'Main character syndrome'?

Baby Reindeer (Miniseries, E1-7; 2024)
Director: Weronika Tofilska & Josephine Bornebusch

(Based on the autobiography of Richard Ladd) 

I learned a new term today: main character syndrome. In a world where only I, me and myself, which people really care about, it is logical for people to think that they are indeed at the centre of the Universe. The sun and all the planets revolve around them. They naturally become the main characters in a story they narrate. Even though the story is their point of view, it looks like the other characters are just there to fill up space without giving any substance to the story.

This is what the other characters in this true story are saying.

This story is about a shy Scottish lad, Donny, who wants to be a comedian. It is an autobiography, actually. To sustain himself, he works as a bartender. In the course of his work, he meets a friendly lawyer whom he finds interesting.

He is not much of a comedian, really. He is not funny. Nobody laughs at his gigs. A TV scriptwriter takes Donny under his wing and promises to make him a star. The scriptwriter turns out to be a pervert who drugs him and rapes him.

Meanwhile, the lawyer he met at the bar turns out to be a stalker who goes to great lengths to make Donny's life a living hell. Donny has a transexual person for his girlfriend. The whole story is about how Donny emerges from the shadow of his past and handles his stalker to try to make something of his life. The trouble is that Donny appears drawn back to his past as if he enjoys the pain and lives to dwell in negativity.

Even though the storyteller tries to empathise with the stalker and the abuser, in biopics like these, the aggrieved party will have his own account of the whole event. So now, the stalker and the said abuser, which netizens can easily find out with all their wisdom, are thinking of taking legal action against Netflix for screening such a film. Unable to tell her version of what actually transpired during the whole fiasco, she accuses that writer of suffering from 'main character syndrome'.

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The Queen is dead, long live the King!

©Elanour Tomlinson

We are often advised to say only the nice things about the recently departed. Somehow, all the ill feelings and the wrong paths crossed are temporarily swept under the proverbial carpet. Everyone, including the ones who tend to benefit from the deceased's passing, is expected to carry a sombre outward appearance - wear a sad face, dress down and avoid merriment. 

After the so-called mourning period, it will be pretty much no-holds-barred, I guess. 

But now, even before the dead are laid to rest, the wokies are already at it. I am referring to the recent demise of one of the longest reigning monarchs of the once most enormous Empire of the world, where the sun never set. True, she inherited a bounty of loot from the world over. At one time, pirates scaling the Atlantic high seas were free to pilfer gold from Spanish vessels legitimately under the auspices of the British Crown as long as they paid their dues to the monarch.

True, they went out with their imperial stance with a chip on their shoulders and a stiff upper lip to match. And plunder wealth from civilisations that had found peace with their place in the sun, create mayhem to liberate the oppressed and destroy other cultures with their new economic model.

This turn of events is inevitable. Every nation wants to improve life for itself. The designated / king does that for his subject at the expense of a gamut of benefits for himself and those under his umbrage who held his torch. This way of conquest was thought to trickle down the food chain and continues to date.

There were plundering imperialists, and there were cruel plundering imperialists. Some maimed their subjects without caring about their future. In a way, the British made some humane decisions to ease their administration but ended up causing their Empire's own destruction along with other compelling factors. They laid down plans for proper administrative machinery, invested in education for natives to help (and look down on their own cultures) and created an extensive web of transportation networks. 

If not for the English, this blog would not be in English or an incomprehensible language that could hardly pass for English. We were lucky that English became the lingua franca of the world, the modern language of communication. Left to our politicians to steer us to the future, we would still be a fumbling fishing village ruled by despots, not that they are not preventing this from happening. An unthinking obedient herd of the population led by their leash to the slaughter is their idea of utopia. If we had been savaged by colonists, we would have been brutalised by our own kind. As the Tamil saying goes, "Whether Rama or Raavan rule, it doesn't matter to me, I don't give a damn!"

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Freedom of expression?

The Lady of Heaven (2021)

Directed by Eli King (pseudonym)

When a controversial figure like Sheikh Yasser Al-Habib writes the script of a movie, one can be pretty sure that it will kick up some dirt. Just for the record, Al-Habib, a Kuwaiti Shia cleric, was imprisoned in Kuwait for 35 years when he insulted the companions of the Prophet back in the early 2000s. After obtaining a royal pardon from the Emir of Kuwait, he resided in the UK. He lost his Kuwaiti citizenship in 2004 when he stated in his speeches that the Prophet died not because of an ailment but after being poisoned by His wives! Al-Habib apparently has made a hobby out of insulting Sunnis.

In the UK, he continues his controversial stance and has been accused of being a divisive figure and one-minded in creating a rift between the Shia and Sunni denominations of Islam. As a head of the Shia community, he regularly appears in the media for all the wrong reasons accentuating the Shia-Sunni divide.

This movie is pregnant with so many points that beg to be picked up by detractors as offensive. No one gets away depicting Islamic holy figures in flesh and bones and gets away scot-free; what more if it is the Prophet and his daughter Fatima. The filmmakers got around it by using CGI and light deception for this purpose.

We know that the Shia-Sunni divisions started as early as when the Prophet was on his deathbed. The selection of His successor was the bone of contention. Ali, Fatima's husband, was apparently favoured by the Prophet but His tribe members felt someone from the tribe should continue the Caliphate duties.

That is where things get murky. Both denominations have their own version of what actually transpired at that time. To tell stories of a dark-skinned mob, who eventually became Sunnis, waiting to burn down the house occupied by Ali and Lady Fatima is just too much for the Ummah to stomach.

To further fuel, the anger is the comparison of the ISIS mob in Mosul during the Iraqi invasion of 2014 to the time surrounding the Prophet's succession. The film compares the pioneers of the Sunni sect as one-minded, aggressive and as resolved as the ISIS men in creating mayhem. The narration tends to imply that the first Islamic terrorism started way back in the 7th century! Lady Fatima was its first victim.

The story is told from the perspective of the Shias on the turn of events around the Prophet's death, but it ended up hurting the sentiments on both sides. It equated the Abu Bakr and Umar (Sunnis) to the dark-skinned Arabs, while the Ali and the Shias were fair-skinned, stirring up racial sentiments.

Muslims worldwide have condemned this movie for spreading false information about the religion. Widespread demonstrations in the UK prompted cinema halls to cancel this film's screening, fearing their staff's safety. Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq denounced the flick as blasphemous and banned it in their countries.

It narrates the tale of Lalith, a young Iraqi boy whose mother was killed by ISIS soldiers. He is picked up by an Iraqi soldier. The soldier's mother nurtures him to escape his PTSD by telling him the story of Prophet Mohamad's daughter, Lady Fatima, who sailed through her difficult times with patience and calmness. A mob was outside her house, threatening to burn her house and demanding for her husband, Ali, who was earmarked to continue the Prophet's journey.

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It does not matter...

This weekend would see meaningless parties and stupifying merrymaking in the name of a monarch who is synonymous with opulence and redundancy. There cannot be a worse time to glorify a family when the rest of the world looks at entitlement as a bad word. The idea of a person, by his birth, being feted up to high heavens despite all the scandals that have linked with the royal family does not make any sense. It is worse when the ruling monarch takes the helm as the head of the Church of England.

Nothing looks pretty when we talk about their predecessors' curriculum vitae or past glory. Her laurels include legitimisation of robbing non-British merchant ships of their gold and silver, giving a royal seal to pirates to loot the Spanish royal armada of their wealth,  allowing famine deaths in their subjects (just because they are brown) to feed their soldiers and brutally murdering millions in the name of civilising the natives. Yes, the Platinum Jubilee of the longest-reigning British monarch is here. 

  

Completed 1903 to mark Queen Victoria's
Diamond Jubilee (1897). At 60 ft tall, it
commemorates each year of her reign.

When the wokes are up in arms questioning the privileged, the errors and omission of the generation past, as well as the blatant widening of the gap between the haves and have not, this is in bad taste. There is no reason for the royal family to flaunt the wealth that they acquired by birth and force others to revel in jubilance. If anything, it only rekindles old festering wounds and re-emphasises the extent of the limit humans are able to dehumanise each other. 

To the aristocrats and plutocrats, it is an opportune time to reinforce their loyalty. In return, the tongue-hanging loyalist would pounce upon the mittens shrewn to them as picturised in the children's folklore 'This Old Man' - give a dog a bone!

In my school days, I remember walking past a clock tower in Penang, erected in honour of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Then from pictures in magazines and museum documents, I realised that Penangites were having a whale of a time during Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and King George V's coronation. The million-dollar question is whether the colonial subjects really share the sentiments of their Masters, or there are they there just for the party?

Like the Tamil proverb that says, ராமே ஆண்டாளும் ராவனே ஆண்டாளும் (Whether Rama rules or Ravanaa rules), it does not matter to the Average Joe. The life of the ordinary man hardly changes for the better. Still, like Sisyphus, Average Joe tries to find contentment via these meaningless celebrations despite his seemingly hopeless life. He can pack his troubles and seek a release from his bottled-up emotions for one evening. But come tomorrow, it is back to the same grind mill.

(N.B. The idea of celebrating a Jubilee goes back to the time of the Old Testament. A Jubilee is celebrated in a kingdom every 50 years. At this time, debts are written off, enslaved people are freed, and people take a full year of a break from work. It is a kind of reboot. The land is not planted, and people were expected to fete in ecstasy for the ruler.)

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Uncomfortably numbed...

Des (TV Mini-series; 3 episodes, 2020)

This dramatisation of a 1983 real case from the police files of a seemingly boring man who carried out gruesome murders of equally unimpressive men in a most deliberate manner. He is credited to have killed at least 12 men. An ex-army cook with a short stint as a policeman and a civil servant invites young men to his apartment, makes them inebriated, kills them in various manners, and disposes of them in equally grisly ways. His activities came to light when a drain was blocked. Police were called in when human remains were discovered. The suspect, Dennis Nilson, is quite nonchalant about all his pursuits. He boasts about his crimes and even speaks to an author in the hope of publicising his feats. 

The murders and the investigations were later described in a best-seller titled 'Killing for Company'. The TV series shows how all the police investigations and this case, in particular, left a bitter after-taste in his mouth in the chief investigator, Detective Chief Investigator Peter Jay. Two years after Nilson was sentenced, he quit for force. In one of the closing scenes, Jay returns to the crime scene with the biographer, Brian Masters, where some of the victims were buried under the floorboard. The case never really left much resolution the many of the victim's families. Many of Des' victims were never identified. Masters quipped, "I can still smell the stench." implying the purifying bodies once hidden under the floor. To this detective, Jay replied, "Funny, I don't smell it anymore!"

It made my mind go asunder.

We are the company we keep with. My wise mother used to tell us when we were young about choosing the right friends. We became the persons that we befriend. She often quoted a famous somewhat brash proverb, "a calf, when it wanders with piglets, will soon be scavenging around dumpsites!" Cows, revered by Hindus, are given divine status. Pigs, on the other hand, are looked upon as dirty and shunned by most societies. By the association one keeps, he is lured to venture into the majority's habits as we, human beings, are social animals.

I feel for the many of the frontliners, the health and police personnel,  who have to deal with many of the unsavoury characters they have to deal with daily. Their clients come in as helpless, broken souls needing fixing. Once they regain strength, they bite the hand that fed them. The frontliners know that they should not be their own yardsticks to judge their clients. But with constant exposure to the nerve-numbing tragedies daily, are they at risk of becoming numb to the very struggles they are trained to handle. Are they at risk of becoming another file in the statistics in the annals of time?

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It is our fault!

Years and Years (BBC, Miniseries; 2019)
Season 1, Ep 1-6.

It started with the £1 Tshirts in the mid-1990s. Everyone knew it was ridiculously cheap, but nobody saw the need to create a ruckus about it. The businessmen took the lion's share of the profit while the poor workers who put it together took home a few pennies. The buyers did not complain as it was a bargain. The workers did not either. They were thankful that they had a job to go to. After many years, they were able to see some money. That was the beginning of the divide - the divergence between the haves and the have nots. It went on to create obnoxiously rich conglomerates.

With the spread of the world wide web to all corners of the world, global netizens were hooked. They were lulled with the dopamine of social media influence and the lure of aimless spending. People were cooped in the comfort of their echo chamber, looking into the eyes of the fellow humans but into the abyss of their monitors. Perched in their armchair, they became opinionated about everything and feel superior to the surroundings. Unbeknownst to them, the Big Brother of the Web was busy mining their habits and idiosyncrasies and would one day be used against them.

These must be some of the thoughts that went through the scriptwriters as they envisioned a potential dystopic UK in the 15 over years after 2019. 

The United Kingdom is no longer the cradle of the world as it used to be. Many jobs which used to be done by people is redundant as AI can do it as well, if not better. Who needs accountants anymore? Unskilled works like the manual car wash are resurfacing after being phased out long ago by the automatic car wash stations. Despatch riders to deliver online orders made a comeback. People simply needed jobs.

The story revolves a matriarchal octagenarian and her four grandchildren as well as their partners and children. Trump had been re-elected and had authorised the launch of a nuclear missile to the man-made island owned by China. Theresa May is somehow still in the picture. Politics in the UK is still chaos as hatred and populist politics hog the limelight. Brexit had secluded the UK from the Continent, but it has to deal with an influx of refugees from Ukraine. Russia had invaded Ukraine and is after its enemies and the LGBTs. Gay marriages in the UK are the norm, hence the illegal immigrants.

Along the way, many British banks collapse. Political candidates become outrageous in their approach to convince voters to vote for them. Digital contents are regulated so much. Deep fake videos make nothing credible anymore. Frequent power outages are carried to continually erase and modify data. Information is controlled by the ruling regime. BBC is shut down. Once again, print media makes a comeback as it proved more credible. Housing shortage becomes acute. The long arm of the law becomes something to be feared as the process to wrangle out such legal entanglements becomes too easy and cumbersome.

On the other end, people get so obsessed with integrating themselves to the net that they go into great lengths into incorporating the human body with the digital world. In Transhumanism, man can implant chips into their hand to receive calls, plant cameras into their eyes to get their instant clicks (literally at the blink of an eye) and even to transfer our memories and consciousness to a digital format. 

Along the way, we do see advances in medical treatment. Macular degeneration (which may cause blindness) is reversed with stem cell technology. The 80-year-old, who later became 90, seems active as ever, celebrating birthdays after birthdays. There is even mention of in-utero correction of spina bifida.

If Consciousness is the common denominator that unifies all beings in the Universe, the ability to interpret Consciousness will put Man at the level of God, would you say?

History has shown that giving too much power to the ruling elite can be disastrous. In the same vein, the people in the 2030 UK realised this and garnered their resources to oust the ruling regime by exposing their concentration camps and take charge of the Government.

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Life on fast lane

My Generation (Documentary; 2017)


This documentary is mainly about the rise and demise of the British Invasion generation. It was the time after World War 2. Euphoria was everywhere. Clement Attlee and his Labour Party gave a shot in the arm for the working class people. NHS made medical services accessible to the average Joe. Education became free. The divide between the aristocrat and the common man soon became blurred. The class demarcation became a thing of the past. Everyone has the opportunity to prosper. Clothing became democratised. The normal sombre tone of the garments became strikingly loud and short. Dressing-up was no longer to cover the bare essentials and to keep warm but became a statement of anti-establishment.

As it became to generations to come, the generation before thought that the society was heading to a path of decadence and Armageddon was nay.

Music became an annoyance to the elders. Rock and roll music could not be contained by the powers that be. The youngsters, creative as they were, even got around the legal wrangle by transmitting them from a boat as Radio Caroline.

The popular music and their new-age gurus dictated what fashion is and what is haute couture. The introduction of contraceptive pills to the general public further empowered the younger generation and especially the girls, to come out of the cocoon of being treated as second-class citizens. The young ones dictated what they wanted and were not going to take the orders of the oldies lying down.

With music appreciation also came recreational drugs. This, in essence, can be said to be the cause of the downfall of the 60s generation. Addiction, overdose and death brought this flamboyant age to its self-destruction.

https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson 

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Everyone's a loser?

I Hired a Contract Killer (1990)
Screenplay, Production, Direction: Aki Kaurismäki

When does a person consider himself a failure? Does it happen when he loses his job and is unable to sustain his existence? Or it happens when he realises that there is no future for him, nothing for him to live for? The path in front of him is just an abyss of nothingness with nothing to call his own. His life is hollow, and his interaction with others is just superficial acquaintances which end at the end of working hours or the break of dawn.

Is he a loser when he is unable to provide for his loved ones? Does he lose it when the curtain draws on him and the Maker prematurely call him in?

Set in the gloomy, dull days of the 70s in the United Kingdom when economic malaise was the order of the day and financial market was in the doldrums, it depicts the story of the Royal Water Works Board clerk who was retrenched. The Board is being privatised and the protagonist, Henri (Jea-Pierre Léaud, seen as a child actor in the classic French neo-realist film '400 Blows'), being a foreigner, is the first to go. A disappointed Henri, probably with other baggage that he must be carrying with him as he had run away from France, attempts suicide. He fails miserably. By chance, Henri encounters an article in the newspaper about hired killers. With his life savings, he employs them to kill him!

Along the way, he meets and falls in love with a flower girl. Suddenly, the zest for life is renewed. Life has a purpose now. Unfortunately, the agency that sends hire killers cannot be contacted, and a contract killer is on the prowl for his blood. Amidst the cat and mouse chase, we the audience, come to know that, even the hired assassin has a sob story to tell. The slayer feels he is a loser as he is dying from terminal lung cancer, his days are numbered and has a daughter that he has to depart soon.

In his own way, the storyteller paints a picture that everyone would perceive themselves to be a flop if there is nothing much to look forward to life. The next question is whose duty is it to pave a flawless path for us to follow? Is it our individual duties to plan our futures? Is it the role of our elected leaders to stimulate the economy so as its citizens can prosper? Does money solve everyone's problems?

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