Three Body Problem review: the politics of novel, Netflix and Tencent

Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu: Netflix and Tencent TV series adaptations

Reviewed by Anna Chen, First published 6 May 2024

8-part Netflix 3 Body Problem

30-part Tencent Three-Body

SPOILERS AHEAD

Book One of Remembrance of Earth’s Past

How did the Three Body Problem work as a book, a Netflix series and a Chinese Tencent series? That’s a Three Body Problem in itself.

There once was a time when any American or British playwright or scriptwriter would have taken the concept of Cixin Liu’s stupendously successful Chinese science fiction trilogy, Remembrance of Earth’s Past, and run with it. Adapting other people’s histories to your own world experience with insights and dramatic skill has been our strong point ever since Chaucer read Virgil and Shakespeare refracted Holinshed.

Genius always stands on the shoulders of giants. Netflix’s eight-part series 3 Body Problem had the opportunity to dramatise Book One of the Hugo Award-winning blockbuster series and illuminate it through a western lens. But, instead, they turned it into a banal addition to the multiple-body of China-hate currently pervading every nook and cranny of the culture like a cancer.

Yes, we geddit. China bad, West good. Hulk smash.

It’s as if Western intelligentsia drove their egghead brains into the buffers of late-capitalism when its contradictions bit them on the bum. The resulting cultural entropy and breakdown misses chances for enlightenment and insight: as illustrated in the new Netflix series.

As I’m fond of reminding everyone, the cultural superstructure collapses into the economic base. Sadly, even Netflix, with all its resources, can’t break out of this gravitational nosedive and avoid being pulled into the black hole of US-led geopolitics. This isn’t helped by the author’s own inner Ye Wenjie pressing that big red button and replying to the siren call from afar.

Overall, the eight-episode 3 Body Problem is strong on pacing but glosses over the science and philosophical ideas that drive the novel. Sacrificing content for spectacle and action loses much of what makes the book interesting. The 30-episode Tencent Three-Body series made for Chinese audiences is truer to the book and its ideas, but it suffers from longeurs and repetition. A stronger edit could lose it a few episodes and prove that sometimes less is more. Both have strong production values reflecting how much was spent on these two mega-projects.

The Cultural Revolution

Three Body Problem, Book One of the trilogy, kicks off with the traumatising events of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a reverse-mirror event of our own swinging sixties which took place in an expanding post-war economy. Lucky us.

China had no such luxury. It faced an assortment of obstacles across more than a century of hardship including the decaying Qing dynasty, opium wars, ridding itself of colonial rule (yes, I’m looking at you, Britain), the birth of the republic, civil war, war lords, sadistic Japanese occupation, revolution, a vicious Korean war, famine, embargoes used to starve the fledgling state into submission, and a war against itself in the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.

The chief antagonist who gets the story rolling is astrophysicist-to-be, Ye Wenjie. She is only a teenager when, to chants of “Root out the bugs,” she sees her physicist father publicly denounced as a counter-revolutionary intellectual and beaten to death by the young Red Guards who’ve been entrusted with preserving the purity of the revolution.

Betrayal looms large as her own younger sister is one of the patricidal ideologues on the stage, who are full of passionate intensity but too immature for wisdom. Her terrified mother also piles in with accusations. Later, a journalist who Wenjie trusts saves his own skin by stitching her up as the author of a tract he has himself written about the western ecological book, The Silent Spring. You can’t trust those feckless intellectuals.

The aliens are greener on the Other side

Wenjie’s world is relentlessly hostile and it takes its toll on her. More sinned against than sinning, at least in the beginning, she will end up committing the biggest betrayal of her own kind, less as revenge, more trying to help out what she sees as her ruined planet and her own species who are responsible. It is The Silent Spring that, in a tortured logical fallacy, finally sparks her motivation for doing the awful deed that dooms humanity.

“It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.”

Having chosen lifetime incarceration at the top secret Red Coast Base run by the People’s Liberation Army, which transmits communications via a monster nature-destroying satellite dish in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, the damaged Wenjie has access to the outside force she believes can awaken humanity.

Which, given the clues including an alien message warning, “Do not reply,” is a helluva gamble.

Dark mirror

The first book in Liu’s trilogy uses the Cultural Revolution as the initial setting, and its harrowing events as motivation, for Ye’s action. Liu himself has some dim childhood memories of catastrophes occurring as the chaotic young communist nation struggled to stabilise and reconstruct itself. Everyone loves a winner. His critique of China’s politics and besottedness with the West is hard to miss. Giving aid and comfort to an opposing system that could destroy your kind lies at the core of his villain, so you could read Wenjie as a dark mirror version of the author.
Netflix’s 3 Body Problem seizes on the Cultural Revolution opening and foregrounds it into a simplistic device colouring the whole narrative, essentially ascribing a moral paralysis to China that makes it responsible for world destruction. It’s an unpleasant seed to plant in the current climate of war fever while, of course, absolving the West from any culpability after nearly two centuries of pumping out pollution since the Industrial Revolution and numerous wars.

The Tencent version runs in the other direction and only reveals the book’s opening scene fully somewhere around Episode 24, focusing instead on the science and philosophy within in a detective mystery.

First serialised in a Chinese-language science fiction magazine in 2006 and then published as a novel in 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics, the events of Three Body Problem are framed by the pendulum swing from the chaos of the revolutionaries’ tragic attempt to prevent a recidivism back to the destructive system they’ve just overthrown, to the new era of wealth and stability.

Yellow Peril tropes for the 21st century

Fifty years after the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese can take stock and enjoy the new normal: the eradication of absolute poverty, the growth of the biggest middle-class on the planet and the emergence of, whisper it, a new bourgeoisie. But humanity is about to learn of of the existential threat lying four light years away in the Centauri star group, set in motion by Ye Wenjie in 1979.

This is where the Netflix series gets ideologically stuck and hollows out. While the book and Tencent’s Three-Body series explore the whys and wherefores of chaos and stability in a modern setting, Netflix acknowledges no such contrast for Chinese society. We are shown Chinese only as cyphers unless they are here and thoroughly westernised; always at work, never at play. They are spotted in flashbacks to the bad old days, never in their homes with family or in bars, or restaurants as in the Tencent. In short, the Chinese are dehumanised.

The inference drawn is that the Cultural Revolution opening is a static backdrop to a failed China which is, under the glittering surface, dark-age mysterious, sinister and no good for its inhabitants. Especially when the China scenes are all shot with the same grey misery filter the BBC reserves for communism while safe old Ingerland is filmed in full colour.

As one viewer succinctly put it on Twitter/X, “The Netflix series makes the Cultural Revolution into an eternal symbol of Chinese Evil which is contrasted with Western Good.”

BOOK ONE and TENCENT – Three-Body

In the book, you can read a serious attempt to make sense of what goes wrong, what goes right and why. All within a largo-paced SF story about Trisolaran aliens, human beings grown mad with grief and the big logical fallacy that sets the story in motion.

Tencent’s Three-Body series, which follows the book closely, provides a glimpse of the Chinese people looking at themselves as the protagonist of the story, the driver of their own destiny, while pursuing philosophical enquiry as well as a detective-thriller investigation.

After the opening Red Coast Base scene, we cut to the present, 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics. Back then, China was riding high, about to debut on the world stage as the benign rising superpower that could put on a stunning show demonstrating how far they’d progressed from just making our cheap tat in suicide factories.

This was the start of a Golden Age when the Chinese were looking forward to spending their hour in the sun and sitting at the Top Table, previously the domain of the western developed nations. China was about to save the global economy from America’s Great Financial Crash and prove itself to be the good guy in the new era of stability. What could possibly go wrong?

The detective quest

Equilibrium is upset by the suicides of top scientists who were connected to the mysterious Frontiers of Science cult. Our hero and protagonist, nanotech engineer Professor Wang Miao, is enlisted by the authorities to help the investigation. He learns that the dead scientists include Dr Ye Wenjie’s daughter, the lovely string theorist Yang Dong, on whom he has a crush, making his involvement personal and applied, not just theoretical.

Wang is goaded by a gruff, earthy police detective and former soldier, Da Shi Qiang, who, after initial antagonism meeting cute, will become his sidekick.

“I’m not a good cop,” he tells Wang, annoying his colleagues and establishing himself as a disobedient, wilful anti-hero — quite risque in Chinese society which is emerging from a tradition of disdaining individualism. The series’ honourable attempt at Hollywood-style character construction harks back to a grinning Errol Flynn swashing his buckles, and is done with mixed results: sometimes sweetly buddy-buddy, at other times clunky and toe-curling.

Major-General Chang Weisi of the PLA asks Wang to take up Japanese physicist Shen Yufei’s invitation to join the Frontiers of Science group in order to infiltrate the organisation, which he’d previously rejected as far too theoretical in their exploration of the limits of science. Wang’s applied research is aimed at getting things made, specifically, nano-fibres that can cut through anything.

Wang agrees to join, telling Da Shi: “A person’s ability to discern the truth is directly proportional to his knowledge.”

This, of course, idealistically assumes one’s objective is to find the truth, the raison d’etre supposedly lying at the heart of 400 years of fact and science-based Age of Enlightenment which may well be coming to an end in the West (See Netflix’s wasted story opportunities).

Peace origin of Three Body Problem

Televised in 2023, with the benefit of hindsight and the foresight dread of Things To Come, Tencent’s Wang probes Chang about his war anxiety and points out that there are no hot-spots in the world as this is “probably the most peaceful period in history.” And, indeed, it was peaceful when the book was published in 2008. And even when Ken Liu’s English translation was published in 2014, there’s a feeling of, phew! Thank goodness we’re living in this part of history. However, by the time of TV production, the fictional fear is bleeding into reality.

In both The Three Body Problem book and Three-Body, Chang tells Wang he’s lucky if he’s never known a complete change, a crisis. A comment that becomes loaded with irony as the series was made over the period of deteriorating relations with the USA superpower.

“The entire history of humankind has been fortunate. From the Stone Age until now, no real crisis has occurred. But if it’s all luck, it has to end one day. Let me tell you: it’s ended. Prepare for the worst.” This sounds like the Tencent series preparing Chinese viewers for a major calamity and reversal of fortune.

And so life imitates art. Or perhaps the art sensed what was in the wind and provided a cathartic outlet in a science fiction metaphor for an underlying collective dread of an enraged imperialism.

It’s painful to hear the same words from the 2008 book uttered with a new meaning in 2023 that’s like a death plunge into an abyss. At this point metaphor and real life collide. Something even worse than the Opium Wars, World War 2 and Japanese fascism slouches its way here.

Story dynamics — what works and what doesn’t

You can see why audiences prefer the Chinese Tencent version. The first two episodes are gripping, serving up a rich, complex stew, explaining physics and particle accelerators with the aid of a drunken pool table demonstration. Street hallucinations and a rich, imaginative palette of visuals from the smallest quantum sub-atomic particles to the biggest cosmic vista are vividly delivered.

Viewers aren’t talked down to but are assumed to have enough of a grasp of basic scientific principles to find credible the science in the world of the story. The Shooter hypothesis is simply explained and illustrated, as are the turkey scientists of the Farmer hypothesis, a most entertaining series high point. They’re fed regularly and looked after … until the day they aren’t. But they’re not to know that until it’s too late, poor delicious turkeys.

But the visual medium of film and TV has different demands to the speed of a book if you’re sticking to it literally and literarily. By episodes four or five, narrative drive threatens to grind to a halt, suffering from stasis and repetition. One influence seems to be the mesmerising German hit series, Dark, sharing with it a hypnotically atmospheric sound design, but with many of the narrative-pacing flaws that sometimes made watching it feel like wading through wet cement.

Long pauses have to earn their screen time and deliver meaning through skilful set-up and story momentum, not left as vacuums hoping to be filled by profundity: it is a Zen emptiness we crave.

The animated turkey scientist story is a delight but one which loses its power with each telling — and it was retold frequently with little variation. Adding drag, a whole ten minutes is spent explaining why the sun is a super-antenna.

San-Ti’s little helper

Nostalgic and grateful for the leg-up out of its century-of-humiliation doldrums, the book leans into adoration of the West and its science figures such as Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Copernicus, and one Chinese philosopher Mozi, as if China did little up to modern times. But if Chinese astronomers hadn’t been active, we’d never have known about the RCW 86 “Guest Star” supernova in 185AD, or the supernova that created the Crab Nebula in 1054, also seen by a monk in Flanders as a “bright disc”.

Not having a time machine, Liu couldn’t foresee China’s vast clean-up and the effect its green tech would have on the world, as he was writing at a time when Beijing was bathed in smog all year around from manufacturing affordable goods for western consumers. The Silent Spring book to which Liu defers through his chief antagonist, Wenjie, has long been eclipsed by events as genius takes a giant step for mankind onto the shoulders of giants.

It’s not until Episode 18 of the Tencent that the core Trisolar story gets going, reaching the book’s beginning. In Episode 24 we finally see in flashback the full inciting incident as shown incompletely in the first episode.

It’s worth hanging in there as the story deepens and picks up when it is revealed that the misanthropic oil billionaire and Adventist Mike Evans is helping the Trisolaran San-Ti invade Earth because he is a species egalitarian who sees humanity as sinful. And of what importance is the human species in the vastness of the universe? A fossil-fuel oligarch’s son who transfers his hatred for his eco-destructive father onto the human race, he devotes his love and obedience to the off-planet daddy figure, the distant voice of the San-Ti he calls “Lord”.

Along with Redemptionist Ye Wenjie who wants to work with the San-Ti to solve their Three Body problem, these two narcissists decide the fate of the world due to an inability to come to terms with the hurt done to them. (I see parallels with war-mongers and whoever released the Covid virus.)

Their betrayal backfires when the Lord realises how treacherous and duplicitous humanity is, being capable of saying the opposite of the truth even if it’s a fictional fairy story. The San-Ti see humanity as an existential threat and resolve to destroy it when the fleet arrives in 450 years, clobbering their science first. Sounds familiar? Just as Wenjie could not foresee the San-Ti’s deadly turn, neither could the author see his idealised American system doing the same and turning on his kind.

NETFLIX — 3 Body Problem (March 2024)

Half an hour in to Netflix’s eight-part 3 Body Problem, the godless, heathen Chinee hate old things. There’s little sense of history or science. Only the West has a sense of God. To get a snog, give a girl a book about pesticides. Foregrounding the Cultural Revolution horror up front as a five-minute pre-credit sequence without paying it off with society’s contrasting progress, establishes it as China’s underlying mindset in the present; a misery mise en scene only relieved by an English language book and western values, of course.

Unlike the book, it denies China’s emergence from the period, repairing & reconstructing itself, and catching up with the West. It reinforces China as Other with a single positive male ethnically Chinese character, detective Officer Clarence “Da” Shi, who works for the British Strategic Intelligence Agency (MI6), a reassuring presence played solidly by Benedict Wong.

After establishing Cultural Revolution horror without the nuances of the book or Tencent series, 3 Body Problem transfers to the safe familiarity of the West and a murder mystery. We know who dunnit — the victims themselves — but we don’t know why.

The Oxford Five

The present-day story starts with its wheels rolling, with Clarence/Da Shi arriving in the present at the scene of a grisly death of a scientist where sequential numbers, possibly a countdown, are scrawled in blood on the walls.

A second scientist, Vera Ye (Yang Dong in the Tencent series, daughter of Ye Wenjie), commits suicide at the Oxford University Particle Accelerator after the project is shut down, and leaves her colleague and friend, Saul, to investigate why the physics is wrong, “science is broken” and whether God exists.

Two of Saul’s scientist buddies, Auggie Salazar and Jin Cheng, function as Three-Body‘s Professor Wang split across two characters. (Jin is the only other positive Asian apart from Clarence/Da Shi.) They are all members of Vera’s Scooby-gang group-protagonist of university friends; dubbed the “Oxford Five,” it includes Jack the snacks business mogul and Will, Jin’s cancer-ridden ex-boyfriend.

Like Professor Wang, Auggie is a nanotechnologist. They both begin to hallucinate numbers in a countdown sequence. Wang spends ages identifying his mysterious numbers appearing in the photos he takes and in his wider vision. Auggie learns what the big lightshow numbers filling her vision mean within the first thirty minutes as events are economically collapsed into one scene: sinister Adventist Tatiana demands she close her nanotech company or else, and says the sky will wink at her as proof. It does.

After demonstrating that her nano-fibres can cut through diamond, Auggie orders her company to shut down its development with seconds to go before the countdown reaches zero.

Three Body Problem in virtual reality

Both series pursue the mystery of the dead scientists and the cults who hold the key. Both enter the Trisolaran realm via the Three Body Problem virtual reality game: Netflix via a headset, and Tencent through two full-body suits and helmets, the suits being the more believable experience. However, the gorgeous, shiny, metallic Netflix helmet does look more alien and its Trisolaran virtual world is funnier, inhabited by Earth science legends played by popular British comics. The game sequences are little filmlets in themselves.

The VR game within the detective mystery requires the players of both series — Wang and Da Shi, and Jin Cheng and Jack — to solve the problem of the three “flying star” solar bodies: the triple suns’ orbits can have no focus point, making it impossible to predict periods of chaos and stability. Accurate predictions allow the population to either dehydrate and survive the roasting sun and big freeze, or hydrate and continue to develop their civilisation to higher levels of the game until they can conquer space travel.

Wang tries to unravel the science while Jin’s role in the Netflix version is to mark out western scientific superiority over the Count of the West’s Asiatic mysticism. Again with the subliminal defining Chinese culture as primitive Other. They should have had a Galileo character trying to persuade the Church of the superiority of science.

The BBC misery filter

One thing Netflix 3 Body Problem does effectively is the fate of Mike Evans’s ship the Judgement Day, a wandering community of his Adventist followers. However, the success of this climactic scene is despite the disturbing addition of children on board — not in The Three Body Problem — whose only purpose seems to be to ratchet up emotional involvement. Dead children, even pretend ones, is not something most of us wish to be seeing right now.

Both versions had me squirming but it was Netflix that dialled up the tension to eleven and had me watching through clenched fingers.

For some unearthly reason, in episode 7, Netflix sends Wenjie untried and unpunished from England back to where it all started at the Red Coast Base for her final fate (ambiguous in the book, but certainly not by anyone else’s hand). It’s in China so it’s still relentlessly bleak and shot through that hazy grey BBC filter even in the present. This was a chance to show China’s current contrasting state of stability and development but it only follows her to the graveyard decay of the old SETI project.

One viewer said dryly on Twitter, “If Dr Ye had been shown landing at Beijing Daxing Airport then travelling via High Speed Rail through Futuristic Chinese Cities, Three Body Problem viewers may have thought the San Ti had arrived early & started fixing human problems.”

Sophon supercomputers

The Tencent series ends Book 1 bleakly but on an optimistic note. Aided by pacifist Trisolarans in the VR game, Wang and Ding discover how the invasion will happen.

The Trisolarans have been targeting Earth’s technology on the quantum level with advanced protons in order to contain and keep us primitive — shades of US objectives to contain China. With every destruction of an unfolding proton, raised from one to eleven dimensions, entire universes can be destroyed. Raised to 2 dimensions it is big enough to wrap around Trisolaris and create Wisdom One (Sophon One in the book), a supercomputer beyond mere AI.

At this juncture in the book, there’s a ton of science exposition that requires reading several times and I congratulate Three-Body for paring it down as well as they did. I can, however, picture the triumphant script-writing meeting at Netflix after bringing in their their economic explanation at under two minutes, manuscripts and champagne corks flying through the air and producers yelling, “Eff it! Science, schmience! We’ll just have terminally cancer-ridden Will’s brain shot into space to save us!”

Back to Three-Body: once Wisdom/Sophon Two, Three and Four are built, the first two are launched towards Earth at the speed of light where they will hide in the particle accelerators and deliberately give out wrong results and create false miracles like blinking stars. Wisdom Three and Four act as receivers allowing monitoring of humans in real time while the invading Trisolaran Interstellar Fleet is in transit, expected to arrive at Earth in 450 years.

And so to the end …

Wang and Ding (Yang Dong’s widower) despair drunkenly over humankind’s imminent extinction four and a half centuries hence. A terminally cancer-ridden Da Shi cheers them up with a rousing speech in a field of locusts comparing their resilience to that of bugs that survived the worst that humans have thrown at them. Individuals may die but humanity will survive. In the face of species obliteration this is about as much optimism as can be mustered under the circumstances.

Netflix Clarence takes depressed Saul and Jin to a field of cicadas where he gives a similar speech but uses cicadas for his metaphor which makes less sense as we all like cicadas, rather than locusts which no-body does and have indeed survived age-old attempts to wipe them out.

Tencent’s Ye Wenjie ends the book on a literal cliffhanger when granted a visit to the Red Coast Base camp to see her last sunset before her life sentence for crimes against humanity begins — all shot affectingly without BBC grey haze. You see, it can be done.

Like all the women in the Tencent Three-Body series, even the aging Wenjie is exquisitely beautiful, as if Chinese society is terrified of its anima being perceived as ugly or even slightly imperfect. This fear of being seen in all its variety hints at a lack of confidence, pressure to conform to rigid standards of beauty instead of letting rip with women from across their fabulous range. Women are not pioneering leaders outside pure science. They echo western stereotypes of man-pleasing lotus blossoms or mysterious dragon-lady villains. Chinese men are not similarly constrained in Three-Body as they are in the Netflix.

“You are bugs”

In the absence of Chinese males in Netflix 3 Body Problem, Clarence/Da Shi does a lot of heavy lifting but he works for the “good guys” so is allowed a rounded character. Other Chinese men, mostly seen in flashback, are rendered mysterious.

One might suspect that the only good Chinese is one working for the Western state: for the remnants of an empire currently trying to revive the worst aspects of itself and itching to wreak havoc in the spirit of Winston Churchill.

So when the San-Ti tell us Earthlings, “You are bugs” on tech screens throughout the world in different languages, I thought of Winston Churchill and what he had to say about “Red Indians,” native Australians and Palestinians.

At the Palestine Commission in 1937, Churchill said of Palestinians: ” ‘I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.’

He might as well have cut to the chase and said, “You are bugs”.

The very first words of Episode 1 are “Root out the bugs,” equating the Communist Party of China with the murderous species from Trisolaris. A crude transference of the crimes of Western imperialism onto the patsy as the Viking raiding party seeks a casus belli and gears up for war in Asia.

We are witnessing in a great crossover the anguish of the European group that has brutally dominated the world for centuries and fears that they are about to end up on the receiving end of what they dished out: as the dinner, not the diner. Of course, this is pure projection of a guilty conscience but try telling them that.

A WASTED OPPORTUNITY: Possible story directions

We now arrive at the direction the Netflix series could have taken had it been motivated by artistic excellence commenting on the world we now find ourselves in instead of plugging into the US geopolitical agenda.

It is possible for American culture to critique its own system. We’ve seen this vividly since Grapes of Wrath, The Jungle, All The President’s Men, JFK and Apocalypse Now to Westworld, Fallout and many others. Netflix 3 Body goes retrograde and reinvigorates a reactionary mythologising of itself as world saviour and policeman rarely seen since the height of the Cold War.

The contrast between chaos and stability and their causes is what the Three Body Problem story is largely about. Netflix writers would have demonstrated an advanced skillset if, in transposing it to the West, they’d looked at the era of chaos we’re entering. China is emerging from a dark place and heading towards the light, while we’ve abandoned the science and fact-based Age of Enlightenment and find ourselves burrowing deeper into a dark age.

Character assassination, poison, demonisation, dehumanisation and repetition of the Big Lie until it is accepted as Truth are our stock-in-trade along with military hardware and survival of the strongest. They could have taken a long, hard look at themselves and where we are if they’d examined that instead of delusional grandstanding as a 21st century John Wayne. More like a lung-wrecked Marlboro Man.

They might have transposed the story to the west, juxtaposing the outgoing balance of the post-war liberal order (for us, that is) with the rapidly descending chaotic era characterised by wars, social meltdown, abandonment of law and principles and lashings of speaking with forked tongue. An enlightened playwright might have seized the opportunity to flag up the reverse happening in the West in late stage capitalism as we are dragged from Stability to Chaos.

We even have our own real life bodies for which the three suns of the Trisolar system are the perfect metaphor: the USA, Europe and China; the actual Three Body Problem tipping us from a long period of post-war liberal order dominance into a multipolar rebalance.

This is likely to be a long and painful birth.

Our own Three Body Problem

Kindly allow me to finish by running with my astro-political metaphor.

As the US, the great star of the geopolitical firmament, declines and recedes, it disrupts the cosmic equilibrium of the post-war liberal order in the West. (Not so much equilibrium for the colonialised regions, unfortunately.) The US enters its supernova phase.

During the final period of stability, China saves the global economy from the declining America’s Great Financial Crash of 2008, releasing the big star’s last burst of energy which it proceeds to burn up at speed in a last ditch attempt to maintain its brilliance.

Meanwhile, Europe is drawing towards China under its huge gravitational pull of 1.4b human beings, vast productive economies of scale and rapidly advancing technology.

Lighter elements in the US whose outgoing energy counters the star’s own gravity, begin to burn out and fuse to create heavier elements. These deep state elements need to either drag Europe back or nix it all together.

They resort to all sorts of dirty tricks to promote Brexit, taking a huge chunk out of Europe as the UK jumps out of the Europe frying pan and into the US fire, adding its small mass to America. The additional gravitational attraction is just enough to pull Europe from its natural flow towards China and jerk it back towards the US, where the American red sun expansion fries parts of it to a crisp.

Burning through the last of its hydrogen and helium, the oversized star rapidly fuses into heavier and heavier elements — as Brexit shock leads to Trump leads to Biden in ever deteriorating states until its outgoing energy can no longer counter its own gravity.

It falls in on itself and bounces back off the tiny metallic core in a cosmic supernova, collapsing and exploding at the same time. Nothing is left except a tiny dwarf remnant of social breakdown, civil war, debt, hate and death spinning in the black depths of space.

Now, this is the plot we actually find ourselves in. I wonder if Cixin Liu ever stands at the lip of his Red Coast Base clifftop, staring into the setting sun, and asks if the sunset for humanity isn’t already here.

Anna Chen

Kicking the tyres of the culture: arts reviews and cultural critique by Anna Chen

Three-Body on Viki: all 30 episodes with subtitles

Three-Body on Prime: to buy

3 Body Problem: all 8 episodes on Netflix

Heathcote Williams' American Porn poetry collection: balancing passion and disgust on a razor's edge — review

Five stars for Heathcote Williams' American Porn poetry collection: balancing passion and disgust on a razor's edge

Seems like we are all stuck in a science-fiction writer's coma dream, so deeply weird have been events of the past year. The culmination was the installation by electoral college (as opposed to popular vote) of our Orange Overlord, Toddler Trump. Or is it Eric Cartman and his Asian Cartman counterpart, Kim Wrong-un?

How would Western culture respond?

Fast off the block was Heathcote Williams with his collection of poetry, American Porn. So far, only Williams, South Park's astonishingly good Series 20 with its toxic Memberberries, and gallows-humourist Frankie Boyle have delivered the satirical goods — with the US Saturday Night Live TV series scoring the odd home run with Alec Baldwin's chumping of Trump and Melissa McCarthy's epic savaging of Sean "Squealer" Spicer.

Heathcote is lighter on laughs but more intense on historical background, which anyone familiar with his stunning Royal Babylon will know. There's real substance in his writing, balancing passion and disgust on a razor's edge lest he stare into the abyss for too long. Like all great poets, he connects seemingly disparate events, building a fully three-dimensional picture of how we got here. This requires delving deeply into the alt-fact mire and fishing out shape and sense without puking — a heroic endeavour.

In the opening poem, The United States of Porn, Heathcote takes us from Ancient Rome to Amerigo Vespucci, pornographer to the mafia Medicis; from Chatsworth, California, which he nails as the "HQ of America's Pornocracy" industry, to the Nazis and tyrants who have always used sex to cement their power — modern America is little different.
"Goebbels believed pornography worked as an anaesthetic -
His enemies, ironically, could be softened by being stiffened "
Given the choice between food and orgasms, sex-mad lab rats will starve, and humans are diverted from existential threat.

His poem Happy Thanksgiving (as opposed to a Happy Ending) disdains the usual amnesiac festive platitudes for the horror of those first meetings between indigenous Native Americans and European immigrants. If only the natives had had the means to build a wall. "But this nation was created by Zombie cannibals". Williams then gives us gruesome vignettes of barbarism and treachery, not on the part of the natives, but of the pious, bible-bashing interlopers and their God-bovvering hypocrisy. "The Pilgrim Fathers belong not to history, But to a quasi-religious ideal," which is still running things, especially with the ascension of Trump.

In American Porn, Heathcote Williams maps out the background: all the roads leading to this sorry point. Trump is less cause than symptom: a fully-ripe buboe fully charged to explode all over the world.

American Porn by Heathcote Williams is available from Amazon

Heaven Sent Doctor Who episode satisfies this SF critic at last: five-star review

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

It is always good to be brought into the light, even though it may take an age: better late than never. And so the theme of Heaven Sent, the penultimate episode in the latest series of Doctor Who, brings me to my knees in grateful awe. Heaven Sent knocked me off my cynical perch where I've been nailed ever since Russell T Davies rebooted the Time Lord franchise to dreary derivative effect. And may I say I have never been happier to have had my opinions reversed so totally even if this turns out to be one glorious, single, solitary, diamond-perfect episode before it all goes back to normal.

Quite staggering in its concept and clever in its execution, this episode never makes a wrong turn. Blessed relief to find histrionics kept to a minimum, only reflecting the Doctor's impossible predicament and thus earning him the right to emote furiously, epically and truthfully. At last, Steven Moffat gives Peter Capaldi a script worthy of his talent and our expectations.

A grieving Doctor is deposited in a vast unrealisable castle, who-knows-where, which turns out to be a gigantic puzzle reminiscent of the classic The House That Jack Built episode (1966) that had Diana Rigg's Emma Peel so thoroughly trapped and beaten in The Avengers series.

Pursued relentlessly by The Veil, a monstrous shade of Death, it is only when the Doctor solves the first bit of the puzzle that we realise how difficult this challenge is. He is forced to struggle across all his levels of existence, from his deepest inner nightmares, to engagement with the ghost of Clara, to his survival on a colossal cosmic scale, and is tried to his utmost ingenuity and courage.

"How many seconds in eternity?", he asks. Not such an empty question as you might think.

A truthful confession dredged out of his deepest recesses stops The Veil in its tracks and resets the castle, whose floors and rooms rotate and move, for the next stage of the chase. Here, even the constellations are all wrong: the stars tell him that his very own torture chamber is 7,000 years in the future. How long has he been playing this game? Will he work out his ultimate escape? Will he run out of confessions?

Piece by piece he solves the puzzle and escapes death time and time again. Who was the owner of the skull he finds at the top of the tower still attached by electrodes? What is the meaning of the word written in the dust? He discovers that the castle is an island surrounded by a sea of human skulls. What cruelty has the castle's creator unleashed on these poor souls?

And yet, as in all the best stories, beneath the byzantine puzzle, there is a simple explanation whose driving force shoots this episode to the front of the SF screen rankings.

Our Doctor finally reaches the Home room, the square at the end of the game, where the Tardis and escape is set tantalisingly the other side of a crystal wall. At 400 times the hardness of diamond and twenty feet thick, it is impossible to penetrate. And yet, this surely has to be the moment he vanquishes? Well, yes, but not in the way you might expect.

What follows is a tour de force sequence that satisfies every demand for great story-telling. The moment you realise how the Doctor is going to win takes your breath away and is beautiful in its simple, profound truth. Here is eternity in a grain of sand, heaven in a flower. You could almost call this Triumph of the Will, but let's not go there.

So, bravo, Steven Moffat. It didn't take you a billion years to get here after all. It only felt like it. Salud.

Where to watch Heaven Sent.
On iPlayer.

Terminator Genisys review: a tragic thing to do to an old friend

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Oh the excitement as the Amazon package containing another 3D blu-ray movie drops through the door. This week it's the fifth in the much-loved Terminator franchise, Terminator Genisys which I've had on order for weeks and which was at long last released on November 2nd.

But yikes ...

After a promising start with Arnie doing a decent job reprising his original role as a craggily Johnny Cashesque aging Terminator, the movie ultimately proves itself a truly godawful stinker.

There's no sense that smug well-fed Jai Courtney as the tragic Kyle Reese is a top trooper who has endured a lifetime of apocalyptic nightmare under the tyranny of Cyberdyne and their Skynet artificial intelligence system. Instead, he looks like a jock goon straight out of a National Lampoons movie, dishonouring the memory of Michael Biehn, who wrung our hearts in the original.

It took me a while to realise that the one-note brat playing Sarah Connor is Emilia Clarke, Danaeris from Game of Thrones. I may have to wait and forget her performance in Genisys before I resume watching GOT season 4 but I fear my viewing may be irreparably harmed by her feisty feistiness. I may even take to referring to her as Her Feistiness. In case you hadn't guessed, I HATE feisty. Too cutesy, and insufficiently endowed with guts to be as truly challenging as demi-goddess Linda Hamilton (all hail).

What happened to Clarke's GOT co-star, Lena Headey, who made such a magnificent Sarah in the TV series The Sarah Connor Chronicles? Did she take one look at the script and scarper?

Both Courtney and Clarke lack sensitivity and depth, and fail to recreate the mythical grandeur of the original movie, not helped by witless lumpen dialogue that a smart 11-year old would find embarrassing.

It says a lot when, aside from Arnie, the best acting comes from the T-800 (Brett Azar with Arnie's CGI'd face) and the T-1000 (Lee Byung-hun doing a great Robert Patrick). Not to mention JK Simmons spanning the years as Detective O'Brien.

The writers should be made to sweep streets for turning out this time-travel mess in which five dates figure: 1984, 1997, 2014, 2017 and 2029, plus the year when Sarah Connor was nine years old and got herself a pet "Pops" — an Ah-nuld Terminator. Got it?

The film opens with the messianic leader of the Resistance, John Connor (played by the decidedly UN-messianic Jason Clarke, meh!), sending his best buddy Kyle back in time from their offensive in 2029 to 1984 to protect his mum. So far, so like the original. However, in this timeline, it's all different and in the new 1984, Sarah is already hardass and familiar with the plot (aren't we all, dear) and now has that (rather emasculated) pet T-800 in tow. The other thing that is different is that Sarah and her cyborg minder have knocked up a little time machine. In 1984. Yeah, right. Never mind protecting Sarah, protect the crock of a plot at all costs.

Anyhow, I digress. The subsequent John Connor twist is severely mishandled, throwing away this key character. And the plot holes ... So if John Connor is transformed into a nanocyte prototype Terminator-3000 and goes back to 2014 in order to develop Genisys, Skynet's global operating system, in time for its deployment in 2017, and also to kill his parents, how can he be born and go back to 2014 in order to ... This conundrum is crudely plugged by nicking directly from the charmingly effective method in the original to the effect that someone says, "a person could go mad working this out". It's meant to work under cover of a witty callback to the first movie but just ends up calling attention to its own ineptitude.

There's not enough emotional pacing to transmit the horror of the situation in which JC and the family finds itself and results in just another over-complicated blah sci-fi movie when I wanted epic SF that explores big themes. In the wake of so much brilliant writing emerging from America, from Buffy to Breaking Bad, this is unforgivable.

I was optimistic about this movie, having seen what a glorious job the makers of the new Mad Max, Fury Road, did with the franchise. Terminator Genisys may have done well at the box office but I wonder how many viewers were pleased with the experience.

The brief presence of Matt Smith as the evuhl T-5000 who turns John Connor into a machine indicates intentions to make another sequel. It'll be back.

Doctor Who "Deep Breath" review: all hail Peter Capaldi, shame about the script.

Why is Peter Capaldi flashing his red bits like a lady baboon, and other questions.

SPOILER ALERT

Anna Chen's review of Dr Who "Deep Breath" first broadcast BBC1, Saturday 23rd August 2014

The Dalek was eyeing up some poor bastard on the far side of the room. It hadn't yet seen me, so I backed away. Far scarier in the actual metal than on screen, its presence only three feet away sent my heart pounding to 11, so loud it was sure to hear me. It swung round and I froze, skewered by its cyclops stare. Me and a Dalek. Eyeball to eyeballs. An inhuman rorschach inkblot of a creation, sucking out all the dark matter in my soul and planting it into this single embodiment of EE-vuhl. It waved its sink-plunger at me and I took another couple of steps back. People laughed, my mother among them. Surely a nervous, entirely inappropriate, reaction to the horror before them? I sensed another malign presence. I slowly turned to where the people were looking and tittering ... to find a Cyberman bent right over me, arms outstretched for a bearhug.

I screamed an eight-year-old's scream and ran as fast as I could, missing the Cyberman's grip by a whisker, past the Ice Warriors, the Monoids and the Fish People, and screeched to a halt before the Yeti blocking my way outta here. A moment's relief because the Yeti was surely just a big teddy bear. All that cuddly fur waiting for a kid to snuggle into. But this was no oversized furry playmate: this was a sinister, silent, unbelievably huge furball with fangs and a bad manicure standing between me and the exit. I stared at it, suddenly aware of depths of alien viciousness. Knowing I was beaten, I broke into a fit of weeping and heard the laughter rise. I swear that Yeti was heaving along to the jollity. It shifted a little to one side leaving a space just big enough for me to squeeze through and then made a final swipe. I yelped and leapt several feet in one bound, vowing I would return one day to vanquish the monsters that had landed at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition.

That was one of the few times Doctor Who ever pressed my terror button. Doctor Who was always about the permanance of the British empire and our values; as much in the outlands of space and time as here among Britainland's acres of melamine and fresh paint. Why else, after 51 years, is there still a white male at the helm of the Tardis aided by a trusty gurl assistant? Terror was the series' way of reminding you how lucky you were to be alive at such a secure, stable time ... if you lived in the British Isles rather than, say, post-second-world-war Korea, Yemen, Kenya, or Malaya. Any disruption of the status quo was certain to be corrected by the Doctor, with equilibrium restored by the end of the series and our place in the universe nailed.

Nuthin' changes except when it does. This year, for its twelfth reincarnation and eighth series of the modern reboot, Doctor Who goes full-tilt steampunk, calling once again on the Victorian era for validation in a world that's a little less secure, a little less reliable. Terror springs from newscasts and comes knocking at the door. Casting Malcolm Tucker (who bears a passing resemblance to actor Peter Capaldi) is inspired. Gravitas, grit, a laser tongue and a weary intelligence far beyond that of the mere mortals surrounding him make him the perfect Timelord in this, our hour of need.

Sadly, 'Deep Breath', the first episode of the long-awaited new series introducing Capaldi, inhales superb production values, along with some solid acting, but exhales a godawful script from Dr Who veteran Steven Moffat. Dwahlinks, you call that DIALOGUE? Monologues, more like: with declamations to the audience requiring actors to remain rooted unresponsively to the spot instead of reacting the way people, you know, react! The old vagrant and the robot boss have to freeze and endure long narcissistic screeds of character-establishing bollox that should never have made it out of Moffat's notebooks.

The episode opens promisingly with a Godzilla-scale tyrannosaurus rex as the chosen delivery method of the Tardis, the new Doctor and his companion, Clara (Jenna Coleman). After terrorising London, it is swiftly dispatched by a gentleman cyborg who harvests humans for body parts and requires some dinosaur optical nerve; although how first incinerating the creature aids raptor recycling is never made clear. The story then unravels with one damn thing after another rather than pearls finely strung to develop a complete whole: a meandering scene concerning a bad-smelling homeless man, some absurd short-cut ratiocination from Madame Vastra (Neve McIntosh), and lo-o-ong event-free dialogue in Mancini's restaurant. You know it's an idiot-plot when the heroes stumble on their nemesis as he's recharging and don't even unplug him. Clara is saved from the cyborg's cannibalising restaurant by the crimebusting Paternoster gang. They escape by taking the deep breath of the title and holding it, thereby avoiding detection by the murderous bots who only want to find their "promised land". The Doctor, still befuddled by the stresses of his regeneration, may or may not have pushed the cyborg gent out of his human-skin balloon at the clunking denouement, although suicide under the torture of being forced to listen to him rant while barely getting a word in edgewise, isn't ruled out. There's not a lot of outwitting going on.

When Joss Whedon-manque Russell T Davies first rebooted the franchise, his achilles heel was his adoption of the surface characteristics of Buffy and Angel with only the slimmest understanding of how plot and character interact, resulting in relentlessly annoying hysteria and a lack of story dynamic. He gave us sentiment instead of profound emotional involvement, lurches instead of arcs-within-arcs that dipped and soared along with our spirits. Bad habits have stuck.

I was always shown (and told!) that the rule was 'show, don't tell'. The Doctor babbles exposition like a mofo in a stinker of a script in search of a storyline. Note to producers: making characters talk 13 to the dozen like coke-fiends doesn't mean we won't notice little things like plot-holes and entire missing throughlines. Have none of you heard of PACING? Longeurs stretched into longdays as sub-Buffy banter held up the promised action while we were expected to genuflect before the awesomeness of Moffat's one-liners, a vanity process not far removed from pounding rock for diamonds — yes, there were a few but by the time they surfaced I was too exhausted to care.

You can lesbian-lizard-snog all you like in order to establish your LGBT credentials, but class hierarchy is alive and very unwell in the world of Doctor Who. Any subversive value resides in the relationship between Lady Handbag, Madame Vastra, and her maid-wife being normalised, not hollered triumphantly every two minutes. Uncool! Why're we back in very unsubversive days when maids and butlers were the norm (know your place, kids), and where the white "ninja" maid appropriates eastern skills but the only actual East Asian (Clem So) in sight is a robot? Reactionary mindset leaking at the edges? Even Harry Potter had an East Asian girlfriend until she was dumped for a white girl under circumstances never satisfactorily explained. In fact, not much ethnic minority presence at all in this one.

And why does the Doctor keep exposing his frock-coat's red silk lining like a lady baboon flashing her in-oestrus labia? So many questions, so much left dangling.

We wade through a swamp of exposition so thick you could stand a spoon up in it. The origins and rationale of the cyborg aliens aren't revealed through the clever workings of the script: Capaldi has to bark them out while the cyborg stares glassily, politely waiting for him to finish.

The cyborg's not too bright, anyhow. Eons of farming humans in order to make a skin balloon when he could have used whatever material Victorian dirigibles were made from, or simply bought some animal skins from the local abbatoir?

The funniest moments are owned by Strax the over-literal butler (Dan Starkey) whose knocking out of Clara with a rolled up copy of The Times was authentic laugh-out-loud slapstick.

Clara goggles her way through like someone who's been told she has pretty eyes (which she does) and has given up blinking for fear of hiding them. Her shrill tantrums have been praised as the mark of a strong woman. Surely, the critics have mistaken petulant for "feisty"? Having her throw strops and hissy-fits at inappropriate moments is a singularly ham-fisted method of telegraphing that this is not your dad's submissive Dr Who companion but an incredibly dated Grrrl Power trope that the BBC has only just twigged exists. Brattish and bossy when she could be co-operative, sensitive and insightful (but there I go again, talking about myself: it's catching), Clara is the template for the privileged breed of management who climb up the echelons of the BBC and walk off with those million-quid payoffs. FFS, don't try this at home, kids.

"In the name of the British Empire," cries Madame Vastra as her gang perform their rescue. Drip, drip, drip. Doctor Who is the hard-wiring of young minds into the values of the Establishment, not those of our real British society. The post-war period of freedom and relative prosperity for the masses is at an end, the party's over and the Doctor has reincarnated into the child-catcher. Protect your tender budding brains. Retain your critical faculties even as you chow down on your (intermittently tasty) comfort food.

An ideological battleground. Review of Doctor Who season finale: Death in Heaven.

Review of the rebooted Sherlock: The Blind Banker.

Fu Manchu Complex review: a boisterous romp through the yellow peril canon

I'd already expressed my delight in seeing Daniel York's lively satire, The Fu Manchu Complex, at the Oval House Theatre last week, but a rash of resentful mainstream reviews prompts me to expand on my response.

In particular, the Guardian's theatre reviewer Maddy Costa seemed completely out of her depth, writing a stunningly superficial piece that simply did not geddit. The poor woman didn't even derive any fun from it, making me wonder why she bothers with theatre reviewing at all if it's all such a bore and a chore.

To be fair, York has a fine line in jolly-japes one-liners and crude national insults: the Scottish woman dismissed as a "moronic haggistani", the Irish man ridiculed as a "potato-nosher clover-face". But having a character acknowledge that events on stage are "dashedly dramatic" does not postmodern irony make: without it, the play feels weirdly anachronistic.

This is, at best, mischievous. Daniel York has deftly demolished a slew of stereotypes, setting them up and bowling them down like skittles in a boisterous romp through the yellow peril canon. He dredges up every unpleasant racist colonialist epithet and then, when you think he must have exhausted his supply, he goes and finds some more. As Artie in The Larry Sanders Show once said, he hits rock bottom and then breaks through to a whole new bottom no-one ever knew existed — much how racist ideology burrows into language.

What's different here is that because such archetypal EDL-esque heroes as Sax Rohmer's Nayland Smith and his sidekick Petrie, who deliver these insults, are played by east Asian actors — the very people mocked in the Fu Manchu books — the absurdity of such dehumanisation is shown up under a spotlight, diced, cubed and wrapped up in a pretty yellow bow.

According to Ms Costa, it's all merely a crude context-free repetition of national insults. "Oh look, they're just as racist." How she failed to notice both the sub-text and the twist, I can scarcely begin to fathom.

York could have written anything, and almost anything would be an improvement on this cod-Edwardian schlock-horror farce burdened with cock jokes and schoolboy sniggering.

This year marks the centenary of the original publication of the Fu Manchu books, making this a timely and pertinent production. And yet we still get Sherlock reboots regurgitating the same "cod-Edwardian schlock horror" (the Sherlock episode "The Blind Banker"), and Radio 4 giving us all-white Fu Manchu yellow peril fantasies (Fu Manchu in Edinburgh). How's that for  being"weirdly anachronistic". Why is the Guardian not challenging these?

She appears to have missed why tiny todger cock-jokes might be hugely relevant when Chinese males are uniformly dismissed as being hung like hamsters — one way colonialism dehumanised an entire race is by dissing their sexuality. "Black men were labelled superstuds. Chinese men got the reverse stereotype. It's a sort of Goldilocks Syndrome — or Goldicocks — not too big, not too small but just right. And 'just right' is the European norm. The 'horn norm'", as I pointed out in my own solo show, Anna May Wong Must Die!

Talking of colonialist dissing of sexuality, as Fah Lo Suee, the daughter of Fu Manchu, Jennifer Lim's schizoid oscillation between dragon lady and sexy lotus blossom was a joy to behold, nailing both stereotypes with wit, brio and verve. The diminutive Paul Chan as Nayland Smith is a natural comedian, funny and likeable before he even opens his mouth: truly inspired casting. And there are many more great touches, such as the Borg implant-like white quarter-masks to go with the assimilation theme.

I do question why two Guardian writers (the other being Matt Trueman, who originally reported the RSC director Greg Doran's spiteful "sour grapes" comment) have given this hugely entertaining bundle of fun a measly two stars. Was it perfect? No. Did it deserve a mere two stars? Definitely not. If you're trying to reinforce the notion that we're "all crap so why all the fuss?", well done. Five stars. Keep the interlopers off our pitch and whatever you do, don't let them play with our ball. You'd think some people just don't like having their imperial myths deconstructed.

Resistance is futile. We're here to stay.

Oval House Theatre until 19th October

Yellow Peril orientalism past and present.

HUGO mini review: a dramatic turkey with brass knobs on.

MINI REVIEW: Steampunk aesthetics and the history of cinema: what could go wrong?

I watched Martin Scorsese's Hugo last night and, although the visuals are stunning (I'd have loved to have seen this in 3D) the script was one of the worst things ever.

Snobby middle-class preciousness (the cute kids with Rank starlet accents nearly gave me diabetes) and dramatic ineptitude killed for me the story of one of the fathers of cinema, George Melies (Ben Kingsley). Sir Ben's muted appearance in the same film as Ray Winstone who played Hugo's evil drunken uncle had me longing for the last time I saw them paired up in Sexy Beast and wishing Melies would blurt Don's immortal line, "I'm sweating like a cunt". This would have given the lagubrious script a much-needed cheering up.

Two nights running I've seen Sasha Baron Cohen in iffy films (although this was still considerably better than The Dictator, a pale shadow of Borat and Bruno).

Reading the reviews and scanning the list of awards garnered (although not for veteran film editor Thelma Schoonmaker for clear reasons in my eyes), it appears that flattering the movierati guarantees good write-ups.

However, box office failure reveals the wisdom of audiences who stayed away in droves. A good yarn told well beats any amount of bells and whistles.

A dramatic turkey with brass knobs on.

CRAP LYRICS: What do Siouxie Sioux and Rod Stewart share with Bernard Manning?

Charles Shaar Murray just read me a brilliant demolition of "Hong Kong Garden" by Siouxie Sioux and the Banshees and "Every Picture Tells A Story" by Rod Stewart from journalist and former NME writer Johnny "Cigarettes" Sharp who has written a most excellent book, Crap Lyrics (pub Portico).

Punk rock never had any truck with petty social rules or niceties. Yet when Siouxie sang, Slanted eyes meet a new sunrise, a race of bodies small in size, she seemed to be expressing a knowledge and empathy with immigrant peoples that had more in common with pre-punk figures such as, say, Bernard Manning. Chicken chow mein and chop suey, they rhymed questionably with Hong Kong Garden takeaway, displaying all the searing wit of the bloke who goes into a Chinese restaurant and asks for 'flied lice'. But let's not be too hasty in our condemnation. After all, Miss Sioux has since claimed that the song was 'kind of a tribute' to immigrant communities who were harassed by skinheads in the late 80's.

It's certainly an interesting way of showing respect for other cultures, especially coming from a band who once wore swastikas on stage. I'm sure they meant well, though. Anyway, I'm off down the Notting Hill Carnival dressed in an afro wig and boot polish — it's my tribute to the afro-caribbean community. I'm hoping for a warm reception.

I can't stand Rod Stewart so I was lucky enough to miss out on this lyrical masterpiece, "Every Picture Tells A Story".

Once the Beatles had taken the word by storm, the globe became a playground for tight-trousered troubadours eager to export some culture (usually a culture of sexually transmitted bacteria) to their foreign cousins. But like latter-day Marco Polos, they did at least report back on theier experiences, to educate us in the customs and peoples they met there. As Rod Stewart put it in this postcard from the edge:
On the Peking ferry I was feeling merry, sailing on my way back here.
I fell in love with a slit-eyed lady, By the light of an eastern moon,
Shanghai Lil never used the pill, she claimed it just ain't natural
... and so I did the decent thing, and put a condom on my Deng Xiao Ping.

OK, so I kind of made up that last line. But don't dismiss old Rod for any lack of chivalry, or indeed romance. He goes on to inform us how she won his heart, then refers to her once more as the 'slit-eyed lady'. How she must have loved that pet name. Sadly, history history does not record whether she affectionately dubbed him 'parrot face' in return"

Johnny's sharp book is full of equally funny take-downs, throwing like a top martial artist, actually not having to do much except have an eagle eye and present what's already there. The Beastie Boys telling us, Girls! To do the dishes! Girls! To clean up my room. Girls! To do the laundry!; Rod Stewart again, promising to make love to you Like fifteen men when he gets "Lost In You" (hmm); Prince coming over some poor woman's wedding gown in "Head" (double hmm); Prince once more coming where he shouldn't in "Come" (triple hmm). Who's this Liz Phair who wants to fuck you like a dog (presumably after sniffing your bum for the longest time) and threatens to make you like it in "Flower"? And Prince yet again, this time coming in his "Sister" like some sort of dribble-monster run riot.

Thank heavens song-writing giants like Bob Dylan and David Bowie set a better example. Oh, wait ...!

Buy this book!!!

Yellow Face review: triumph for David Henry Hwang launches London's new Park Theatre

Pic by Simon Annand

My review of Yellow Face in the Morning Star 
4 stars

Tuesday 28 May 2013 by Anna Chen
Yellow Face
Park Theatre, London N4

This smart and savvy comedy delivers a knock-out blow to any still-entrenched belief in certain crepuscular crannies of theatre land that east Asians can't produce culture.

Racism no longer has an outlet in blackface performance but yellowface lingers as a method of corralling an ethnic minority into a ghetto, depriving them of jobs and creative participation.

That's the context of the Obie award-winning Yellow Face, an admittedly autobiographical indulgence by David Henry Hwang which tells a funny and fast-paced story of his perennial war against the surreptitious devices used to keep Asians in their place, in particular the 1990s yellow-peril hysteria targeting President Bill Clinton and threatening to engulf American-Chinese people.

Having burned out as the "poster child for political correctness" in the battle of Miss Saigon - when American-Asian actors protested noisily against white British actor Jonathan Pryce reprising his part as the Asian engineer for the Broadway transfer of the musical - Tony award-winning playwright DHH (Kevin Shen) buckles down to work on his next play Face Value.

He inadvertently casts white actor Marcus G Dahlman (Ben Starr) in the leading Asian role and the subsequent cover-up reveals much more than it conceals.

Too sophisticated to lecture, Hwang skilfully navigates a series of real-life anti-Chinese events including the accusation that his banker father Henry (David Yip) is aiding an enemy - China - and the failed prosecution of Dr Wen Ho Lee as a nuclear spy for Beijing, harking back to the Rosenbergs' execution.

In reversing the situation and trying to manipulate his star Dahlman - "dollman," geddit? - Hwang exposes the absurdity of judging people by their skin.

It's the Siberian Jew Dahlman, building a successful career on an erroneous assumption that he is part Asian, who pleads: "It doesn't matter what someone looks like on the outside."

Hwang has long been respected as a writer of depth with an impressive body of work permeated by a progressive political perspective. In Yellow Face he argues that we should all be part of "the big song" as experienced by Dahlman, who finds peace and an identity with the Dong tribe of China.

Director Alex Sims mounts a technically sharp, elegant and enormously effective minimalist staging in-the-round for an excellent cast who mostly play multiple roles.

Actor-producer Kevin Shen pulls off several firsts with this British premiere of Yellow Face at north London's brand-new Park Theatre.

Following last year's still-rumbling RSC The Orphan Of Zhao controversy, Hwang's long-awaited theatrical resurfacing in Britain after a couple of decades provides a welcome addition to the debate around representation of east Asians in this country's culture.

Runs until June 16. Box office: (020) 7281-8813

See Anna's Morning Star feature on David Henry Hwang

Ellen Gallagher, fat ladies and Pan sex with goat: my week of London kulcher

POMPEII, HERCULANEUM AND ICE AGE ART

In the cultural whirl that's been my life this past week, I've seen not only the sold-out sexily titled Life and Death: Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition (on until 29 September), I also caught Ice Age Art now in its final weeks: both at the British Museum. Some of the ice-age artefacts go back 31,000 years and, as the curators blast out from the posters, it does indeed mark the arrival of the modern mind.

Female forms abound. Closer to Beryl Cook than Vogue, them were the days when being voluptuous (or as we called it in Hackney, "podgy") made you an object of beauty and the muse of artists. I wonder if those cavemen slept with their models.

The funniest exhibit to have survived the volcanic wrath of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 is the statue of Pan shagging a goat — a garden ornament, it is believed, and certainly one I'd have frightening the squirrels in my back yard any day. It's a nanny, not a male goat the god of the wild is penetrating, so, hey, at least Pan's not GAY, thus preserving some decorum for the elderly ladies and school parties clogging up the aisles. However, I bet she's under age, thereby opening up another can of net-curtainland anxieties.

But she looks happy enough, and Pan has the manners to take her missionary stylee rather than doggy, so he's showing respect and not a little affection in the way he's playing with her beard. If a guy tugs fondly at your facial hair while making sweet lurve instead of demanding electrolysis, you know you're in with a second date. Up close enough for my breath to steam up the glass case, the wickedness in his smile is achieved with such subtlety that I could swear he winked at me.

ELLEN GALLAGHER

At Tate Modern, I did one last circuit of the Lichtenstein on its last day, quite liked the Saloua Raouda Choucair but fell head over heels in love with Ellen Gallagher who I'd never even heard of before.

Motifs of boggle eyes and big grinning thick-lipped mouths run through her early work and are immediate clues as to her identity as a mixed-race black woman working in the US. She's funny, beautiful and political so that's my fandom sewn up.

Three vast canvasses made up of hundreds of original mid-20th century newsprint magazine adverts targeting American black people sport new hairdos courtesy of the artist made out of bright yellow plasticene in an amusing and imaginative series of ludicrous formations that aren't half as mad as the neuroses those magazines were feeding.

One of my favourite pictures, Abu Simbel, is a mucked around photogravure of the three giant statues of pharoahs sitting outside one of the pyramids. Again, thick minstrel lips, broad noses and boggle eyes are stuck on the pharoahs' faces. Heads of murdered black men tumble in a heap at the base, two nurses smile and three tiny men in suits point feebly at a flying saucer made of yellow plasticene, turquoise fun-fur and spangles shooting its death rays.

Those nurses are referenced throughout Gallagher's earlier work but it wasn't until I read the notes for another big canvas and my overall favourite, An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity (2008), that I realised the significance.

The experiment referred to is the notorious Tuskegee experiment where hundreds of poor black men were deliberately infected with syphylis and observed over 40 years from 1932 with no medical treatment even when penicillin was found to be a cure. Nurse Eunice Rivers was the trusted intermediary between the men and an insane medical establishment.

This work is an abstract, like several other of the 100 or so works on show, made of hundreds of paper strips soaked in blue ink to varying intensities so that the whole surface ripples, and contrasted with  oranges, ochres and umbers. It is the most beautiful thing to look at yet represents one of the ugliest events in modern American history. The reproductions don't do it justice so do see the real deal.

There's a ton more from Gallagher in the huge AxME restrospective, with her tendrilly marine drawings most notable. Don't miss it.

Coming up, Luke Bedford and the London Sinfonietta, and David Henry Hwang's Yellow Face at London's new Park Theatre.

"Burning words full of life and truth": review of my poetry in the Morning Star

Quasi gal, quasi Byronic. It's official — I write like the poetry dudes of old.

I'm delighted and a bit stunned to read a wonderful review of my poetry collection, Reaching for my Gnu, in today's Morning Star, written by writer and revolutionary teacher Chris Searle.

Chris says of my poetry:

"... a strange rendezvous of language, wit, and the imagination."

"She fully integrates the movingly personal, the vibrantly social and the diablolically political."

"Her rhyming is frequently quasi-Byronic, full of surprise and acerbic invention and her images, in their oft-times grotesquerie — as in poems like Orange Tone — carry a similar visual revulsion as those brilliantly caricatured by the Morning Star’s cartoonist Martin Rowson."

"But the most compelling poem in this collection is Big Society: On A Conversation In The Foundling Museum. 'We grow poorer and yet/ we birth millionaires like stars in a nebula,' she declares and her final message shines out for us all: 'You who are going under, heal/Take back from those who steal./Rise [in]to the light of the sun.' Burning words, full of life and truth."

I remember Chris from when I was a kid at the summer school he ran in a former fire station in the East End's Roman Road (now a Buddhist temple). He was already a legend having inspired the pupils up the road at Sir John Cass and Redcoat School to write poetry which he published in a book, Stepney Words. Shocked by the literary inner landscape of its working class pupils, the school governors sacked him and the kids promptly went out on strike until he was reinstated.

He then cast his net wider across other schools and released more young inner worlds in Fire Words, published by Jonathan Cape. Two of my poems got in. They were juvenilia (and, typical for me, political) but the important thing was that being encouraged to write and then published unleashed something, like a catch being lifted from a door. Feelings poured out with structure, purpose and confidence.

Children from Hackney weren't supposed to have a view of the world and our own experience in it. But here we were, writing, observing, learning, honing and perfecting.

He was one of two teachers who saw something in me and helped me access it — and that represents about the best you can do with another human being. This was sadly against a background of people — including some teachers and leftists, then as now — who tried to bash it back in. Luckily, the spirit endures and sometimes even flourishes.

So when I hear the word culture, I do now reach for my gnu.

In the Ai of the beholder: my theatre review of The Arrest of Ai Weiwei

The Arrest of Ai Weiwei
Hampstead Theatre, London NW3

If martial arts functions by using your opponents' weight against them, then artist Ai Weiwei must be the Bruce Lee of annoying the hell out of the Chinese government.

He's transformed dissidence into performance art, rendering him embarrassingly effective in resisting official persecution.

Howard Brenton's play The Arrest of Ai Weiwei adds more art-fu to the mix, dramatising Ai's account of an 81-day incarceration following his 2011 arrest at Beijing airport. Bored into near-submission by paralysing inactivity punctuated only by shouty interrogations, Ai's struggle to rebut charges of undefined "crimes" is complicated by his accusers having no idea what they are either.

The longeurs created by depicting tedium in real time are thankfully offset by moments of black comedy from the excellent all-east-Asian cast.

Benedict Wong's masterly performance as this bewildered victim of state bullying fleshes out Brenton's outlines, while guard Andrew Koji's metallic thousand-yard stare at a two-inch distance was the funniest scary thing of the night.

The plods' art epiphany — that it is the viewer's response to the art object rather than the object itself that Ai values — prompts his single joyous outburst at human connection achieved.

Brenton's play is part meditation on the power of art, and part deification of Ai Weiwei the artist — or "artworker" as his yelling persecutors keep reminding him in the confines of his cramped cell, a brilliant mobile installation by Ashley Martin Davis, complete with the collapsing walls on every critic's wish-list for China.

A key problem of having a passive protagonist is that there's little to help us penetrate the symbol and behold the man: not only an enemy of the state but also his own worst enemy. So what drives him?

One admirable quality is that he bites the hand that feeds, sending Chinese officialdom into a hyperventilating tizzy.

Given the prestigious assignment of co-designing the Bird's Nest Stadium, he'd openly criticised the Beijing Olympics, inviting the animosity of a Communist Party hoping he'd take the bait and fall into line.

However, being on the side of the angels doesn't make you an angel, and being an iconoclast shouldn't turn you into an icon.

Brenton's Weiwei is simply too saintly for someone who wittily runs rings around the authorities with all the confidence his exalted class confers. He's a mischievous hedonist, but no such humanising flaw manifests in this Christ-like Weiwei.

Greater confidence in the audience's ability to engage across his faultlines might have rescued Brenton from creating him as an object of pure beauty and harmony — as decried by the Big Ai himself.

The climactic action of an inspiring final speech is the smashing of a neolithic pot, reenacting Ai's famous 'performance' signifying that individual human souls are priceless, rather than classically beautiful but safe objects prized by the party's art commissars.

Some might read this as a brutal demonstration of the overriding power of private ownership — an assertion of property rights over shared historic artefacts via economic power.

Flattering both Ai Weiwei and the play's western audience, the production and cast performance are considerably better than this slack, superficial and complacent piece deserves.

Runs at the Hampstead Theatre until May 18. Box office: 020 7722 9301

The Book of Mormon review: South Park creators' gentle mayhem in London

Here's my review of The Book of Mormon for the Morning Star Thursday 25th April 2013.

The Book of Mormon may not represent the much-heralded death of satire but, with full-page ads taken out in the show programme by lampooned subjects The Lion King and the Mormon church itself, this effervescent musical inches us ever closer to the abyss.

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are equal opportunity offenders, transferring their gleeful lack of respect for everyone and everything to Broadway and the west end with the help of co-writer Robert Lopez.

Race, gender, colour, creed and the do-gooding leftism they so despise: if you are an identifiable type, you will be done over by these libertarian scamps. Show them a sacred cow and they'll skewer it and serve it back to you with BBQ sauce.

These caveats in mind, if this is the sort of thing you like then you will like this thing very much. If not, look away now.

Odd-couple Elders Price and Cunningham (ace Broadway imports Gavin Creel and Jared Gertner) are paired up to save souls in Uganda as soon as their Salt Lake City training as "latter-day saints" is completed. They're assigned to a miserable village under threat from local warlord General Butt Fucking Naked (basso-profundo voiced Chris Jarman) whose mission is to subject all women to clitoridectomies.

Demolishing a slew of clichés straight out of the charity handbook, everyone has AIDS; one character shags babies; and the doctor is forever singing, "I have maggots in my scrotum" when the chorus isn't belting out, "Hasa Diga Eebowai" (Fuck You God).

The dispirited Mormon posse of clean-cut all-American fabulously repressed gays share the "Spooky Mormon Hell Dream", inhabited by Jeffrey Dahmer, Saddam Hussein, Genghis Khan and Johnnie Cochran: "I got O J free".

Elder Cunningham inadvertently twists Mormon history out of shape from its patently absurd mythical beginnings — shades of South Park's most excellent Scientology take-down with Tom Cruise "in the closet" — and finally wins over the villagers. They agree to be baptised after staging an outrageous parody of the show-within-a-show scene in The King and I, including a monstrously priapic Jesus.

Goal achieved, the Mormon proselytisers celebrate with a cheery rendition of "I Am Africa" hilariously satirising imperialist wet-dreams of the benevolent kind.

The all-singing all-dancing cast kick up a storm. More than half the actors are black, as is the leading lady love interest, the multi-talented Alexia Khadime.

Puerile, offensive and rude, The Book of Mormon acts as a welcome reboot of faculties numbed by moralising authoritarian edicts substituting for political solutions. What's not to like?

Prince of Wales Theatre, London W1
Runs until January 11th 2014

David Bowie Is V&A launch party review: music event of the year

The vast lobby of the Victoria and Albert Museum had been turned into the sort of joint where beautiful young men and women press cocktails and bubbly onto you as soon as you walk in. Mini canapés appeared transported on futuristic illuminated platters like something out of the Korova Milk Bar in Clockwork Orange.

Yes, here we were at the David Bowie Is launch party, surely the music event of 2013.

We sipped Green Genies: vodka martinis with lychee juice and absinthe. The orange cocktail was the BEST! Passion fruit juice, vodka and ginger ale over crushed ice and sipped through a straw. I had four of those (see how pink I am in the photo?), came back home and caught Tescos open. Tried to buy the ingredients (I was pissed and not thinking straight, only I WANT) but was vetoed by CSM who bought me Irish Cream faux Baileys instead. Not the same. But I got to use my new Bowie tote bag. Which is orange.

The exhibition is huge and begins with oranges. (I'm spotting a colour theme.) I can't possibly do it justice in 400 words but every corner yields something fascinating: the handwritten cost for a recording studio session (£149); videos; drawings; costumes galore.

It opens today. You have until August 11th to catch it when it begins a world tour. Some 47,000 advance tickets have been sold so hurry up and book.

Anna Chen and Charles Shaar Murray at the Bowie launch party

So here's my review for the today's Morning Star.

David Bowie Is
V & A 23 March - 11 August 2013
Review by Anna Chen — Morning Star

Nearly a decade with nary a squeak from the house-husband, and suddenly this embarrassment of riches arrives, hot on the heels of his new and most excellent album, The Next Day.

Here I am praying at the altar of David Bowie, the eagerly awaited launch of his very own exhibition at the V & A museum. My heart throbs, my eyes goggle. I'm falling in love all over again.

Wednesday's launch party carried a fitting sense of occasion like the rock events of old. I say a quick hi to Noel Gallagher, ogle Bowie lookalike Tilda Swinton, listen to Tracy Emin's speech about swigging sherry to early Bowie, and hear Gary Kemp plan a film about Bowie's much-loved sidekick, the late Mick Ronson.

One glance at the heaving crowd and I realise that there's a new measure of wealth and taste. Forget tight buns: the mark of today's pampered elite is a tight face.

On entry, I am immediately transported back to my childhood as a serious Bowie kiddie, camping out all night to secure front-row tickets at the Hammersmith Odeon and Kilburn State Gaumont, and glimpsed in the DA Pennebaker Ziggy Stardust movie.

The radio-headset is a vital part of the experience, surrounding you with super-duper 3D audio as you walk around. I wasn't sure what the Carl Andre floor tiles were doing in the first bit but it sets the scene for Bowie as Serious Artist, a status the rest of the exhibition confirms.

This extensive selection from the Bowie archive has everything a fan could wish for, barring the presence of the great man himself. From his earliest artistic influences (Warhol, Burroughs), his first appearance in the public eye as spokesperson for The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long Haired Men, the space race (Space Oddity, Starman): welcome to Bowie World.

The scraps of paper on which Bowie scribbled lyrics and notes demonstrate that this wasn't someone merely churning out product: this was someone in the seat with the clearest view of worlds of imaginative possibility.

Many of the costumes on show seem strangely drab and unmagical without Bowie filling them out, but the wing-legged Kansai Yamamoto outfit shines (literally), as does the bizarre black and white one-piece (influence Sonia Delauney) beside a screen depicting it in action for Bowie's stunning 1979 performance of The Man Who Sold the World on Saturday Night Live.

By the time we reach the final hall where thirty-foot-high Davids and Micks sing to us, I remember why I fell for him the first time round. I'm ready to do the whole thing again.