow different characters as they move towards the bloody denoument.

Why is this a problem? Because it seems to me to be a deliberate, exploitative attempt to creat etension, to engage the audience emotionally, and focusing their conciosuness on their own nervous anticipation of events - will it be now? Now? NOW?! We might all know that the elephant is in the livingroom, but the preoccupation is not what to do about it, but when it is going to go rogue.

I must add, the much-commented-on non-linear construction isn't anything to get excited about. It is, essentially, a gimmick, the sort of thing you might expect from a premium episode of a TV show like ER. The startlement that greets a film that tweeks with its time frame says more about how low our expectations of cinema in general have become,trather than than the excellence of the film causing the stir.

It is also interesting that time-manipulation is a favoured tool when the film-makers are addressing some unpleasant topic - Gaspar Noe's Irreversible being the obvious exemple of this. Perhaps they feel that twisting the timeframe gives their work a particular gravitas, or intellectual weight. It isn't just a nasty little story about something unpleasant happening, it's a challenging and provocative piece of cinema. I'm not buying it. Elephant isn't as petulantly attention seeking as Irreversible - Noe is a director to whom the term enfant terrible may be applied more literally than is usual - but it is arid.

So, in the end, the film becomes exploitative. It becomes about who dies and who lives, about our mounting trepidation as we move into the final twenty minutes - for Van Sant rejects the only intellectual justification for his muddled time frame and has the climactic blood bath at the end, rather than dropping it on us - or, even more courageously - not including the shooting sequence at all.

Elephant is not the great film that needed to be made about this subject. It is a pity that it may, for all the doubts expressed above, be the best treatment the subject of high school violence receives for a long time.

*

Really bad sex

I award the Empurpled Septre for Sexual Bathos to Nigel Tranter for this hyberbolic humping, from The Steps to the Empty Throne, the first book in his trilogy about Robert the Bruce:

"... My love for you has been eating me up. These many, many months. When I despaired ever to see you again. Yet still loved and hoped. And now - to have you, hold you, here! It is more than flesh and blood can stand ..." "Ah, Robert - so it is love! Then, my dear, I yield. Sweet God, I yield me!" Suddenly, fiercely, she was pressing forward, against him. "And, save us - I conceive your flesh and blood to be standing very well, my heart ...!" she got out, before his mouth closed over hers, and their lips and tongues found greater eloquence than in forming foolish words.

Tranter would have been well advised to heed his own wisdom at this stage, but decides to plough on, using many foolish words in his search for greater eloquence:

The man's hands were almost as busy as his mouth - nor were the girl's totally inactive, either. He shrugged his own cloak to the floor, and hers quickly followed it. Then he was tugging at her gown, while still he all but devoured her with his kissing. Her defter touch came to aid him, and the taffeta fell away from her shoulders. The pale glimmerof her white body was all that he could see, but his urgent fingers groped and stroked and kneaded the smooth, warm, rounded flesh of her, serving him almost better than his eyes, her nobly full, firm breasts filling the ecstatic cups of his hands to over flowing, as they overflowed the cup of his delight.

I'm not convinced her breasts could be both nobly full and at the same time firm, unless she's followed Pamela Anderson's lead, but lets not dwell on that, for Tranter certainly doesn't:

Suddenly he was down, kneeling, his lips leaving hers to seek those proud, thrusting breasts, the exultant nipples ...

Steady on!

... reacting with their own life and vigour. She bent over him, crooning into his hair, her strong arms clasping him to her, rocking. But their need was a living, growing thing, a progression, and quickly even this bliss was insufficient. He drew her down to him, pulling at the gown's folds which a golden girdle held around her waist; and willingly she came, loosening it. The spread cloaks on the floor received them, and with swift, sure co-operation she disposed herself, guiding his clamant manhood and receiving him into her vital generosity.

Clamant manhood?

The man fought with himself to control the hot tide of his passion, to give her time. Blessedly she required but little, and together their rapturous ardour mounted and soared into the high, unbearable apex of fulfillment. With blinding, blazing release, and a woman's cry of sheer triumph, they yeilded themselves together in simultaneous surrender into basic, elemental oneness, a profundity of satisfaction hitherto unknown to either.

I actually enjoyed the book, overall. It's just unfortunate Tranter likes to write really bad sex scenes every now and again.

Stop the world - a new film from Godard

The great man is working on a new film, called Le socialisme, probably due for release in 2010.

A trailer is available on You Tube:



Apparently, he is also pondering a film exploring the shoah. Themes of destruction and genocide have been immanent in his recent work, such as Forever Mozart and Notre Musique.