They Should Change Their Name To Unfairfax

Content Is Not King With Fairfax

It's been pissing me off for a few days so I'm going to have to jus get it out there.
A band - Black Bird Hum - were asked play at the Sydney Night Noodle Markets. They were told that they wouldn't get paid to play, but they should because of the exposure they would get. As any right thinking professional would, the band declined and put it out to the world that Fairfax (who own and run the Nigh Noodle Markets) would do such a thing as to ask a band to play for free.

Black Bird Hum declined the offer, which they received via an agent representing Fairfax. “We’re flattered to be on the radar of a company with an annual ‘Total Group Revenue of $1,867.2 million‘ (FY2016),” the band wrote on Facebook. 

“We have, however, decided to decline the invitation to perform at the event on account of you deciding not to pay us.” The band noted how they have been paid for all of their upcoming tour dates, much like those who would’ve worked on Fairfax’s event. 

“We’re guessing that the sound tech who ran the PA on the night was paid; as were the graphic designers and marketing companies that did the event website, promo and marketing material; and the companies that supplied the lighting, tables, chairs and umbrellas; and the cleaners,” they wrote. 

But despite a Fairfax representative insisting to Crikey that they will “look at how we are engaging with everyone to ensure we are showing RESPECT”, they apparently still haven’t quite grasped the message. 

In an article published earlier this week in The Advocate, a Tasmanian paper printed by Fairfax Regional Media, musicians are taken to task for their ungrateful entitlement, i.e. expecting to be paid for performing live.

And so things just got a bit more nasty. If you go to the Advocate, you will find one Elanor Watt writing:

The real question is, how strong is your passion and what are you willing to do to achieve your goals.

I assume most musicians love making and performing music, it is not one of those jobs that you simply decide to do as you don’t have any other choice, it is considerably passion related much like writing or sports.

If someone was really passionate about getting their music out there, and enjoyed performing then they would take up any opportunity given to them, especially if it means expanding their audiences, drawing in a larger fan base, because we have all seen the movies, anything can happen.

The next issue is worth. Some bands have explicitly implied taking the previous approach insists that artists, well some, do not need to be paid. Are they not worth payment, are the countless hours put into practicing not worth payment.


I consider this issue similar to one that many other people face.

The trade industry for example. My grandmother told me she worked for several years training to be a hairdresser, she was the one who paid for cutting people’s hair, cleaning up, like any employee, but she was paying to do this, to further her skills.

The same goes for university students, yes we pay to learn but we are churning out word after word, some people go on to write thesis’ and contribute to academic literature which is all unpaid.
These people all share the same desire to pursue their goals. They all do this to get ahead, musicians should be no different.In response to these comments, the argument they make completely rules out many other people who are in a similar situation as mentioned previously.

The band seems ungrateful to a potentially amazing opportunity that has been given to them. Dismissing events like this makes me wonder where this band will be in several years time, if they consistently have in their heads they are too good to be even approached for an unpaid gig, what has made them so entitled.

Hundreds of people would be honoured to play at such an event that draws in thousands of people, but hey. obviously royalties are more important to some people.

And so she goes. Where do you start? If a band played a live set at the Night Noodle Markets, clearly it's situation where the corporation is hiring a band to play. If they don't want to pay for it, they should say it's open mic and invite people who want to play for "exposure". Watch all the crazies come out of the woodwork with their banjos and ukuleles and glockenspiels. Of course, they won't do that because they want to ensure a certain standard of entertainment - which is kind of why they would have to pay for the band. It's just a standard business transaction. 

If you have a stage with lights and a PA, and you have crew running around already, it's understandable that it's no big leap to think you can make it better by having a band. Except as the band point out, the lights and the stage and the audio techs are paid. Why on earth wouldn't Fairfax pay for the band? What possible reason could there be but outright disrespect for band musicians? Well, let's look at it in some more detail. 

Fairfax are doing all these Night Noodle Market numbers in order to transition out of just being a print media company. I also know for a fact that they keep their budgets tight and hardly raise them year after year but expect more from their suppliers every year; I know that they charge a shit ton of money for these stall holders to participate; I know this results in stupendous prices when you go to the Night Noodle Markets. In that context, it surprises me none whatsoever that they don't want to pay musicians.  They don't want to pay because it comes out of their margin - that's it. It's not profound; it's not some kind misunderstanding; it's not really difficult to understand.

Fairfax have conjured up an event where they charge stall holders money in exchange for providing an event space. They spend a portion of that money and squeeze out as much as possible from the production company so that they provide infrastructure such as power, lighting, staging, audio and assorted decorations. And the rest of it is their margin. It's a business, so you wouldn't do it if you didn't have a margin. The question then follows, if you're willing to have the infrastructure of a band performance and pay for it, why the hell wouldn't you want to pay for the band? 

It really goes to the core of what Fairfax thinks is its content. Presumably they think it's the food and therefore not the band playing music. What really is staggering is that the people who produce this event think the band should come free in exchange for 'exposure', because that would suit Fairfax just fine. All this says is that Fairfax doesn't want to spend the money because it's greedy. There's nothing excusable about it or anything that can be misconstrued as a misunderstanding. 

You know what's really crazy about all this? They've always been happy to pay some DJ in the past. Yes, a fucking DJ. Don't let anybody fool you that the Fairfax corporation has any "RESPECT" for musicians, or content. 

'Suits' - Seasons 1-5

That Was A Big Binge

My better half has been watching this show regularly and I've sort of shrugged at it because the aesthetic of the show was way too smooth and manicured. I like my law shows a bit grittier; my fave law show was 'The Practice' back in the 90s where Dylan McDermott played criminal attorney Bobby Donnell and each week had a big trial speechifying moment. Of course the same person who created 'The Practice' also created 'Ally McBeal' so ... what can I say? Maybe 'The Practice' wasn't as gritty as I remember it to be - Wikipedia lists its genre as comedy drama. I sure don't remember laughing a whole lot watching 'The Practice'.

Anyway, I decided to take the plunge because FetchTV served it up on a platter, and I was researching how to write a series and it seemed appropriate to see what a multiple award winning show did. Plus, my better half is the better half for a reason. She has a sharp eye for character drama. It couldn't be bad at all to go through it all, could it?

80 episodes is a long journey to go through, but having gone through it, I think I at least understand what the hell is going on in the show, and why it might appeal to audiences. The one benefit of watching a show about lawyers is that they do it without special effects or masked vigilantes saving the day. It's nice watching something that is ostensibly content for grownups, and in most part it is.

'Suits' seems to hark back to the 'L.A. Law' style of slick lawyering show that inspired another generation. You can see how this works - the constant glamorising of the law sucks in the ever aspirational into a turgid career pushing paper. I once met a woman who wanted to be a trial lawyer who explained to me just how far one had to go just to be the kind of lawyer that gets up and works a trail. After her explanation it seemed to me law shows were far more misrepresentative of the career allure of its profession than medical dramas. Yes it takes a long time to become a surgeon too, but you don't exactly go into not expecting to see blood and gore.

'Suits' gives the impression that lawyering is not only glamorous, it might just be easy enough that you can watch a few episodes of 'Suits' and then you too can go into court and argue for a client. It is fanciful. But then so is 'My Kitchen Rules' or the Six o'clock News.

What's Good About It

The best thing about the show is the premise whereby a savant turns out to be a en excellent lawyer in practice but has no qualifications to be practicing law. Much of the tension in the series is built on whether the character Mike gets found out for this brazen fraud. The show teams up Mike with Harvey who is meant to be the sharpest lawyer going, and Harvey is complicit in the fraud because he can see the immense potential of Mike.

The show isn't as good a survey of the law as something like 'The Practice'. It's relatively light on the sort of procedural law show tropes. Instead, it spends a lot of time exploring the hierarchy and institutional strengths and weaknesses of a top flight law firm.

Gabriel Macht who plays Harvey is a very solid leading actor with great range. you can see why the show is so successful watching him. He has more range than the character he is playing so he surprises you at least once every few episodes. The show hangs on him more than the other main character of Mike played by Patrick J. Adams. Adams is also good, but when you watch 5 seasons in a row you start seeing his limitations. He just repeats certain moods and moves over and over again. It wouldn't be noticeable if you saw the show once a week, but it sticks out when you watch the series in a row. He's simply not as varied in voice or elocution or body language as Macht.

What's Bad About It

The writers of the show can't resist quoting movies. It's just time-wasting fodder when real character stuff could be explored. The show has many moments where they're just spinning wheels, which are more apparent when you sit down and binge watch 5 seasons. You get to hone in on which narrative lines are important and which ones aren't, and you find yourself watching quite a number of tedious exchange built on quotes from movies.

The worst moment was when they started quoting 'Mad Men' when 'Mad Men' clearly informed the template for the office politics. It was just bad writing, bad execution. The moment they likened a situation to 'Game of Thrones' was also terrible. I'm sure they meant it as an homage, but it killed tension and the sense of place of this show. It was these moments where the writers gave in to their own anxiety of influence.

Also some of the lesser characters seem have difficulty breaking out of their two-dimensional characterisation. Louis, the strange obstacle character, spends a better part of the five seasons until he finds himself enough to stand in solidarity with his cohorts. It's just not believable that somebody so smart could be so dumb about their circumstance - especially a circumstance the character claims to love and cherish above all else.

What's Interesting About It

The whole exercise turned out to be quite instructional on how to formulate a long-lasting TV series. The show has an overarching problem - that Mike Ross is a fraud - but it also has secondary story arcs that last the season where the show presents with a antagonist who seeks to destroy the firm or take it over. There is a tertiary arc where the character interactions reside whether it be romantic love interest or professional regard for one another or simply bickering over process; and only after then does something happen in each episode to nudge things along on all the arcs.

Some times you wish they spent more time on the big arc, while other times you're happy watching the lawyers do their TV lawyer thing. The tension between the story arcs goes a long way to pushing the show out to 5 series and counting.

Defending The Indefensible, Arguing the Implausible

The trick to writing a good lawyer show seems to be capturing the ability of lawyers to and do and say things normal people would never consider doing. The system is there to give a fair trial to people and that means somebody has to argue to the best of their ability in favour some unsavoury people and things. Take our foreign minister Julie Bishop who as a lawyer defended Big Tobacco and James Hardie in the famous cases before she turned to politics. I know some well educated people who hold this against her as a sign of bad character but you watch enough law shows, you quickly understand that those trials wouldn't have been fair trials had Big Tobacco and James Hardie not had their lawyer in their corner arguing the implausible to defend the indefensible. To that extent I sure don't hold Julie Bishop's legal career against her as having bad character. For our society to be as moral and ethical as it claims to be, somebody needed to be in that corner for the system to work.

In many ways the fun of watching these law shows is watching the lawyers do and say these extraordinary things. Harvey Specter then, is an interesting lawyer character because he often opts to not go to trial. Instead he looks to make sure he cuts the best deals for his clients. That is an interesting wrinkle because for a show about lawyers, they don't seem to go into the courtroom anywhere near the frequency that the lawyers in 'The Practice' or 'L.A. Law' or 'for that matter 'Ally McBeal' did. Instead we're treated to a world of finding the leverage and pressing hard to get outcomes. It's indefensible at times, implausible at others, but it sure makes for interesting viewing.

Race, Gender, Faith And The System

The main characters are palimpsests of American anxieties about race, gender and faith.
I was watching the series and it struck me that Harvey Specter was a dead giveaway name. Harvey is like the imaginary rabbit from the eponymous movie, and Specter is actually spectre, a ghost. He is the least present of the characters in the show, and so he gives us the least information of himself or what he is truly about. Harvey is also unlike any standard American character in that he hates his mother. That's something you don't see everyday in American media. He seems to be living out a WASP nightmare of repressed feelings and memories which are finding expression in his angry outbursts and terrible treatment of those around him. By season 5, he is sent packing by the writers to go see a Psychiatrist which creates its own troubles.

Mike, in stark contrast, is a Catholic boy haunted by a sense of guilt. He finds moral purpose where other sane, normal people might not choose to find them, but given that his character pretty much is at the centre of the main problem in the show, you sort of accept the whole thing. Mike is constantly flip-flopping about what to do, essentially weighing up what makes him feel less guilty as he goes along, but all the while repressing the fact that he is indeed a fraud.

Louis is a man full of self-loathing and a strange sense of satisfaction at his own idiosyncrasy. He's a man in search of one good friend, and he can't maintain friendships because he perceives his social standing only in hierarchical terms. If he is meant to be comic relief, then it is pretty psychotic. It is revealed Louis is Jewish by birth and upbringing but he seems to have devoted his faith more to the church of Harvard Law school as an institution than his own naive faith. It's not clear what exactly drove him to the self-loathing, but what seems to soothe his self-loathing is prestige. It is comic but also profoundly sad when put next to the fabulously WASP and cool Harvey, or the Catholic and empathic Mike. Louis' pettiness is the foil to distract us from the repressed anxiety of Harvey and repressed guilt of Mike.

The managing partner Jessica is a stern black woman of considerable fortitude. She protects her turf because she alone understands how far things can fall, and she is determined not to let that happen. And so her story combines the emancipation of both women and blacks. The system does not play by the rules it advocates, and so Jessica is eternally committed to managing the firm in a way to stay ahead of the volatile ructions of the system. The absolute lack of faith she shows in her staff except Harvey is very revealing. It asks, can Black people ever come to peace with the system that has prosecuted them for so long.

Institutional Elitism

The less appealing aspect of the show is the affirmation of a two-tiered society where the chosen elite reign supreme over the unsuspecting masses. The lawyers in the fictional law firm Pearson Specter Litt are all recruited from Harvard Law School and from that school alone. The other 20 or so leading law schools are given short shrift for most part simply out of snobbery. The characters in most part believe in the snobbery and the importance of maintaining this snobbery which reaffirms their social standing. It's quite unappealing even if Mike who is not from the school runs rings around these lawyers because in most part the status quo is affirms over and over again. The maintenance the elitist institution takes such precedence over so many real concerns.

In a sense a show that strives to give us diversity chokes itself by giving us an institution that would resist diversity as the party for whom the audience supports. There are moments in the show where you just ant to vomit all over the worship of Harvard University. It is all too reminiscent the misplaced awe in which University of Sydney graduates were once held. There probably are law firms that only hire from one place and make it a hallmark of their firm. It's an ugly look.

Because the law is by its nature conservative affair the show never really gets close to undermining the institutional elitism that underpins the socius in the show. Nobody really breaks free, nobody questions the validity nobody really finds the gait creates with the rest of the world to be  serious problem. Louis, at the end of Season 5 is forced to consider graduates from other law schools but by then the firm is in too much turmoil to make good.

Donna Paulsen is clearly a outsider to the coterie of Harvard educated lawyers. She looks in as she contributes mightily to the fate of the law firm. But for all her extraordinary talents and accomplishments and personal guidance to the lawyers, she will never be acknowledged the way Joan Holloway is acknowledged in 'Mad Men' when she ends up owning a share of the advertising firm. Interestingly enough they're both redheaded women.

The Law Is A Sorry Ass

When you watch 80 or so episodes of a show, you come see many moments where characters reverse course of action. And then characters apologies to one another for having done the 180 degrees. Sometimes a character is forced to do two 180 turns within the space of two episodes. Then the apologies ensue.

There'a whole lot of apologies going on in five seasons. If you run a show long enough, the characters end up being n bad enough conflict to have to apologies to one another so often. It's no surprise Harvey ends up seeing a shrink in season 5.

The Law Can Kick Ass

The central tenet of the show seems to be the law can be made to do anything. If it's written down anybody can argue anything and there is a whole posse of lawyers trying to push an agenda. It's interesting because the law is seen as a utilitarian guide to the smooth and fair running of a society.  It's a far cry form the conception of the law that comes from above and perhaps this is why there are so many characters that play fast and loose with the law in this show.

That being said, the procedures and protocols seem to be rigidly enforced and judges seem to frown on most anything bought in front of them. You can imagine being a judge in America is like being asked to intervene in so many idiotic disputes that one's initial response is to frown at any document being thrust under your nose.

There is a lot of document thrusting. And for the sake of the show, most of the characters take one look at the first page of any file and seem to understand the entirety of the content. It's like magic.

The Magical Characters

For all the talk about Harvey being the superhuman amazing lawyer, he doesn't seem to live up to his billing all too well. Instead it is Mike with his amazing photographic memory and Donna's telepathy that saves the day more than once. There are quite a number of episodes that hinge on the fact that the talents of Mike and Donna are simply not normal. If this were Marvel or DC it would make sense. The fact that it happens in a law show reveals that American fiction really is degenerating.

'Movie 43'

Omnibus Mayhem

Look, some people like these movies where a bunch of directors get together and do short skits. Most people it seems hate them. I have a sot spot for 'Amazon Women of the Moon' to this day and 'Monty Python's Meaning of Life' still gets me laughing. On the whole though, people are pretty hostile to this subgenre of comedy films and they hardly get made. If I think back, 'Amazon Women on the Moon' was from 1988 so it's been like 25years between drinks.

People complain, they don't get made. But I for one wouldn't mind if they made more of these instead of those lame 'Scary Movie' type of parodies. The film business has changed greatly in the mean time, so it's quite interesting to watch the shift in sensibility.

What's Good About It

It's got top talent in it, doing some seriously fucked up shit. Hugh Jackman and his scrotum on his chin skit essentially kicks off the aim-low, sinkerball-fest parade of shorts that really want to do away with good taste. This is great because Naomi Watts puts in a fantastic performance as the other half of an Oedipalised mother, while Richard Gere gets to do a pretty funny Tim Cook pay out. It's crude, but crude is exactly where these actors need to be.

What's Bad About It

Not every one of the shorts are good. Some are real stinkers, some are off, some leave you wondering about the people who wrote them. The Randy Quaid in Greg Kinnear's office pitching bad movies framework doesn't really go anywhere good.

I know it's a weird to complain about sexism and racism when everything is up for laughs, but some of the sexist jokes really were naff, and Stephen-Marchant-As-Asian-Dude was not one bit better than Mr Yunioshi in 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' - and that film is like 52years old now.

I also wonder about the sadness of skit featuring black American basketball players in 1959, about to take on a bunch of white kids. It's pointed and funny but the fact that it's pointed an funny indicates that maybe our society hasn't come that far from 1959 except on the field of sport. It's disappointing because it dovetails with the Stephen-Marchant/Mr. Yunioshi moment.

What's Interesting About It

The overall effect of the movie is remarkably like 'Amazon Women on the Moon', which leaves you with a disjointed feeling. The Omnibus movie never works for critics and audiences  alike, pretty much for this reason. Still, I'd want to see more of these for the simple reason that this film has a silly joy of film-making pumping right through it. It's fun to make movies, and the expense of making them and the effort it takes makes it so hard for film makers to just go out there and jam like musicians or do studies as artists would do.

So it's good to watch something where you know they're having a good time doing it.

These films offer scope for greater risk-taking than the feature films which are made under such stringent industrial supervision that they have no chance of surprising you. It's really not a film for everybody but if you want to watch something very different from the controlled, smooth, media output of Hollywood machine, then this might be okay on a rainy afternoon. Then again, if your sensibility is too tightly wound around the narrative precision of the conventional Hollywood product, then probably not.

Cockatoo Island Film Festival

The New Thing In Town

Sydney got itself a new film festival starting this year and it took place on Cockatoo Island. Out of an odd happenstance I ended up attending parts of it. I even made it to the Award Night where they handed pout their own inaugural gongs.

What's Good About It

They've done a nice job selling it as a film maker's festival, and it does take place on a beautiful part of Sydney. If you could conceive of a film festival in Sydney that was utterly unlike the Sydney Film Festival, this would have been the place to put it, and really, it has great promise for the future.

There's a lot of enthusiasm to it, and one suspects that it is going to be even more unlike the Sydney Film Festival which has established itself firmly with a particular kind of film-viewing public. The potential is there for it to grow into something really different and good. If nothing else it is unique and breaks the mold of what film festivals should be like

What's Bad About It

This year being the first time in Sydney - it's grown up and out of the Dungog Film Festival - it felt like it was more form over function. The organisation seemed in most part chaotic and planning underdone. It compared very unfavourably if you were a regular punter to the SFF and suddenly were confronted with the sense of out-of-control-ness the festival betrayed.

Volunteers were talking into their intercoms on their collars a lot, but the flow of information was anarchic. It looked great, but it didn't work as well as it looked.

Getting to and from the island can be a little haphazard, which is a minor complaint, but it's a real one all the same. Once you're on the island, you feel captive to the services and amenities available and they're not exactly good or cheap.

What's Interesting About It

There's a lot of space for the festival to grow, and I guess that's where the promise is. A few years back there was talk of slotting in a comedy festival in October on Cockatoo Island, which almost happened and never did. It might be an idea to run that concurrently on the Island as well as have a band competition.

The feeling I had while I staggered around the island was that there nearly wasn't enough to see or do at the festival, once you staggered out of movies. The flipside of it is the feeling that it could in future turn into a really varied, multifaceted event that attracts great talent from all over the world.

It sure beats stumbling in and out of the State Theatre with a bustling throng in the rain.

'家政婦のミタ' ('I Am Mita, Your Housekeeper')

And Now For Something Totally Different

Today's entry is about a TV drama series from Japan. 'I Am Mita, Your Housekeeper' that aired late last year in Japan.

I rarely watch TV dramas. I kind of get dragged to it kicking and screaming and walk away form the set when the scenes get too maudlin, sentimental or dragged out in anyway so that they can stretch the content out to get to the commercial breaks. I hate the feeling of not enough content to make up the time as opposed to the too much content squeezed in to the allotted framework you get in good movies.

So I was naturally very sceptical about seeing a show about a housemaid in Japan that garnered 40.4 ratings in Japan for the climactic episode. That's right 40.4%, for a drama. It's unheard of in most parts of the world. This is why I sat down to take in all 11 episodes across this weekend.
I think it did my head in.

What's Good About It
The show is an indictment of a kind of social dream that has gone totally wrong. The nuclear family and myths of the "my-home" and even social cohesion are thrown into the blender for pulverising critique. The early episodes are a stand out in hitting society exactly where it hurts.

The characters are worked out in fine detail and the story spirals out of control at exactly the right way because of the way the story is knit together. It's very good writing. Some of the performances are fine, others are not as good but it all pulls together to keep the rather wild fiction going.

What's Bad About It
It's not as if this series didn't have the moments of groan-inducing sentimentality and tearful pleading.

Technically, I also hate the way Japanese directors cross the line of action just to get a different reverse angle - and it keeps happening through out this series, but it's nothing isolated to this series. I hate the way characters suddenly appear in a scene just to cut to the chase because it may be convenient for the story but it strains credulity when it need not.

They also keep recapping key moments from earlier episodes and by the end of the series, you just want them to get on with it rather than recap those moments.

What's Interesting About It
First, there is the psychological study of the family in a downward spiral. It is like Freud's Oedipus Complex going out of control and unchecked, as well as Electra complex and a more obscure thing called the Ajase Complex.

The series starts with the aftermath of a mother's suicide as a family struggles to deal with their emotions of rejection and dejection. It is into this context that a housekeeper arrives, and the housekeeper is as emotionally unresponsive as the Terminator. It then proceeds to build domestic drama upon domestic drama by dissecting the family members and their emotional vulnerabilities.

As hard as it is to imagine, the unfolding saga builds up a great deal of intrigue, and emotional complexity. The series in many ways an indictment and is no wonder that it garnered the ratings it did.

Oedipus Wrecks

The Oedipalised emotions of the males in the family have tremendous force in this story. Firstly there is the father who has been having an affair with a coworker. It is revealed that he asked his wife for a divorce which led to the wife's suicide. Once his affair is found out, his daughter then exposes it to the company with predictable results. The father keeps claiming that this woman is the only woman he has genuinely loved - and not his wife - because he was never certain of his feelings for his wife. Later on, he tries to rekindle his affair, only to find out the man who replaced his post at work has also stolen the woman. The ensuing humiliation is like Freud played out large.

The elder son who is in middle school becomes intrigued with Mita to the extent that his libido drives him to ask if she would do anything on command. She responds by saying that she would do anything within her power. He demands they fuck. She asks, "how would you like to do that?" He demands she first disrobe - and she is totally willing to have sex with the boy. It doesn't quite come about because the eldest daughter walks in at the nick of time to stop it from happening.

Again, it is Freud played out large. The repressed eroticism constantly threatens to boil over. You sure don't see this stuff in 'Desperate Housewives' because America's not ready for this - but Japan is fine with this stuff. It's bewildering.

The younger son is in sixth grade. He has to write a paper "in appreciation of mother"; even though he feels abandoned by her apparent suicide. The housekeeper Mita encourages him to write about the mother as if she died of an accident and express his fully blooming Oedipal-ised emotion.

The daughter is perhaps in a deeper problem because at once she is drawn to her father and then is betrayed when she finds out her mother ave committed suicide over the affair. In the absence of the mother, she asks Mita to kill her. It's all Freudian once again when the children kick out the father and are left with the housekeeper to look after them.

Easy Suicides

Another layer of disturbance lies in how easily the characters choose death. Not only has the mother committed suicide, the elder daughter and father both try to die in the course of the series. Even Mita herself tries to kill herself in one of the later episodes. Death is everywhere, but most improbably it is because people are so willing to contemplate suicide.

One wonders if Japanese narratives naturally tends that way or whether this readiness is a function of a growing dysfunction of this era. In each instance what drives these characters is a deep sense of embarrassment that is disproportionate to what their real offenses might be. Throughout the series, the characters back away from suicide as they gain perspective - but while they lack any perspective, it makes for some harrowing viewing.

There's so much suicide in Japan because suicide itself is seen as a kind of available option for kids. They jump off buildings, leap into trains, hang themselves, they kill themselves in all kinds of ways for all kinds of reasons that most people would see as trifling. My own view of it is that there is something about Japanese schools that hem the kids in so hard in the name of discipline when in fact they are grossly violating the human rights of the kids they have in their care - but more of that later.

Sado-Masochism

The dour, seemingly selfless Mita persona gradually reveals itself to be a kind of masochism. The more we learn about her, we realise she too is labouring under a disproportionate sense of embarrassment and shame, and this drives her to the ultimate submission - she will do anything and everything that is physically possible, if ordered to do so. In parts of the series, this is milked for some humour, but in a overview sense, it is disturbing how she may well fit into some kind of sick fantasy. The infinitely pliable housekeeper who would submit to anything, can bring out the inner sadist in a lot of people.

As if to prove this point, once Mita takes on the role of 'Mother', she flips the switch and becomes an emotional sadist. She feeds the children less, demands more discipline from them and tells them that they are inadequate. She becomes the disciplinarian sadist towards the children; and as an audience we watch this with a great deal of pleasure because she brings out the inner sadist in us all.

What's interesting is that in Mita, we find parental discipline and the sort of discipline you find in S&M porn sitting side by side. As viewers, we enjoy Mita disciplining these spoilt kids - but you have to question what that pleasure means. I felt oddly uncomfortable with how enjoyable these scenes of putting the shoe on the other foot were.

Absent Parents

The film spends a good deal of time exploring the relationship between the father and his in-laws. What is apparent is that the father seems to have no parents of his own who are in the picture. That he has suddenly appeared into the world uncertain, and was made a father by his late wife; all of it vaguely against his sense of self. On that level he is Gen-X to a tee, but the series goes one step further: his children throw him out of the house and make themselves parent-less, just like him.

What is blindingly obvious is that problems of this family do not start with just the father or the mother, but sometime in the distant past before they even met; and I suspect this is why this series managed to reach people in Japan. There would have been many people who saw themselves in some way as that character.

True to the traditions of Japan, he is trying to put together the form of a caring father, but he does not know what it means or how it manifests itself in his life, even after having fathered 4 children. I imagine this aspect of the story would have hit Gen X in Japan pretty hard. The absence of proper adult supervision created a generation of lost men and women, all with the emotional maturity of three year olds.

The Disintegrating Nuclear Family

The way the father keeps retreating from responsibility is quite disturbing. If there is one character that much of the drama can be pinned upon, it is the father. Yet he constantly shows himself to be not up to any substantial emotional challenge, and spends a good deal of the last 4 episodes apologising to everybody.

While there is a tradition in Japanese film and TV of portraying the nuclear family as somewhat suspect, I don't recall an instance of the repudiation running this deep. it makes the making up of the family towards the end oddly unbelievable. In many ways, what is most interesting is exactly how the family spirals out of control.

In a sense it's not even the father's fault that he comes into adulthood incomplete. The adults that brought him up essentially yelled at him (as his father in law can't resist doing) and then vacated the arena of adulthood for him to simply step in. Armed with very little capacity to handle his own emotions, let alone expectations of others, he proceeds to vacate the lives of his children as his parents must have done before. As a likely explanation for why there is so much of this sense of social discontinuity is going on, it's not a bad one. A peak rating of 40% suggests  a lot of Japanese viewers agree.

Bad Teachers

The younger son's teacher is a miserable man. He basically lets the bullying in his own classroom go on and pretends that it doesn't exist. The sad truth is that there are way too many teachers like this in Japan, and they're all protected from scrutiny by the social consensus that a teacher is a better class of human being.

Similarly, the aunt to the kids who is meant to be a physical education teacher is also a total and utter nincompoop. Schools and teachers come off really badly in this series, I suspect because there is now a total breakdown in trust in both the educational system as well as the educators.

It still makes for painful viewing because you those types of teachers exist, making kids lives miserable all over Japan, and they wonder out loud why there are hikikomori kids. The Japanese educational system has a lot to answer for, when it comes to those traumatised kids. For years, commentators have been wondering what they're doing wrong. What they really should be doing is totally re-envisaging how they do education. For a start, those classrooms look like something from 100years ago, and stop cramming 40 kids to a class. They really need to see how the rest of the world does it; and they should sack all those children-hating sadistic teachers protected by the Japan Teachers Union.