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‘Exits’ by Foals deals with the dark side of the Soviet space program
The main gist of the story here is a girl who is stuck in a harsh boarding school, who dreams of going away to become a cosmonaut. Throughout the video her fantasies are contrasted with the darker side of the real Soviet program.
At the school she faces hazing exercises from the other pupils, such as being made to run through a dense forest blindfolded with hands tied behind her back. In her mind she imagines this to be part of the training and so embraces it as part of her preparation. At least one other pupil has got his hands on a gun, which she regards with both fascination and horror, wondering if this will form part of some other hazing ritual. The gun symbolises the Soviet space effort being essentially an offshoot of the military, that the rockets that carried the first people into space were adapted from missiles designed to destroy entire cities.
Mixed in with this are sequences of her imaginings of what space training might consist of, such as twisting through a narrow space while attempting to master a complex set of manoeuvres in zero-gravity. Perhaps it is one of those zero-G simulator aircraft which climb steeply and then dive through the atmosphere to give the occupants a brief sense of weightlessness. We also see her fencing with her friend, joyous, carefree, a warrior of the heavens!
But things take a darker turn.
We are shown a car being pulled from a river, and a man in a jumpsuit on fire. These allude to some of the ways the space program often failed lethally:
In 1961 Valentin bodarenko died in a fire when his low pressure test chamber, which contained fifty percent oxygen, ignited into flames.
In 1967 Vladimir Komorov was killed when the main parachute of his Soyuz capsule failed to deploy, which resulted in the vehicle crashing to Earth in flames. The mission plan had been for two spacecraft to rendezvous in orbit, and was fast-tracked to coincide with the 50th aniversary of the 1917 revolution. But to be ready in time for the date the rocket was rushed into service and was obviously defective. Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit the Earth, knew it would probably fail and wanted to volunteer in Komorovs place, as he felt they would not risk a national hero in a capsule known to have so many lethal flaws, but Komorov insisted. The Soviet system being what it was, no one who knew this dared speak up, for fear of being labelled a counter-revolutionary with dire consequences for themselves and their families. As a result, a very brave man suffered an horrific death.
In 1971 three cosmonauts - VladislavVolkov, Georgy Dobrovolski, and Viktor Patsayev - were suffocated when their capsule suffered a sudden depressurisation while preparing to re-enter the atmosphere. All three were found dead in their capsule on the ground. This is represented in the crashed car being pulled from the lake.
This wasn’t an exclusively Soviet issue: in 1967 three US astronauts - Virgil Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee - were burned to death on the launch pad when their Apollo capsule burst into flames from a cabin which had a high oxygen mix. In the race to get to the moon, they too sometimes cut corners with safety.
(Keep this in mind the next time you encounter some chode who claims we never went to the moon; take a moments time out for the brave men, Russian and American, who died for those boot prints.)
At one point an unseen someone shoves her up against the railings on a balcony to show her something below. But the space beneath them is mostly empty. When the camera turns we see the person behind her has vanished. This may illustrate the essential emptiness of her space ambitions.
In one of the final scenes we see from below a tall narrow structure with steam coming out the sides, like a steampunk rocket ship. The whole thing looks primitive and hazardous. One character looks up at it, not in wonderment, but outright fear. And that one image, of the clunky rocket in its silo pointing toward the skies, is what made the whole video snap into focus for me: it’s all about rockets that weren’t ready.
Then we see her best friend being spirited away by sinister agents into a black car to be taken somewhere, though he very obviously doesn’t want to go. Again, this harks back to Komorov, press-ganged into a mission he knows can only end in death.
Toward the end we’re shown some sort of parliamentary body which is in total uproar, people shouting at each other and papers being tossed about with merry abandon, which might symbolise the end of the old order. Could it be an allusion to the final days of the Soviet Union?
Bonus fact!
Her friend is played by Isaac Hempstead-Wright, who is also Bran Stark in Game of Thrones.
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That which is remembered, that which is not
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Everyone remembers: Battlestar Galactica
No one remembers: Battle Beyond the Stars
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Everyone remembers: Judge Dredd
No one remembers: Nemesis the Warlock
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Everyone remembers: Bladerunner
No one remembers: Burning Chrome
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Everyone remembers: Duran Duran
No one remembers: Scritti Politti
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Everyone remembers: GI Joe
No one remembers: Action Man
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Everyone remembers: Cyndi Lauper
No one remembers: Toyah Wilcox
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Everyone remembers: Beverly Hills Cop
No one remembers: To Live And Die in LA
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Everyone remembers: Robocop
No one remembers: Miracle Mile
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Everyone remembers: David Bowie
No one remembers: Belouis Some
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Everyone remembers: Madonna
No one remembers: Kim Wilde
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Everyone remembers: MTV
No one remembers: Music Box
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Everyone remembers: Public Enemy
No one remembers: KRS-1
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Everyone remembers: Guns ‘n’ Roses
No one remembers: Zodiac Mindwarp
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Everyone remembers: The A-Team
No one remembers: Greatest American Hero
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Everyone remembers: Indiana Jones
No one remembers: Tales of the Golden Monkey
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Everyone remembers: Superman
No one remembers: Captain Britain
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Everyone remembers: V for Vendetta
No one remembers: Marshall Law
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Everyone remembers: 2000AD
No one remembers: Warrior
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Everyone remembers: Miami Vice
No one remembers: Moonlighting
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Everyone remembers: big dramatic hair
No one remembers: big basketball boots
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Everyone remembers: leather biker jackets
No one remembers: covering your jacket in metal pins
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Everyone remembers: Reagan telling Gorbachev ‘tear down this wall’
No one remembers: the Iran-Contra scandal
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Everyone remembers: Atari 2600
No one remembers: Colecovision
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Everyone remembers: Falklands war
No one remembers: Grenada intervention
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Everyone remembers: the space shuttle
No one remembers: the Soviet Buran shuttle
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Everyone remembers: Commodore 64
No one remembers: BBC Micro
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Everyone remembers: Dirty Dancing
No one remembers: Desperately Seeking Susan
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Jazmin Bean’s ‘Worldwide Torture’ deals with the meat industry and its abuses
(Note: Jazmin is non-binary and has stated they wish to be referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. This piece follows that convention).
At first glance, this is a pretty bizarre video. Jazmin goes all Alice in Wonderland wearing a pig snout mask in a pastoral field. This is followed by a plastic brace forcing their mouth wide open which looks horrifically uncomfortable.
Switches to them in bedroom, holding a club with bright pink guns and knives all over the wall (very Die Antwoord), as well as their own mounted head as macabre trophy, as though it were a previous version of themself they had to destroy.
Then we have the piggy slave who polishes Jazmin’s many bitch awards and serves them cake. Not only does piggy slave have to groom jazmin, she has to be a living napkin on which to wipe their messy hands when they’re finished snarfing all the cake. Jazmin taunts the slave with the cake and makes it clear it is for humans only. When the pig shows them a piece of self made art, Jazmin grimaces in disgust and hacks it to pieces with a kitchen knife.
What the heck is going on? It is a commentary and critique of how we humans relate to animals, in particular our arrogant assumption that we are somehow better and can do whatever we please with them. The mouth brace is reminiscent of the harnesses that horses and other animals have to wear for long periods, no matter how uncomfortable, a symbol of their servitude. Jazmin’s treatment of the pig slave displays how we view animals as subservient to our will, how we assume we can help ourselves to their food sources and then wipe our hands on them as added insult. If they have the temerity to attempt a human level of awareness (e.g crude art) it is to be contemptuously dismissed. The camera lingers on the pigs face just long enough to leave no doubt the effect this has.
Jazmin’s head mounted on the wall as a trophy asks us how we’d feel if another creature decided we were to be hunted for sport, with weapons that made it easy for them and ensured we had no chance of escape.
Jazmin in the pig snout forces us to wonder whether we truly are any different to these creatures we have been conditioned to view as lesser. When you strip away the veneer of sentience, are we really any more than animals in fancy dress?
The blue Alice in Wonderland costume brings to mind scenes where Alice encountered various magical creatures in the forest, all of whom know more about this strange world than she does. They are privy to secret knowledge, and they’re not always willing to share it.
And in the real world, other animals do have perceptions we’re not privy to. There are creatures who can see into the infra-red and ultra-violet. There have been reports of elephants suddenly running for high ground just before a tsunami hit, when they heard the infrasound from hundreds of kilometres away. Other animals have sensed when an earthquake was about to hit because they both heard and felt the imminent vibrations coming up through the earth. Then there are tales of dogs becoming disturbed and barking at seemingly nothing, only for it to be revealed later on that they were in a house where someone died and is now reputed to be haunted. The truth is, animals can and do sense things we can’t. But in our anthropomorphic world, only the limited human perspective has any value, and anything outside of it is to be dismissed.
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Blackstar by David Bowie
It’s as bonkers as you’d expect.
First, the background. Space Oddity, released in 1969, was Bowies first real hit (Sadly, the Laughing Gnome didn’t get a lot of traction). In the song Tom is an astronaut whose capsule has malfunctioned in orbit, essentially stranding him in space. Most of it centres around him realising he isn’t making it back and trying to come to terms with his fate. It ends on a somewhat bleak note: Mission Control loses contact with the capsule prematurely, and they don’t seem to know why. Have the communication systems failed? Has Tom re-entered the atmosphere? Has he killed himself? Or did he somehow modify his little ship to leave orbit entirely and set himself on a journey into infinity? It seems to end on the suggestion any of these could have occurred.
Fast forward ten years. The Scary Monsters album is Bowies first venture into hard rock, and it’s a banger. (He would return to rock around nine years later with Tin Machine; he later described his Eighties journey as ‘two hard ends with a soft bit in the middle’).
The first track, Ashes to Ashes, looks a lot like the next chapter in the story of Tom. He strolls along a beach in a fantastical costume while an Albert Einstein type seems to be explaining something at length to him. Is the beach somewhere else in the cosmos? Who or what is walking along with him? Is it only happening in his mind?
We then see Tom sitting in some kind of control chair pondering his fate aloud, while someone in the background washes dishes and carries out other mundane chores. This can be interpreted as the ships autonomous systems keeping him alive, whether he wants them to or not. At the end of the video we see Tom wired up to all these tubes and wires, keeping him in some kind of stasis, neither alive nor dead. How can he still be alive after over a decade in space? Did he encounter someone else out there? Did they decide to modify his ship so that he could continue on his voyage of discovery out amongst the unknown? Whatever it is, he doesn’t seem too happy about it. He sings of wanting to take an axe to the ships systems (the ‘ice’) and returning to Earth. In the previous chapter he made the fateful decision that, rather than die uselessly in orbit, he would fire all the attitude rockets at once and thrust himself out into deep space, to be the first, possibly only, emissary to the cosmos. In so doing he would be transformed into a kind of artifact. If civilisation back on Earth ended, if humanity itself came to an end, his ship and his remains would endure, out amongst the infinite.
Perhaps he now regrets the decision. Because whatever he encountered out there changed him such that he cannot now die, yet nor is he really alive. All he can do is continue on the voyage, wherever it takes him.
Meanwhile back on Earth Tom has become somewhat of a cult hero: we see a group of people standing around a funeral pyre which they seem to have erected in his memory, singing his praises. As time goes on the cult will slowly grow as his name passes into legend.
Fast forward to 2016, the end of the saga.
It is tens of thousands of years in the future. Humanity’s descendants worship artefacts of the ancient space age, such as a mysterious helmet within which lies the bejewelled skull of a long dead astronaut. These people look human but they have tails and their form of worship seems to involve leaping up and down in unison. This is contrasted with a preacher standing in what may be the ruins of a church, brandishing a book with a black star motif on it. (The five pointed star can be viewed as a symbol of the human being: a head with arms and legs outstretched, DaVinciesque). This is interspersed with images of an astronaut falling into a silhouetted star, his body slowly elongating under the immense gravitational pull.
We can perhaps piece together what happened. The ‘Black Star’ of this chapter refers to the immense black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, whose gravitational well weaves together a hundred million stars. Major Tom travelled all the way to the centre of the galaxy, into a region no living being had gone before, and catalogued everything he saw and experienced along the way. Eventually he was drawn into the black hole, but rather than being pulled in completely, at the last second he saw a way out: he modified his course such that he could use its gravity to slingshot him around it entirely, and put him back on a course for Earth! Whether or not he succeeded and made it back to the mother planet we cannot say. Yet if the helmeted skull is anything to go by, something of him made it home. And maybe also some of the data he gathered out there. Perhaps the information is all in the Black Star book held aloft by the preacher man. Perhaps they have transformed his findings into a religion, and his ships log is now their bible. But the blindfolded man with buttons for eyes could mean that they have descended into a rigid dogma. It could be that we are looking at two separate religious sects: one has hold of the Major Tom holy relics including his skull, and the other has kept the information of what he found out there to itself.
So in the end Major Tom achieved what he set out to do: he has been transformed into a shrine, a memory of a departed civilisation, its last remnant. Though not perhaps the way he originally intended. As they say, be careful what you wish for.
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Introductory Bit
I have no use for cultural snobbery. In a time when Hollywood and mainstream TV seem content to churn out endless humourless remakes of old classics, short pieces which can condense their story into six minutes or less often make for a more satisfying experience. If you look down your big snobby nose at pop music you are missing out on some great stories.
There really shouldnt be any need to make a distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Neil Gaiman is no less valid than Leo Tolstoy; Public Enemy’s social commentary is as incisive as that of George Orwell; the pocket universe inhabited by Rick and Morty or The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is every bit as well realised as that of Gulliver's Travels or Isaac Asimov’s Foundation.
I’m surprised no one seems to have done the fan theory thing with pop videos: their fluid nonlinear structure can lend them a surreal dreamlike quality, which makes it particularly easy to weave alternate narratives out of them.
In this blog series I’ll be taking a closer look at some examples.xf
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