Movie Double - 'Sucker Punch' & 'Scotty Pilgrim Versus The World'

'Sucker Punch' & 'Scotty Pilgrim Versus The World'

Today's Movie double is a no-brainer. These are 2 films that essentially bring video game graphic sensibilities into the movies. As such it seems fitting to at least bash these 2 coconuts together to have a look at what comes out.

Manga Much?

'Sucker Punch' has been getting some strange responses around the traps. I think it's one of those films where it provokes a certain kind of wowserism out of all sides of the political spectrum. Personally, I don't see  what the big deal is with girls showing off their figures in dance studio trainers and fishnet tights if it's set in an asylum brothel cabaret. Yeah, it's degrading to women, but it's degrading to men too. In fact, most of our civilisation is degrading to everybody. It's not a good excuse, but sometimes some things are not as particular critics make them out to be. The point of 'Sucker Punch' seems to be - if it can have anything so poignant as a point - is that life is full of ugly men and a gal's simply got to fight her way through the crap they dish up.

In most part, the action of the girls shooting and stabbing and punching their way through fantasy fight sequences that looked like something out of Final Fantasy was reminiscent of 'Sailor Moon'. Nobody really complains about Sailor Moon's skirt being too short. Or maybe they do. I personally feel like I'm just too old for this stuff to be impressed by it, but even allowing for it, the film has some interesting moments.

'Scotty Pilgrim Versus the World' by contrast draws much of its inspiration from arcade game beat'em ups. The moment they start fighting, the scores start dialing up in the frame. The graphics work over time to convey the sense of frantic movement in combat games while hyper-real depictions of over-the-top-impossible action makes for some pretty plastic viewing. It's not good or bad, it is beyond that kind of critique; it's more surreal and dream-like  without being beholden to Dali's vision of the surreal. No melting clocks, no references to Dali.

In each instance, the exaggerated action and elastic portrayal of time harks back to manga and anime. It's not hard to see the gush of 'Cool Japan' washing up on the shores of Hollywood and getting appropriated.

Conflict Without Drama

There's a lot of killing and maiming and blowing things up in both films. What's interesting in each instance is that no matter what the stakes, there is no doubt whatsoever about who is supposed to win. As such, the suspense is less than optimal. To remedy this problem 'Sucker Punch' resorts to killing off the team members to show the conflict is deadly. This makes the film far less sentimental - which is a good thing - but in turn gives it a new problem of making the audience wonder about the narrative displacement. Every time the girls go on a mission, the film's narrative switches over to a computer game fantasy combat sequence. At one point the narratives overlap and we see how the two lines interconnect when Rocket dies; but it raises the question as to why the metaphorical combat sequence is truly necessary. Maybe there was an even more thrilling film in telling the straight up story of breaking out of the asylum. By displacing the narrative to the fantasy space, it actually detracts from the drama, not heighten it.

'Scotty Pilgrim' too suffers from the same issue. If the combat scenes are in fact 'real' in terms of the action on screen, then the film is simply too silly to sustain a full viewing. It is only when we understand the combat sequences as metaphorical representations of the interpersonal conflict, that the film starts to have any kind of emotional depth, but again the dissociation kills the drama.

It's an interesting development in narratives but I don't know if it really can sustain a lot of meaning. It's the opposite of a film like 'Never Let Me Down' I wrote about yesterday because in that film, the drama is particularly poignant because the problems for the characters are inescapable problems of the story. Once the problems get re-stated in these metaphor sequences, somehow the problems also get abstracted.

That being said some of these sequences on both these films are pretty spectacular and delightful to watch. Just don't look too deeply for meaning. Too much irony will kill a film.

Chicks With Guns

We're in a new period of cinema where guys like to watch girls beat up on bad guys. We can call this the Cinema of Ange, after Angelina Jolie who has been kicking butt since playing Lara Croft. Angelina Jolie has had a string of films where she plays the kick ass woman - 'Wanted', 'Salt', 'Mr & Mrs Smith' and in the wake has been an acceptance that maybe watching the feminine form - read "Hot Body" - beat up on bad guys is more fun than watching another bloke do it. This transition was particularly pronounced when Angelina Jolie got the role for 'Salt' instead of Tom Cruise.

Suddenly there is no shortage of movies where females are toting guns in sexy garb, showing a bit of leg in fishnets. It's like some BDSM fetishist dream come true, but there they are in 'Sucker Punch'. I found myself laughing mostly, but I can well imagine the film is going to be some kind of cult hit for years to come. It's a lot sexier than Snyder's other offerings in '300' and 'The Watchmen'. 'Scotty Pilgrim' also slides into the weird terrain of girls high-kicking with long leather boots. I mean, if there were girls like that back at my school, my high school days might not have been so miserable. Then again, they might have been worse.

The point of all this is unclear, but there seems to have been a change in demographic in the Hollywood system that readily accepts this and ever more vampire stories. Oh look, they're planning another incarnation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Post-Modernity Goes Rococo

Both these films are pretty mannered. They have many sources which they then milk for effect and move on to the next influence they can milk. Both films are a kind of testament to the victory of form over function, style over content kind of movies - but for once the styles are enjoyable enough that you don't care too much about the shortage of content. After all, if you find yourself watching a movie with chicks in tight clothes fighting orcs, mechanical zombies and droids, while a B-24 Liberator dogfights with a dragon, just what kind of content is going to satisfy you as being sufficiently 'content-y'? Isn't it the case that sometimes, one should just go with the flow of visuals? Maybe at that point one should admit, asking for the kind of rich, thought-provoking content like in 'Cracks' or 'Never Let Me Go' is an entirely incorrect expectation for such films.

Anyway, I though I'd mention that because it's not as if I didn't have fun watching these films. It takes all kinds of films to make up cinema after all. We might have bitched about the obscurantist terror that is post-modernism back in the 1980s but at this point in time it is interesting to see that workable method of narrative has emerged from that soil.

Rickenbacker Bass Mention


It goes without saying, the coolest thing about Scotty might be his flame-glo Rickenbacker bass. Why that is his choice of bass guitar escapes me; maybe I missed it, but the choice gets my vote.

Movie Double - 'Cracks' & 'Never Let Me Go'

Boarding School Movies

There's a sub-genre in British movies about boarding schools, that's been added to greatly by the 8 films of Harry Potter, but more recently we've seen two films that mix it up with other genres. 'Cracks' is a film about the strange world of girls' boarding schools in England in the 1930s which veers into all kinds of voyeuristic fun, while 'Never Let Me Go' is a really bleak existentialist film with a Science Fiction tinge.

Both films are, in my humble opinion, very good and worth the viewing, but I'm bringing them up together because back to back, will be the most emotionally wrenching Sunday's viewing. These films are each tragedies that don the costume of English boarding schools but hark at very deep and disturbing issues in life. I think watching them together would make for a truly challenging viewing.

Still, I think I should go through a few things just to give you an idea of how interesting both these films are. As usual, here's the obligatory spoiler warning.

Faulty Adult Supervision

One of the themes in cinema this side of Gen-X coming of age in the mid 1980s has been films where adult supervision is either lacking or faulty. This is more pronounced in American cinema and I have touched upon it in crits of films such as 'Superbad', 'Better Off Dead' and the 'Back to the Future' series. Other films include the Home Alone movies, and even the Harry Potter series swings around the theme of absent parents. There are probably sociological reasons for this narrative movement, but in most part we are asked to see these setups as abnormal. This is because in American films, there is a strong impulse to re-assemble even the most fragmented of families.

In both 'Cracks' and 'Never Let Me Go', we see the opposite where there is no hope of any family - the kids cannot reassemble that myth - so they are forced to travel the terrain of the the strangely restrictive social order of the British boarding school. In each instance, the teachers are stern, conspiratorial, distant and authoritarian, rendering the children emotionally adrift. In both films we see the children become wanton but then they conform into exerting self-control in line with the school's discipline, which ends in tragedy.

Part of the rhetorical question in 'Cracks' is that if the teachers come from the same stilted mold, how can they confer anything of true value in the outside world to these children? Similarly, in 'Never Let Me Go', we find that the teachers' ultimate interest is not in education at all, but in the production of a commodity to suit the consumerist society and its never ending wants. In neither case can the adults said to be ethical or good - and I don't think this is the simple case of people getting back at their own boarding school experiences, but in fact a deeper despair about the meaning of education in our own society.

Rampant Emotions

We associate the British culture with the whole reserve and stiff upper lip thing and yet these characters in both films are extremely expressive of their feelings. There is a sense in both films that because the system squeezes so hard, the feelings cannot help but pour out. And when they do, they just don't seem like ordinary emotions but outpourings of primal rage and lust.

Eva Green's Miss G is a tremendous creation in fiction. The tremendous irony of a woman who claims to be of the world and is so distant from it, cloistered away teaching in a girl's boarding school is already a kind of novel tragedy. The irony and her inability to escape it makes for some punishing viewing. At the end of the film you come to realise that she never grew up, that she became a teacher and guardian to these children with about as much emotional maturity as the children in her care.

Similarly, Miss Lucy, a minor character played by Sally Hawkins in 'Never Let Me Go' is also unable to contain her emotions as she blurts out the truth to the children. As the film progresses we come to realise the weight of her confession to the children about their short destiny. The meaning of those words circle around to the denouement, when discussing souls and art, Miss Emily played by Charlotte Rampling declares, they were looking at the art to see if the children had any souls.

Tommy in 'Never Let Me Go' is subject to tremendous attacks of rage. The deeper angst about his existence is simply too much. In most part he is polite and self-controlled but he cannot accept his own death until just before the end. It's a furious kind of flame.

In both films, it's surprising to see just how deep the feelings run and then gushes to the surface like a geyser. You wouldn't believe it's about reserved English people.

Exchange Of Food

The exchange of food is a very important motif in both films. Fiamma's pastries from Spain in 'Cracks' at once represents her Christ-like appearance as well as presages her doom. Each meal with Fiamma is the last supper. Similarly the sharing of food is more intimate than the love-making in 'Never Let Me Down'. This could be because sex doesn't lead to life if you are a cloned organ donor unit, but food most certainly will be of sustenance.

'Cracks' spends a fair bit of time on showing food as an important social token. Food being shared immediately correlates with shared information and secrets. The party bonds the girls around food.

The flip-side of this is how dysfunctional pleasure is in both films. Miss G, for her pleasure drugs and rapes Fiamma. Not only is it transgressive, there is something craven about Miss G, not to mention the lesbian sex. Miss G clearly fears men and the outside world. Similarly, the sex depicted in 'Never Let Me Go' is not joyous but rather emotionally abortive. Kath, played by Carey Mulligan participates in sex vicariously by overhearing to her two best friends fuck. When she finally sleeps with Tommy, it is the most sad, mournful, depressing love scene I've ever seen on the screen. You're grateful it cuts away.

Love And The Soul

Oddly enough, both films want to discuss love and the soul. In 'Cracks', it is assumed that without love, then the soul cannot be. Miss G's exhortation to live with desire and for desire essentially leads her to her own demise. 'Never Let Me Go' is more elaborate in that it posits a litmus test wherein artistic expression is seen as the corollary for the existence of the soul. The main character Kath and her lover Tommy can only operate on the theory that love proves there is a soul. The ending runs in the opposite direction to the seeming momentum of the discourse, for Charlotte Rampling's character essentially represents a system that has no soul, and is totally willing to condemn Kath and Tommy.

In many ways 'Never Let Me Go' is the film 'Atonement' wasn't. It's a much better piece of narrative fiction by far, and the payoff is heavy, heavy, heavy.

The Film Beautiful

I just want to quickly say how beautiful both films look. There are some stunning moments of cinematography in both films.

Too Bad She Won't Live, But Then Again, Who Does?

So now, it's time to have a look at the 'Blade Runner' references. Jordan Scott, the director of 'Cracks' is the daughter of Ridley Scott, director of 'Blade Runner'. In 'Cracks', she pays homage to her old man's work in a key scene when Di witnesses Eva Green's Miss G rape Fiamma. Set-up -wise, it's a re-run of the scene when J.F Sebastian witnesses Roy kill Dr. Eldon Tyrell, down to the reaction as she turns and flees the scene.

In 'Never Let Me Go', we come to realise our main character and her cohorts in the school are not natural humans but some kind of genetically engineered organ donating surrogates; they are replicants, for want of a better word. The despair they feel for their destiny is in fact the despair of Roy Batty. They want more life, but they cannot get it. At the end, the main character asks if their short lives are any different to the lives of normal humans. It's very bleak, but you applaud the director who gets you there emotionally, without the cinematic pyrotechnics of a 'Blade Runner'. Then again, it's been 30years since that film.

The message is unsurprising because it has been 30 years since 'Blade Runner', and yet it gets delivered with the same gravitas. It's very well played.

What Housing Shortage?

This Made Me Laugh

They're talking about whether there is a shortage of property or not.

This line cracked me up:

More than two-thirds of the government’s shortage estimate arises by including people who can’t afford housing, such as the homeless or those living in trailer parks, Mr Sayce said.

In most part, the belief is that there isn't enough housing, but there's this bit here:

Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens is among those flummoxed as to why homes are so pricey in a nation almost as big as the US, with just 22.7 million people.
“How is it that a country of our size - we are not short of land - how is it that we cannot add to the dwelling stock for the marginal new entrant more cheaply than we seem to be able to do,” Mr Stevens told a parliamentary panel in Melbourne late last month.

Now, what are we to make of that? Obviously the answer is people just want to live on coastal cities and the small areas along the coast, and not in that dirty big inhospitable bit in the middle people call The Outback.

Harry Dent Says...

Harry Dent has written some interesting books based on his observations to do with demographics and how they impact on the economy. He's out in Sydney saying that the Bubble is overdue to take a hit, and most likely will cop it next year.

"Australia is probably the best place in the world to survive this, but we do think Australia will not escape as well as it did from the last crisis (in 2008)," Mr Dent told AAP.

At the centre of the coming debt crisis is real estate, the forecaster says.

"People in places like Sydney or Tokyo or Miami say, 'Hey, real estate can never go down here, we're a great place, everyone wants to move here, there's not much land for development', and what I say is that is exactly the kind of place that bubbles," Mr Dent said.

"Outside Hong Kong and Shanghai, Australia is the most expensive real estate market in the world compared to income."

Mr Dent said Australia's house prices would return to late 1990s or early 2000 levels.

Driving all these changes is simple demographics, specifically the peak of the baby boomers' spending, Mr Dent said.

That is all pretty simple and obvious, but will it really happen? This is exactly the scenario the Reserve Bank of Australia is trying to fight off, isn't it?

From The Sidelines

The Gap Between Common Sense And A Coup

Following on from the post about the High Court judgment against the Malaysian Solution the other day, I had the rare opportunity to ask one of our preeminent human rights lawyers about our constitution and government - specifically about the spectre I raised the other day of "what happens if the Prime Minister pushes for policy and orders the ADF to ship the asylum seekers to Malaysia, ignoring the High Court's decision?"

The answer I got back was that the High Court would issue an injunction against that course of action, which in turn would lead to the ADF desisting.

"Even if it was a direct order from the Prime Minister?" I asked. And he said yes, because the top level of the ADF reports to the rule of law itself.

"What if the generals agreed with the Prime Minister and followed orders and did it?" I asked.

"Well then, you would have a coup."

As in Coup D'etat.

The way he explained it, the top level brass of the ADF are answerable to the rule of law, (and not the office of the Prime Minster) which is an abstraction of what is allowable under the law. Which is why the General would exercise common sense and desist when the injunction came; and is exactly the common sense being practised by the Prime Minister in not pursuing such a radical course of action to push policy, according to the preeminent human rights lawyer.In fact all of our top level government runs on the assumption that all these people will act with this common sense.

In fact, he went on, when the whole Gough Whitlam dismissal was going on, a Unionist piped up and told Gough he should mobilise the army to stop the Governor General getting his way. Whitlam dismissed the suggestion as being outrageous - and lacking in common sense - and so he never went to the army to back his government in 1975. And this, according to the preeminent human rights lawyer, is how democratic government is practiced in a civlilised nation.

I have to tell you I felt very afraid that the only thing standing in the way of a coup was the presumption of common sense being held by people in power. I look at Tony Abbott and the way he carries on and I doubt he has anything like what we would call common sense. I would live in fear that he would be entirely short of such common sense.

I share this with you all in the best spirit that may we all live under a government with plentiful common sense.

The Big Protest

Making the news today was the crowd of 30,000 + people in the domain protesting against the NSW government's attack on the public sector workers. They seem to do this every time a conservative government gets into office in NSW. I seem to recall they did this in the early 1990s when Nick Greiner got in, and the protests did nothing. They had the numbers and did as they pleased.

Big Warwick reports that the Police Union were there which was good for moral support, but that the prison wardens were there. "Who's looking after the prisoners today then?" asked some wag. If the Health Sector Union were in there, then it meant the mentally ill were also on the loose, so to speak. Crazies and Prisoners running riot was a nice mental image.

I get that these unions are angry to have their pay rises indexed at 2.5% which is below CPI - and we all know that CPI tends to under-report inflation. It's a kind of bad faith by the NSW Government. It's also part of a global trend in the wake of the GFC to try and pare back public spending. Why should these people take a pay cut? Because if they don't the NSW Government will have to sack a whole bunch of them instead. You can see both sides of the argument if you step back and look at it calmly, but nobody is ever going to be calm when it's their hip pocket (and you certainly have to respect that too).

The irony that doesn't get missed is that when it comes to politicians giving themselves a pay rise, they never say no.

Even More From Steve Keen

Makes For Interesting Reading

Here's the latest from Steve Keen, sent in by Pleiades.

So is the chopping of The Block a sign that the days of ever-rising house prices are over? Not if you listen to Christopher Joye (Property's fine forecast, August 25). The median forecast of the “21 leading market economists” he polled was for 5 per cent growth in nominal house prices per annum for the next ten years, which Chris notes would suggest “that they will likely be 55 per cent higher in ten years’ time”.

Good luck with that. As Chris notes, my forecast wasn’t included, but it should be no surprise that I expect a fall in house prices of about 40 per cent over the same time period.

I differ with the 20 who predicted positive price growth for one simple reason: I focus on the role of debt in driving house prices. Having argued that debt drove prices up over the last fifteen years, I now expect debt to drive them down again.

The mechanism is simple – but it’s not part of conventional 'neoclassical' economics, which is why Chris and his surveyed market economists don’t consider it. Aggregate demand is the sum of income plus the change in debt, and this is spent on both goods and services and assets. There is thus a link between the change in debt and the level of asset prices (and the fraction sold, and the quantity produced, but I’ll focus on just house prices for now).

Going one step further, the change in aggregate demand is the change in income plus the acceleration of debt. There is thus a link between the acceleration of debt and the rate of change of house prices. If this relationship is strong, then rising house prices require that the rate of growth of debt rises over time.

The first thing that pops into my head is that the moment the real estate asset class starts to nose dive, the RBA would be cutting interest rates to shore it up as much as it can, because let's face it, if the banks lost 40% on their mortgage books, there will be widespread panic. More likely is the scenario where the RBA is going to wind it back towards earlier norms slowly, but can it be done? At least for the next decade, you'd have to concede that Real Estate is a bad bet.

9/11 Remembered

A Decade of Two Wars

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 is rapidly approaching. The media are rolling out interviews with people who worked at Ground Zero as well as digging up their archival footage. Just watching the TV promo spots for these things is bringing me down. I caught Channel Seven's effort tonight and an old hand from the FDNY was asked if the killing of Osama bin Laden brought closure. He replied caustically that he hated the word closure. He pointed out there was no filling the rupture in the lives of people, and that they cannot stop remembering. By extension the enemy cannot forget that day r the retribution upon bin Laden either, so there can never be such a thing as closure.

I'm trying to remember my 9/11 moment and it's pretty easy. I watched it on TV and couldn't sleep. I went to work that following Tuesday as Monday still played out in the USA and knew the world had changed. Amongst my friends I was most definitely the most hawkish in retaliating. This was because I had grown up in New York City and the World Trade Center towers meant a lot more to me than people around me. To the extent that it happened to a place I knew materially made my response a little more visceral. I had to explain to Australians that had it been a landmark of theirs like the Sydney Opera House, they wouldn't be so forgiving. To this day I find myself the least sympathetic to jihadists, terrorists, Islamists and other parties who actively hate on the West. I don't care about their grievances. It's not an intellectually satisfying position to take, but not all of our politics is for our intellectual satisfaction. Some times it is simply because a line is drawn in the sand - and we didn't even do the drawing of that line.

The toll of the Afghan War and the ill-advised Iraq War that followed has been well publicised. They are probably the two most covered wars in the history of mankind, thanks to modern communications. The freedoms we've lost, the intrusions we must endure, the suspicions we must sustain, the injuries and the dead we must accept; all keep mounting up on one side of the ledger. It is very hard to see the benefits of all this expenditure on the other side of the ledger. If Osama bin Laden wanted to see the collapse of the western world, the GFC of 2007-2008 certainly gave us an inkling of how that might already be happening - with or without this stupid pair of wars.

Still, I think it's important that the West have a quiet think about who exactly is the enemy. It might be surprised to find that it has more than a casual few.

David Hicks Again

For a guy who wants to live the rest of his life quietly, David Hicks seems to keep popping up. As you may know - long time readers here most certainly will - I have a reasonably fixed opinion of the man so it gets tedious to have him brought up in conversation and to hear both extremes of the discussion.

My own view to this day is that on 11th September 2001, upon witnessing the World Trade Center brought to ground by terrorist attacks, David Hicks chose to head to Afghanistan to side with the Taliban. I've said this before but I can't countenance his argument that he was somehow a wide-eyed kid who got caught up in these affairs almost by accident. The day he left for Afghanistan, he should have know that part of the risk would be capture by the US Marines.he shouldn't have been surprised to find himself in Guantanamo Bay.

Without going into the legalities of the plea-bargain or the Military Tribunal itself - long time readers know I covered that stuff in my previous blogs - it seems if there's one thing that could be said of David Hicks was that he got exactly what he asked for. And if he were as sanguine a human he claims to be about it today, then he might reflect on that fact and shut the fuck up and go away.

News That's Fit To Punt - 01/Sep/2011

Can't Get An Even Break

What a mess this Malaysian solution has turned into. And here was Julia Gillard, looking for a result, any result, that got over the line to break up the 'business model' for people smugglers. Now that the High Court has ruled against the plan, it's back to square zero for the government.

The High Court's ruling seems to indicate that the Immigration minister can't send a minor to a country without UN protection, and there fore the Malaysian solution cannot be carried out by this government. this would suggest that the Pacific Solution on Nauru would be ruled out by this judgment as well. Of course it doesn't stop Tony Abbott from saying Nauru is a perfectly good location to send these people. It's as if Tony Abbott has totally failed to comprehend what the High Court has said. It's amusing to watch but infuriating all the same.

What ever the case, the ALP Federal government really is in a pickle now because the left faction is preemptively trying to ward off Julia Gillard from doing adopting the Nauru solution which would do 2 things. It would mean a policy capitulation to the  Coalition, and it would mean one of the reasons Kevin Rudd got elected in 2007 would be lost.

A quick look at the SMH Poll is interesting too. As of this writing 40% want the Asylum seekers processed on the Mainland but 20% want them sent to Nauru, and a whopping 35% want them sent back to where they come from. 55% of the electorate not only do not care, they're hostile to the asylum seekers.That's not some lunatic fringe. That's the weight of public opinion no matter how distasteful to one's own ideals.

More tellingly only 1% support the Malaysian plan - which probably shows that the Gillard ALP government at least are not doing this thing by focus groups. If they were, they'd be digging their heels in ti keep them on the mainland and be arguing with at least 40% electorate support. Again, I don't know if this is good or bad. It strongly suggests the electorate haven't digested the Malaysian solution but are instead sticking to party lines or being mean-spirited (how else do you explain that 35%?).

For my money, I actually thought the Malaysian solution was workable in as much as it accomplished a few things. It did mean we took 4000 legitimate refugees in exchange for the questionable 800. That's a 5 for 1 deal in terms of living up to our obligations. It would have put a big dent in the reasons for the asylum seekers to get into the boats in the first place, which is exactly what the government is trying to do.

So you have to feel for Julia Gillard. Not only could she not get a policy win out of this, she's been sent back to the drawing board when the opposition is actively setting fire to the house that houses the drawing board.If sending them overseas for processing is against the law, then what can you really do but process them on Christmas Island or the mainland? That would get you to 43% support on the issue, but it won't deter the people smugglers.

Actually, the question I've bee pondering is what happens if Julia Gillard, Chris Bowen and the government decided to ignore the High Court ruling and did it anyway. I was thinking, that would be really messy. In fact, messier than the circumstances of the Dismissal in 1975. If the government ordered the ADF to move these people, who could stop them from being moved? NSW Police? I'm laughing at that idea.

I guess the High Court judges could subpeona Julia Gillard and say she's in contempt of court, but how would they arrest her if she refused to show? The AFP reports to the Attorney General's office and that would mean the AFP couldn't get a warrant because the Attorney General would block it. What would happen then? A colossal showdown between Parliament and the High Court.

I have to tell you I imagined it, and got half excited, half-scared.

My Question Of The Day

Where do I sign up for 'Kevin '11'?

Manufacturers' Blues

What Should We Be Making?

Today's theme on the news feed seems to be manufacturing. Pleaides forwards this number here on Crikey behind a subscription wall. The salient bit is worth quoting so here it is:

But, as much as people didn’t want to lose jobs, most could see that the jig was up — that there was something absurd about making shoes in Collingwood, dresses in Redfern, fabric in Footscray — when they could be done so much cheaper elsewhere. On that, there was a broad deal of implicit agreement between the neoliberal elites and the masses.

The difficulty now, for both major parties supporting this move, is that it’s a one-time deal. Like a diet that goes too far — cutting first fat, and then muscle and organ tissue — the obsessive free trade/comparative advantage mantra makes no distinction about what is being lost. In that, it wilfully blinds itself with the abstract generalities of economic theory, to its particular effects on the ground, and how they are viewed. The  public lacks that bias, and retains its willingness to take things on a case-by-case basis.

Thus, the evisceration of manufacturing could proceed in the Keating era, because everyone could see the sense of it — there was no compelling collective reason we needed to produce our own shoes (though there may be all sorts of social and cultural reasons for it) and most people can see that. But steel is a different matter, and most people can see that too.

That one raises a few questions. First of all, when we sub out our manufacturing to the cheaper countries, do they hold to our standards? Anecdotally at least it seems this is not so. All our detailed standards for steel specifications are hardly met by the steelworks in China and South Korea. They churn out crap steel that ends up causing more problems when we buy their product. I've even seen this in a licensed Floyd Rose bridge on an electric guitar where a steel saddle snapped in half. That's not supposed to happen.

Anyway, the point is not to bash Chinese steel, but you get my point. Once we sub out an industry like steel making, then we're vulnerable to the crappy product standards of the developing world. We might be willing to live with that in fabrics (it's uncomfortable but it hasn't killed anybody has it?) but can we live with that arrangement with something like steel? In a sense, there's a lot of value added to the steel that comes out of our steel works, simply by having higher standards of specification.

Then there's Michael Pascoe:

Various people have cited the Barbienomics lesson in recent years, but to the best of my knowledge credit for it belongs to a Hong Kong University post-grad student of Professor Michael Enright. Barbienomics was part of Enright's presentation at an AICD conference in Shanghai in 2007.

In brief, the student worked across the border in a factory that made Barbie dolls for Mattel. American protectionists seemed to have a particular focus on Chinese toy manufacturers at the time, so the student broke down where the value was in a Barbie doll when it was purchased from an American store.

In rough numbers, the brand – Mattel's trade mark, the Barbie name and design, the intellectual property - captured 40 per cent of the value. The retailer grabbed another 40 per cent. Parts and materials accounted for about 10 per cent. Logistics, moving Barbie from the factory to the shop, took six or seven per cent, leaving just three or four per cent for the assembly.

Displayed as a graph with a smiling Barbie, the plastic doll effectively asked the audience an obvious question: which part of value capture is most worth having, which part least?
At the time, Chinese were asking just what America was complaining about when China's factories were capturing so little of the value and doing so much of the work.

Now, that's interesting information right there. In pursuit of profits, companies will move manufacturing to developing nations, but the point of moving such labor is to pay so little for labour costs it can take a bigger slice of the margins. The furore surrounding Pacific Brands in the last few years was essentially a move to do exactly that. Our cheaper apparel shops are flooded with goods from China but the the analysis quoted above suggests that 40% of the price goes to the brand, another 40% goes to the retailer and the labourers in China or wherever ends up with 6-7% of that pie. This is exactly why being marketed to by brand is a terrible thing for our own personal finances. You can count on the fact that well over 50% of the ticket goes to the brand and retailer for our pleasure of them being who they are and having it in a shop we can get to.

Try Apple for size.

We have become slaves to Apple's brand, which, according to the research company Millward Brown, today makes up more than half the company's $US350 billion ($328 billion) book value. By and large, what Apple makes, we buy - unquestioningly.

The logo and name have become the symbol of consumerist cool, an affordable piece of luxury that, if you believe Apple's marketing, divides consumers the world over into Apple lovers and others, and ne'er the twain shall meet.

But there is nothing very cool about the culture of the company Jobs has presided over since he returned as CEO in 1997, after being ousted some years earlier in a boardroom coup. Its ''my way or the highway'' approach to business has earned it few friends. Apple is one of the few technology companies in the world that has succeeded despite having a closed ecosystem that does not work with any other technology. This protectionist approach extends to Apple's aggressive policy towards patents and trademarks. Any company, be it large or small, that dares use the ''i'' or anything resembling an apple in its brand, invites the wrath of Apple's corporate lawyers.

Which is a bit of a rant article about how Steve Jobs is no saint, but it's worth pondering for a moment at the sheer power of Apple's brand and the fact that it is the world's biggest company by capitalisation - that never pays a dividend to its investors (!). It is worth asking if it is a good corporate citizen at all. If it weren't for their product, they'd be monopolists like... Microsoft.

There are people committing suicide in Apple's factories in China because of the grueling conditions and they probably get a tiny fraction of the 6-7% the factory gets out of the price of an iPod or iPad. It's getting to the point that the factory wants to automate so that it can get rid of labor costs. It's a contradictory kind of world. To deliver ever cheaper goods, a lot of companies have decided to cut labour costs but in turn this has led to poorer people who cannot afford the cheaper goods because they can't get the jobs they used to have. And given the cheaper cost of production, these companies all line up to collect the lion's share of the profits while some of them complain about having competition.

A Joke About Alan Jones

This One Is Doing The Rounds

Alan Jones is coaching the Barker Boys U-15 Rugby team. He turns up to the team training with a parrot on his shoulder and declares, "If any of you can tell me what this bird on my shoulder is, I will fuck them up the arse."

Confused, the U-15 boys rugby team confer with one another until they push the captain forward, who asks, "Is it an emu?"

Alan Jones says, "close enough!"