| |
|
I love The Filth too.
I was going to wait until the trade came out before I chucked in my fiver's worth, but oh well here goes.
So for the sake of argument anyway, in strictly realist terms:
The Filth actually starts with the Paratabs scene in issue 12, with Greg writing " the suicide note that we like to call existence, " as, after losing his cat, his job and his house, as well as having being diagnosed ( possibly,) with terminal cancer and a nervous breakdown, he O.D.'s in his kitchen, falling face down on the crack in the tiles.
" Granted my position as executive officer... was far from the glamorous James Bond style experience I first imagined... "
You don't even seem real now. "
( Fuhh, us'happening ? )
But... ( I'm coming officer. )
But I suppose... when you think about it... I suppose it all makes sense. "
I mean that's kind of the Filth in a nutshell, in a way.
So that'd be where it starts, Greg's " weird Tibetan bardot experience, " which as I understand it anyway, is something to do with the spirit's being forcibly stripped of the ego's illusions, as perceived by the mind as a physical attack, flesh stripped from bones in Tibetan society, or perhaps these days more pertinently, at least in Western culture, flesh stripped of possessions, mind stripped of it's " life. " You know, as in " I have a life, " ie job, house, status, etc.
This would be the only " real " scene in the whole of the series, everything else, from issue 1 onwards, would be happening in Greg's head, as his dying/dead consciousness tries to loosen it's grip on it's mortal existence, ( you could see this in terms of an initiation experience, } piling on the inconsistencies in terms of time, space, reality, trying to remind itself of where it is, what's happening, trying to move itself on. So the Hand would be Greg's own creation ( see a bit later, ) as well as literally, in his mind, the agent that's taking his old life to pieces ( or a version of his old life, a very alienated version - there's the cat, nothing else, hence the Hand's after Tony, ) along with his dreams and his James Bond fantasies, that sexy super-spy world. In strictly realist terms, at least if we're allowing a Tibetan buddhist version of the after-life to qualify as realistic - I just think why not, since who really knows - that would explain all the weirdness, the dropped threads in the plot, that kind of febrile sense of it all just collapsing as it comes to an end. Not that it matters, but there was something quite similar in the film, " Jacob's Ladder. "
Anyway, The Hand. Whoever said The Hand was started in 1952 because that was Greg's birth date, which would make him 51, was, I think, about exactly right. All the cultural reference points that apply to the Hand would appear to have stopped in about 1970, the spy films, Admiral Nixon/Noxin, the Dali/Dan Dare/Sergeant Pepper uniforms, the Status Quorum as old-fashioned square-jawed superhero group, even Moog Mercury as a member of an experimental theatre collective - all this stuff seems to date from an earlier time, from Greg's mid-to-late Twenties, time to grow up, settle down, disengage from the culture, at least around then. Whereas everything the Hand's trying to shut down is modern, very much up to date, bio-life, hardcore porn, gated multi-millionaire communities, even the cult of self-improvement. So at least in part, The Hand's a reaction on Greg's part to a world or society that's made him redundant. Which, at least arguably, is why The Hand looks and acts like that.
Except as with everything else, it keeps fucking up, because Greg's dying consciousness won't allow him to settle on anything consistent.
Also, if there's a link with The Invisibles ( and I'm not sure there needs to be - there are elements in common, but you could make sense of The Filth without knowing anything at all about King Mob etc, while the same's less true about the Sixties sci-fi/pop references, ) then it's possibly this, that Morrison's almost satirising the creative process behind The Invisibles, this bald, drugged guy lying round in his flat, hallucinating himself as an international super-spy, when the real situation's a bit, you know, darker.
Anyway, the end. Greg by this point is reconciled to his death, " I lost my pet cat Tony... and then everything else went with him. Shit happens, as they say. " and so is free to head off down into the underground, having faced down his demons, his ordeal at an end. Or something like that.
Anyway, long post, sorry, it's horribly late and I rambling a bit, but hopefully this all makes a vague sort of sense.
Basically, as a multi-layered narrative, in terms of style and control, I think The Filth bears comparison with Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, it's really that good, and if it's almost inevitably going to languish a bit in The Invisibles' shadow, I'd say it's still the more mature and well, dammit, literary work.
Anyway, over to everyone else. And that means you, Jack Fear. |
|
|
