When Disney Leaves You Cold

It's annoying me that the song Let It Go from the Disney movie Frozen seems to have been crowned an instant classic. Various parodies and cover versions have been making their way across my Facebook feed for months now and show no signs of stopping. Just look at the sheer number and popularity of Let It Go covers on YouTube and you'll see that we're looking at a cultural moment that will be remembered by minor comedians in decade-summarising clip shows yet unpitched in eras hence. And yet, despite backlashism being built into the fabric of contemporary online memified culture, I can't seem to find anyone willing to stand up and point out the obvious: that the song isn't any good.

Now, I haven't seen the movie, so perhaps it gains a massive deal of substance and insight and intelligence in context, but it seems pretty hard to believe. Look at some sample lyrics: 

It's funny how some distance
Makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me
Can't get to me at all

Let it go, let it go
I am one with the wind and sky
Let it go, let it go
You'll never see me cry
Here I stand
And here I'll stay
Let the storm rage on

Eugh. Inane, self-help boosterism of the most obvious order. I blame Wicked for this. When a song of such undemanding, ear melting boringness as Defying Gravity becomes known as Broadway classic bawled out out by musical theatre geeks as if it's Tonight at closing time, you know somehting is definitely up. There is a proudly "sub" sub-culture of self-proclaimed musical geeks who've had quite the boost in the last decade with Glee and High School Musical, a crowd I think of as the "pro-musical crowd". I say this because they seem very partisan about musical theatre, usually rigidly uncritical on the basis that musicals are not so much an artform as an identity for sensitive misfits and any criticism of blandness and schmaltz must be an attack on the whole community. The more the identity becomes defined, the tighter the wagons are circled. Ironic Disney-loving melts into fanaticism and sentimentality and crap chord structures seep in, forming the kind of endless brainless group-hug that allows Let It Go to masquerade as a masterpiece when it is in fact really, really dull.

This would be fine if Disney musicals didn't have such excellent pedigree. Having listened to other of Frozen's musical numbers, despite being written by actual Broadway composers of standing, it is clear that the days of Ashman and Menken might as well never have happened. These were the people behind Beauty and the Beast, a film with such extraordinarily clever songs Mozart and Da Ponte would struggle to keep up with all the tricks being used. Let's recap:

• In the first song, Belle, we establish the setting, the time period, the protagonist, her character, her origin, her interests, her goals, her frustration, the townspeople, their attitude to life, their attitude to the protagonist, the antagonist, his character, his goals, his values, the town's attitude to the antagonist, and still have time to fit in a great heap of foreshadowing, all in under five minutes and plenty of puns and lovely rhyming. That's basically taking the screenwriting handbook and showing you can do it all blindfolded while conducting Beethoven's Ninth.

• In the song Gaston, we have some of the greatest examples of lyrical brilliance in musical theatre history. The line "As a specimen yes I'm intimidating" is so perfectly internally rhymed it would make Cole Porter weep.
• Be Our Guest, a song with such scorching lyrics it withstands comparison to its Simpsons parody.
• They even manage an actual Cole Porter reference in the mob song: "Here we come, we're fifty strong/ and fifty Frenchmen can't be wrong" which doubles as a lovely encapsulation of Terry Pratchett's rule of mobs.

Ashman's lyrics aside (and they carry a lot of extra social weight as a gay man dying of AIDS in the Reagan era) Menken's music here and in his other Disney music is brilliantly literate as well as catchy - look at his use of leitmotifs in the score of Hunchback of Notre Dame for proof. Frankly, more praise of the Disney golden age of animation is a little redundant, although it is fun to go back as an adult and look at just how clever those songs were (like Prince Ali, with his forty fakirs, his cooks, his bakers / his birds that warble on key). The point is that I suspect that my generation is losing the tradition of musicals in the Cole Porter mode, and accepting a bland, witless, edgeless soup of pap in its place.

The problem comes, ironically, from a new confidence in liking musicals: by accepting that the Disney of our youth is something we can still enjoy, we've grouped everything "Disney" in our heads (I include Wicked and Les Mis here), forgetting that there's a massive difference between the Menken/Ashman Disney films and what came later. Since Frozen is a kid's movie, we feel we can demand less, whereas the genius of musicals is that they can be incredibly well-made and still appeal to kids. Enough with the glorification of everything melismatic, cheesy, boring, Gleeked out and inane. It isn't good enough. Musicals are far better than that, and their fans have forgotten.

Render Unto Caesar The Gay Wedding That Is Caesar's

Last night Governor Jan Brewer vetoed the Arizona law proposed to protect people's religious freedom to not offer goods and services if they felt doing so would violate a "sincerely held" religious belief. Now, plenty has been said about this and other such measures elsewhere on the blogosphere, and obviously I agree with the outraged opposition (among the more salient criticisms: Since Jesus tells us that any remarriage is adultery, surely this would allow people to refuse service to second marriages, too? Does this absolve Quakers from paying taxes for the military? Does it allow for sharia law?). I won't jump on the bandwagon, but it does raise a point I think is rather neat considering that the same people advocating this law are the biggest boosters of free market capitalism.

One of the fundamentals of capitalism, it seems to me, is doing business with people you despise. The growth of first mercantilism and then early capitalism runs concurrent with the growth of toleration for exactly this reason. The Court Jews, as they were known, were required by the nations of early modern Europe for their service of usury, underwriting much of the growth in that period in trading ventures and very early industry. This during a time of little to no official or social toleration for them at all. Even the viciously antisemitic Russian Tsardom would occasionally free up movement in the Pale of Settlement in order to get Jewish capital moving around a stagnant Empire. Did it violate the religious conscience of European anti-semites to do business with those they saw as Christ-killers, child murderers, heretics? Of course it did. But they frequently had no choice, and the laws of capitalism saw to it that those who engaged their services prospered while others did not. Protestants and Catholics, Westerners and Japanese, Capitalist and Communist - where others see an untouchable, the canny see a business opportunity.

The increasing interconnectedness of the world has made it increasingly difficult to avoid doing business with people we don't like. It was assumed by many before the outbreak of war in 1914 that however much Germany and France disliked each other, their economies were too interdependent for them to fight again. It turned out to be wrong, of course, but now it seems like it might just be true for the contemporary balance of power - Chinese exports are so dependent on the manufacturing base of other countries that they are exporting components of iPhones that require the processes of fifteen other countries to complete. The USA is in a similar position, which means that however much the two nations make each other uncomfortable, indeed feel their consciences violated by their business with the sweatshop-runner or the imperialist, they are unable to pull out of the deal. This leads to general peace. Margins around the world are simply too tight to be picky about who one does business with.

Now, this doesn't demonstrate that a devout Christian should be happy to offer their services to practices that offend them. But it does suggest that capitalism is hard, and that if you live in a capitalist system, you should be prepared for it to be hard. Your business is not entirely your own; it is the way in which you interact with the world, and your right to refuse goods and services is limited not just to protect others from discrimination, though that would be a good enough reason on its own. Rather, it is severely limited because a capitalist system cannot well function when the free flow of commerce is complicated by the individual consciences of the actors involved. This is not a prescriptive law but rather a descriptive one; it is an argument not from human rights but rather pointing out to those behind the current wave of legislation that capitalism has never allowed for conscience, and that isn't about to be changed by tawdry bills in a couple of US statehouses.

Regardless of piecemeal legislation here and there, in the long term a Christian can no more choose to do business in a way that perfectly suits their conscience than I can avoid participating in a system of oppression whichever pair of shoes I buy: we live in a capitalist world, and capitalism is immoral, or at least amoral. If you cannot handle the "immorality" of providing services for a gay wedding, you should not be in the wedding business. If you can't stand having gay men share a room in your bed and breakfast, you should find another career. That is a freedom capitalism gives you, but it comes at the cost of being forced to engage in the muckiness that comes with the territory, and if that for you includes homosexuality, tough.

When Jesus told his followers to render unto Caesar, he was characteristically vague and unhelpful as to the limits of his command, but I would offer this interpretation: separate out your civil and spiritual lives. In a capitalist system, your civil life includes your mode of work; it is the being-in-the-world part of you every bit as much as paying taxes to a government you may or may not agree with. Jesus also said that following him would be tough, and this is ample proof of it - in order to live in the world, you must make compromises. If you want to avoid being eaten alive by the world, you must play by the world's rules, and that means your conscience must be sometimes subsumed in order to deal with your customers. The customer must be, for the worldly Christian, always right.

Democratic Thuggery And Its Discontents

It is a strange paradox that despite being portrayed as noble and forthright, the bedrock of democracy is capitulation. If you care about something you'll fight for it, but democracy requires that if you lose the vote you will lay down your metaphorical arms and accept the legitimacy of your opponents. It is the hardest thing in the world to do, so hard that the world's oldest democracies haven't yet mastered the discipline: whether it is the British Left questioning the democratic legitimacy of a coalition representing 59% of the vote or the American Right taking war measures against a law passed by a twice-elected President with a Senate majority, House popular majority and the approval of the Supreme Court. As John Stewart said after Obama's election as Glenn Beck began his rabble rousing: "The opposition won an election and now they're doing things you don't like - I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing... that's not tyranny, that's democracy". Yet despite the friction and hypocrisy and idiocy frequently displayed by those living under the rule of those they hate, on a deeper level we do, in fact, accept it. The proof of this is becoming ever more clear over the last couple of years, as a series of foreign crises have demonstrated that by comparison we're doing rather well.

Quite what history will name these flare-ups I don't know, but I think canny historians will group them, because there are certain common elements that say something about the state of democracy outside the West. I can list Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, Thailand, Iran, Venezuela, and others amongst those countries who have dealt with protests of varying scale and success over the last few years. What they have in common is that they take place in highly compromised democracies in which the protesters were outnumbered at the polls. It is important to remember that Morsi won a presidential election fairly, that Erdoğan enjoys wide support, that Yanukovych was duly elected president in 2010, and so on. What we are seeing, I think, is a new post-ideological world order in which a number of middle-ranking powers test out what I would call "democratic thuggery". The key exponent of this is Putin, but Berlusconi, Erdoğan and Zuma amongst many others practise it to varying degrees. It entails, broadly, the brute facts of democracy without any of the attendant supporting infrastructure - free press, strong courts, civil society etc, backed up by strong nationalism, religious renewal, strong-man posturing and a cronyistic kleptocracy. It is, in other words, an ideology of power, retaining just the tiniest hint of respectability enough to balance all the other interests solidly on the side of the current ruler for as long as possible. It usually requires the majority support of a conservative countryside, a majority that forms one side in the democracy-as-cold-civil-war model that these autocrats use.

It is not sustainable, and right now the semi-democracies are beginning to tear themselves apart. And at the heart of the democratic thuggery problem is that of populaces unwilling to accept thugs who win elections. The Egyptian counter-revolution of the military in 2013 was achieved because the Muslim Brotherhood's vast support in the countryside didn't translate to the urban populaces who hated them. Those populaces would rather ignore a fair vote than suffer the rule of people they don't like, and sure enough the Egyptian people ousted a fairly elected leader. This is justified only in the case that Morsi was dismantling democracy at the time, the jury is out on that question. Otherwise the opposition should have waited until the next election to vote him out. The Ukrainians should have waited to oust Yanukovych democratically, and the Thais have no mandate to remove Shinawatra from power. I say this despite supporting the protesters' causes in each case. The problem is that the western media can all too easily play up the revolution angle while dismissing the discomfort of the largely rural support base of the thug in question. Many Russians were appalled by what Pussy Riot did, and many Iranians think of their urban liberal cousins as shameful. Their voices carry democratic weight. The world is not divided into a fight between just liberty and tyranny, but rather between people who frankly can't stand to live in the same country as one another, and it is this hatred that allows new thugs to rise and play factions off against each other. Sisi is the terrifying example - adored by the liberals of Egypt as a scourge against Islamism, his nascent autocracy is for them the lesser than the evil of actually sharing a democracy with Egypt's conservatives.

So what is the hope that the developing world can learn a discipline of submission that even two-century old democracy is uncomfortable with? Small at the moment. We will see a lot of this over the next fifty years, but my advice will always be the same: continue protesting, petition your leaders peacefully with grievances and build, however slowly, a winning coalition within the country for proper democracy. An endless ding-dong between cities and countryside will not advance the cause of liberty. Any revolution that has to deal with an opposition that could credibly win an election will not lead to a happy nation. The work of democracy is hard, and Ukraine is going to have a hell of a time of it. Let us hope they learn the virtues of patience and the importance of Enlightenment institutions as the immovable scaffolding of true democracy.

Arming For Peace, Me Boys

I have no say in the Scottish Referendum, quite rightly. But I do get a plea. In the case of the English Left in the shadow of a new generation of Tory rule, Billy Bragg's line sums it up:

Sweet moderation, heart of this nation / desert us not, we are between the wars.

Killer Rabbit Republicans

When our gallant heroes in Monty Python and the Holy Grail are contemplating how to defeat the vicious and extremely deadly Killer Rabbit, Sir Galahad pipes up: "Let us taunt it. It may become so cross, it will make a mistake." Of which King Arthur sensibly asks, "Like what?" I am put in mind of this scene by the familiar sinking feeling I get preparing for another long year of watching another probable Republican mid-term victory creep inexorably toward us. A consistent theme of progressive blogs over the Obama era has been that the "Republican fever will eventually break". The endearingly consistent faith that if we just kept them angry long enough, they'd get so angry that they'd do something incredibly stupid. They'd make a mistake that would finally show the American people how lost they were, and allow the remaining cooler heads to prevail and at last turn the GOP back into a party of reasonable government. We must now accept that this isn't going to happen.

I understand where the impulse comes from. Watching the American Right go crazy in 2009, you felt there had to be a downside to it all. All that undirected rage, all that resentment, the increasingly cloistered thinking and the propagation of insane conspiracy theories: it had to be leading to a monumental fall, right? And there is a great satisfaction at watching an opponent get angry, as long as they're at arm's length. As long as they're angry they can't make informed decisions as to how they're going to get you. It was something of a staple of the kind of adventure books I read as a kid that the plucky young hero would be held captive by the arch nemesis only to goad him through his arrogance into a rage filled-decision to, I don't know, fight Young Hero hand to hand and expose his weakness or fire wildly bringing down the shark tank on his head or whatever. It's a trope Monty Python plays with, but as Arthur points out, there's not much of a mistake a psychotic bloodthirsty rabbit can make. And the same is true of the American Right.

The big mistake they were meant to have made was the government shutdown hostage crisis. Republicans received most of the blame for that and liberals came away smug enough to have felt they had won. The fools had, if not walked into a trap, then at least done exactly what their crazed groupthink would logically lead them to do when led by Ted Cruz on his noble resentment crusade: do something so crazy nobody would trust them again. And yet here we are with polls predicting a Republican takeover of the Senate and holding onto the House. The public, it seems, doesn't much care how ridiculously out-there the Republicans are. They don't really like the Democrats either, so they'll happily plump for the opposition as long as they just keep opposing. A killer rabbit guarding a cave can't make a mistake, and neither can an insane party guarding one side of a two party system. Everything is just too easily forgotten.

That leaves us with a situation where the Republicans, far from being ultimately hobbled by their anger as every liberal pundit has assumed from day one of the Obama administration, can indulge it to an unlimited degree and forever gain strength from it. There was an idea, fuzzy and half-formed in the liberal mind, that while a black president would piss off a great number of people at first, a combination of the failures of the instinctive kneejerk reactions (of which the shutdown was one) and the inuring power of time would inoculate the old white guard to a black man in charge and eventually achieve great progress for the country on racial issues. Again, the illness analogy. That is how liberal America sees its conservative cousin, as suffering from a malady in need of a cure. But the fact is that raging conservatism can froth and fester for as long as it wants, as hot as it wants, and only get stronger.

I and many others have looked on the current era of Tea Party crazy as an aberration, condescendingly believing that once the child has had its tantrum it will calm down and go to bed as told. We must now face what increasingly looks like the case: things aren't going back to how they were. The Eisenhower or Nixon Republican is not coming back. There will be no purge of the crazy, and eventually the crazies will be in government again. Instead of being so taunted by a black president that they make a terrible mistake, they have fed on the energy he gives them. The smug meme of commenters on progressive blogs when Republicans do something tub-thumpingly hubristic and crass has become "please proceed", a la Barack Obama in his debate with Romney. What they don't see is that jujitsu is pretty ineffective against an oncoming train.

 If they proceed to the Senate and then the Presidency, there is no telling where they might take America now that their media systems have locked in the doctrine of "right wing good, more right wing better". US politics may end up representing another Monty Python sketch, one dealing with the pitfalls of two-party government. And it won't be very funny.

Work Ethics And The Ethics Of Work

Francis of Assisi and Alexander the Great, virtuous men of previous ages. But hard workers? 

Someone, who I remember as Ruskin but can't find evidence of this, said that every age defines its virtues in a manner incomprehensible to the others. The moderns (by which I believe he means Protestant, Anglo Saxon moderns) value above all else industry, so that there is nothing you say better about a man than "he's a hard worker". To the ancient Greeks, for example, this would make no sense - work is for slaves, not free men, and so the defining virtue of the ancients is a boldness and exceptionalness of spirit as would be attributed to an Alexander. Neither would it make sense to the medieval mind, for whom all work is merely another aspect of life in the shadow of an all-important God and thus piety was the chief virtue of the age.

It's a convincing enough thesis, as it goes: we today almost exclusively define our lives by the work we do in them. Almost from birth you are taught to do well at school and university so that you might get a good job, and the chief measure of a man's success is the quality of his job and his quality at it. It is interesting to me that unlike the other two eras I mentioned, today's virtue has not caught the imagination of our novelists and poets to the same degree. With the notable and poisonous exception of Ayn Rand, the virtue of amassing wealth and sweating at the foundry hasn't mattered as much to writers as heroism mattered to Homer and piety to Dante. If work is our defining value, it is a tawdry one.

We should be alive, then, to the possibility that the work ethic we have inherited from an industrial and high-capitalist past will not remain in place forever, and that work will no longer define either our lives or our moral sense of ourselves. We've had high unemployment for nearly six years now and there's been plenty about how it's affecting people's self esteem in the long term, because we think of ourselves as workers first and foremost. However, with the increase in automation and productivity and the rise of the global South to be able to contribute to the developed workforce, there may simply just not be enough work to do. Keynes, brilliant as ever, kinda saw this one coming: in 1930 he predicted almost correctly the productivity increases in the next century and came to the conclusion that everybody would therefore probably be working only 15 hours a week. What he didn't predict was that we would be so consumed with the need to work that our working weeks would actually get longer, not shorter. We would invent more things to consume and work longer to pay for them. We would invent new kinds of work so far removed from producing anything tangible it becomes almost parodic: lawyers for the advertising companies that market banks that invest money in management consultancies that tell people how to better sell $900 handbags.

Because fuck taste, and fuck sense. 

There are many economic reasons why Keynes was wrong, and books by very clever economists debate why. But it's also a more general question we should be asking ourselves. Conservative Andrew Sullivan worries about the failure of the Protestant work ethic in America here, and it seems to me several interesting points are raised. Firstly, that a lot of discourse around the welfare state is based on a fear of loss of work ethic -  the conservative critique that we'll all get fat and lazy if the state is there to provide for us. The implication is that we all need to have not only the threat of absolute terror of bankruptcy and destruction hanging over our heads at all times to motivate us but that there should be actual examples of this clear to see around us to stop us getting comfortable. This is the tacit implication of US arguments against Obamacare, and it is frankly borderline psychotic. I find it hard to believe there are many Englishmen who feel they can slack off at work because the NHS will be there to catch them if they ever get ill. Sullivan is slightly blindsided by this. On the one hand, he says for him "the American Dream remains not only intact but inspiring. I believe in work". But on the other hand as an HIV sufferer the new insurance landscape give him a new freedom:

I feel empowered by the ACA not to work if I choose to and have the savings to take a break. There are a zillion different scenarios in which the guarantee of health insurance removes the absolute necessity of working if you have some savings to fall back on.

He accepts that the lessening of the work incentive might be worth the trade-off, which I think is putting it extremely mildly, but then I would. Not all conservatives would even accept that, and you only need look at the benefits debate in this country to see a massive segment of the population willing to come down firmly on one side of the incentive/security trade-off every single time. In any case it's certainly not a debate we have openly.

The other point brought up is I think one of the reasons for this., and Sullivan only touches on it very briefly:

One strong thread in the opposition is the fear that we’ll all stay on the couch, binge-watch Netflix and sleep in late, while the Chinese eat our lunch...  Isn’t there an obvious, if unstated, cultural fear here that Latino culture is less work-obsessed than white Protestant culture (despite the staggering work ethic of so many Latino immigrants)?

Yes, the racial aspect of this is very much there in both the US and UK. One the one hand you have the "lazy" races, the immigrants from Mexico or Africa or poorer parts of the world, and on the other hand you have the distant Oriental races, disciplined and uniform, innumerable, working 14 hour days and outscoring our kids on every test. These discourses are very old and built into our civilisation, not to go all Edward Said on you. The point is to form a mirror image of our own society to define ourselves against, and since the discourse was largely formed in an era when we were very good at going around the world and making money, much of it has to do with work. We Northern white people are good at working and making money, unlike the feckless Catholic South or the barbaric Africans. But we are creative and wholesome in our work, too, not like the unquestioning Chinaman or the dishonest Jew.

The goddess Ayn Rand in her British form 

There is a split here between the US and the UK which would be worth exploring if we had time, but it is interesting to me that the British have actually rarely venerated work all that much given our self-image. Something about that land-owning aristocracy at the top in full sight of everyone dampened it down a bit. Nor has the British self-image ever been about being good businessmen, thought that is often how the world has seen us. A nation of shopkeepers, Napoleon called us, but strangely we've never had much of an affection for the excellent businessman as have the Americans, in whose culture the snake-oil salesman is a character of almost grudging respect, the Lyle Lanley who can swoop into town and sell a pointless monorail with a song-and-dance number. If I were to believe in the concept of national greatness I would point out the conquest of one of the world's oldest and most populous civilisations with nothing but a bunch of tradesmen and a joint-stock company as Britain's most extraordinary hour, equal to the campaigns of the Mongols and the expansion of the first Arab caliphates. The fact is, despite our fond self-image as bumbling amateurs, there must have been a time when we were, extremely, extremely efficient at buying and selling and building and expanding. Yet the hard-work and up-by-the-bootstraps and commercial genius narratives don't figure much in the national imagination. We clearly never truly felt that work ethics were, well, ethical.

Only now, with the threat of being overtaken by China, has hard work been lifted onto its pedestal. And we will fear being outworked more and more as time goes on. We're in the global race after all, which means misery for our schoolchildren and declining expectations for the rest of us. Work will be the god that saves us now we've lost our faith in God. And yet what is the point of working harder when so many jobs are done by machines, by our massive interconnectedness, by Big Data and what have you? Why do we need to win these races? There is no changing the fact that our work can now be outsourced. So let's reduce the amount of work we do. Enough with growth. Thomas Piketty (about whom I shall say more in a later post) has demonstrated in his new book Capital in the Twenty First Century that absent a massive global tax on wealth the gains from future growth will almost entirely go to the top 1%, which to me sounds as good as pointless. Let us be happy with low growth then. Let us stop our worship at the temple of work. Let's work fifteen hours a week, get overtaken by China and find some new virtues.

I'll finish with a last paragraph from Sullivan:

With wages stagnant for most Americans since the mid 1970s, and hard, often back-breaking work failing to provide real gains in income, doesn’t the logic of the work ethic get attenuated? Isn’t it also affected by your knowledge that many people at the very top of the pyramid rake in unimaginable dough for working far less hard than your average teacher or healthcare worker? And isn’t the vast accumulation of wealth among so few itself a contributor to the decline in the work ethic, since it provides so many dependents with such easy, unearned cash? It’s not just the left that has created these disincentives. Global capitalism has done its part as well.

He is right, but as befits a conservative, he understates the case. Work in the 21st Century will not be what it used to. Incentive, the absolute bedrock of every right-wing bromide against the welfare state, incentive, the mighty idol of the free market true-believers, may well become a memory in the face of secular stagnation and the uselessness of so much work that makes so much money for so few. We may find ourselves having to reconsider our values, redefine our virtues, decide on what purpose our life is being lived for. And that will be very hard work indeed.

The Problem With An Etonian Coriolanus

Having seen Tom Hiddleston's Coriolanus now, I am still of the opinion that while talented and an excellent verse speaker, Hiddleston lacks the electric abilities of a Whishaw or Scott to totally transcend himself on stage. He is probably much more suited to the bombastic kind of role he had in Thor than anything too subtle, and more power to him. He can't do much to alter his very smooth and Etonian voice, much as it might make the tumblr brigade swoon. Partly the problem is that he is too posh to play Coriolanus, although this made me realise a more fundamental issue with that play's performance today.

Coriolanus is by nature an actual, physical bruiser, who glories in being covered in blood and viscera during his battles. Basically, we don't believe this of the tall, willowy, Adonian Hiddleston. He's beefed up for the role, sure, but there's not much he can do to convince us that he's spent his professional life carving up other human beings with sharp objects - bulging pectorals are no substitute for dead eyes, an oft-broken nose, and the sense of barely repressed violence lurking under the public face. A shaven-headed Ralph Fiennes from the film version fits this image far better - you only need see him in In Bruges to know how well he can convince you he might be about to cave your face in at any moment. Yet the bruiser interpretation of Coriolanus doesn't work either, because of his snobbery. It's almost impossible now to recapture the aristocratic hatred of the plebs that might have seemed more relatable in 1608, but it is much harder to do it when you cast Coriolanus with a more stereotypically working class accent as we might attribute to a modern squaddie. 

Hiddleston's dislike of the plebs was well captured in his cut glass voice. My thought at the time was that it would have worked far better in a WWI setting: have Hiddleston as the kind of officer-class Edwardian warrior, both loving to get stuck in himself and contemptuous of the rank and file when they failed to be as enthusiastic as him. Indeed this production did a good job of highlighting Coriolanus' sense of betrayal at the cowardice of his fellows at Corioles - hinting that this was the source of his hatred of the common folk. Indeed, outside this very narrow framework we have little cultural understanding of aristocrats who like to fight themself while hating the rank and file. Today violence and wealth are very much at arms' length when there's always a Blackwater mercenary or two to contract out to while keeping a smooth public face. So Coriolanus is going to remain a problem play for the time being, and Hiddleston is going to have to find more effete Shakespearean roles if he wants to convince. Benedick or Edmund are surely more to his taste.

Villain-Elle

Jesse Eisenberg has just been cast as Lex Luthor, and the internet is uncharacteristically not happy. Unthinkable! Idiotic! Totally unlike the real Lex Luthor! Worse than Ben Affleck as Batman, who was more ridiculous than casting teen heartthrob Heath Ledger as the Joker! Et cetera. Well, half the fun of geek culture, it seems, comes before the release of the movie or book or what have you, during the period when geeks can do what geeks do best, and speculate and fantasise and critique and say how they'd do things better. That's the real creative engagement part: the stories themselves are mostly generic and boring road-tested reruns of journeys to find oneself, learn a lesson and then beat up a similarly-powered villain with lots of explosions.

The interesting bit is talking about how to do simple stories, which everyone has as a common denominator, well. Everyone can pitch in on this, and it gives one of the few forums for actually discussing acting with friends. Highbrow Shakespeare and co. tends to be met with a lot of "oh, he was very good, wasn't he", whereas if it's Benedict Cumberbatch doing that funny face he does in Sherlock everyone loves to rave about it or knock it down as hammy or take it to bits in other ways. That's the point of geeking out.

In fact, the Eisenberg story reminded me of a conversation with a friend I had after the most recent episode of Sherlock, also to do with villains. The question was about the apparent return of Moriarty, and what could be be done to top him in the villain stakes. It was agreed that Moriarty's brilliance as a villain came partly from being played by Best Actor In The World Andrew Scott and partly from sheer unpredictability. A villain who cheerfully kills himself just in order to top his opponent in a battle of wits made for one of the greatest moments of TV of all time, and we agreed that to have him return slightly ruins the wtfness of that moment in retrospect. Conversation then turned to introducing a female villain who could go toe to toe intellectually with Sherlock without there being any hint of sexual tension, a route rarely trod by mainstream cinema and TV. I put forward various ideas including having Olivia Colman play a villain, which I admitted was an unusual choice, but given her previous work, I doubt there's anything she's incapable of.

Evil Colman

That's when I realised that there's actually no such thing as the right kind of actor to play a villain. There's only a good character. Take the Eisenberg case. Plenty of online snarking was done about how unthreatening he is, how he would annoy Batman to death, have the superpower of superfast speech. But you don't need to be threatening the whole time to be a good villain. You just need to kill someone. Imagine that in Scene I of the new Batman movie Lex Luthor is basically being played as a Mark Zuckerberg beta male. He's whiny, physically unimpressive, and doesn't even say anything especially ominous. And then, at the slightest provocation, he stabs an underling to death with a pencil. He then goes back to being exactly as he was before.

This, in my mind, is precisely the way to create a good villain, because he functions like Hitchcock's bomb under the table. We already know that the figure is vicious and murderous - that point doesn't need to be made again. Everything they do that plays against that - childlike playfulness in Moriarty's case, or devilish charm in Hans Gruber's  - heightens the suspense, because we don't know when the murderous side might return. We find the villain confuses or wrongfoots us, he is complex and unknowable and therefore difficult to predict, and this creates the danger that makes for a good villain.

I say "he" because villains are still almost invariably men. And there's no need for this. In fact, precisely because we are unused to female villains, they are the prime market for villainous expansion right now, as I think we're probably bored with the mischeivous "he wanted to get caught" type (in just the last couple of years and just the stuff I've seen I can group the Joker, Loki, Skyfall's Silva, Moriarty, and Star Trek' Khan into this group). To wrongfoot audiences we need actors like Olivia Colman to play villains with mannerisms we don't recognise, female villains with no sexual undercurrent at all who are just nutcase killers and criminal masterminds. Not that Olivia Colman can't do sexy. She can just do a lot more than sexy.

Look at Ruth Wilson, another actor who can do pretty much anything. She's fantastic as Alice Morgan in Luther (although not really a villain) because she is an utterly unpredictable psychopath with a genuine sense of fun. Some people detected a sexual chemistry between Idris Elba and her in a bout of wishful thinking  - I actually thought the lack of it was one of the most refreshing things about the show. She's totally mad, totally her own person. And too few female characters have got the chance to not be defined by gender.

Make her a supervillain with eyebrow powers

A good villain needs that independent, instantly recognisable character to work well. That's why there's no such thing as a good villainous actor - a villain is simply someone who threatens our protagonist in some way. And to do that, they don't need to appear threatening. They just need to, you know, do something threatening. And that's the screenplay's job, not the actor's. Absolutely anyone can play the villain if they shoot the hero's dog in the first five minutes. After that, all bets are off, we know they're an absolutely terrifying threat. It's what the actor can do with everything else apart from being obviously villainous that should interest us.