Art.

Is ‘Art’ bad? Comedy answer: yes. Glibness aside, that obviously isn’t true. I’ve made a whole stupid website that apparently focuses mainly on art and exploitation films here, as well as their exciting cross-pollination ‘artsploitation’! And also, I’ve got like a PhD in literature or something. But, you know, Sturgeon’s Law and all that: “ninety percent of everything is crap”. This is actually a misquote, if we’re being petty; Theodore Sturgeon actually wrote in 1957 that “ninety percent of everything is crud” (emphasis my own; the actual quote does have emphasis in it, though oddly not consistent between times he put it in print), not that it makes much difference in context. He apparently had said the same basic thing at a talk he was giving some years earlier; maybe he said ‘crap’ then and it was just too monocle popping when he submitted it to print. He, also, incidentally referred to it as a ‘revelation’, his ‘law’ being a different, less quoted adage of his that appeared in print earlier. It seems dubious to me that he should be the one to determine that. Anyway, where was I going with this? I understand this sentiment, and the context that he wrote it in is perfectly sensible; it’s about the snobbish nature of critics toward genre fiction’s perceived low quality; but I’m not wholly sure I agree overall. Having consumed a lot of media for both this site (there’s tons of crap that I haven’t bothered writing about in the past few years; and, yes, ‘years’, as despite how it might look, I didn’t start this thing on a whim) and a bunch of other projects, it seems like a fairer assessment is that the vast majority of everything is instead utterly mediocre. The question does arise: ‘is that maybe worse than being ‘bad’?’

Having had a big long thing about the merit of art, I’m actually here to talk about Make Me Up, a strong candidate for artsiest thing I’ve written about for the site to date.†

Siri (Christina Gordon) wakes up, Galatea style, in a mysterious hall. She doesn’t seem to have much idea who she is or why she’s there, but she’s soon inducted into a group of women clad in frilly pastels who reside there, themselves all over seen by the Figurehead (Rachel Maclean), a garish Thatcher-esque figure who pontificates on the nature of civilisation in soundbites ripped from Kenneth Clark’s seminal TV documentary series conveniently titled Civilisation (1969). Her purpose is to educate her charges on their role in society, before, at the end of the day, pitting them against each other in competitions of ladylike behaviour, judged by the myriad cameras that follow their every move in the building, incessantly evaluating their worth. The winner gets to ascend upstairs (and also eat dinner in front of everyone); the one who ranks last disappears down a chute. This place is just all trap doors. That’s all well and good, if you ignore basically everything about it, but Siri finds herself having nightmares about a man with a cleaver and an oddly pressing concern about Armageddon (Stewart Preston).

So, this is the first full feature length film by Rachel Maclean. You kind of have to emphasise the ‘full’ bit, as Feed Me (2015) clocks in at about an hour, so probably counts as a ‘feature’ by like the American and British academies’ metrics. Still, Make Me Up passes the seventy-minute mark, so its ‘feature’ status is pretty undeniable. It’s also perhaps her first work to at least vaguely pass as an ordinary(-ish) film. Rachel Maclean’s main line is that she’s a video artist. In this sense, this is variety of ‘video art’ that crosses over with performance art. I suppose the sort of thing that the BFI would generally label as ‘Artist’s Moving Image’. Make Me Up is clearly born of her earlier projects, but at the same time has a certain layer of accessibility. This not least because it has an actual cast beyond herself clad in increasingly extravagant costumes and makeup and masks and a load of editing trickery, making it easier to have more distinct ‘different’ characters for one thing; Feed Me’s dramatis personae involves many physically identical figures who may or may not be different people, as well as many physically disparate figures who may or may not be the same people; but also in terms of its broaching of the topics it looks at. The story that Make Me Up tells is much more obviously linear in structure, much more conventional in tone, and much more forthright in terms of what it wishes to convey on the matter. I suppose it had to have some level of accessibility; the BBC was involved. Even if it’s as part of their arts strand, Arena; which it’s TV airings it is indeed part of (well, generally); I assume they still have some limits on how far out there they’re willing to get… Also, Maclean apparently got better at lip syncing in the interim between the films. (I watched Feed Me to write this; while she plays all the parts physically, all the voices are performed by other people, and her ability to synch up the lines is pretty variable.)

Despite my talk of accessibility and the rather unsubtle nature of its commentary, this isn’t to say that this is necessarily an easy and comfortable watch. Its copious use of green screen to maintain its Barbie’s Dreamhouse aesthetic may take some getting used to for one thing, but the divide between its childish hues and the nature of the events taking place provides a stark, uncomfortable contrast. However it’s played for laughs as much as it’s played for horror, with the chop shop approach to archive sound clips lending an air of absurdity to proceedings, as Kenneth Clarke’s ponderous tones get recontextualised into some bizarre, comedically sinister situations (a bite of him declaring “feed my sheep” gets quite a bit of play as part of the dinner scenes), which only comes to feels stranger still coming from a woman in a pink bouffant, spangly lipstick and a day-glow powersuit.

I wrote all that, but what is it about? Aside from that cursory synopsis, that is. Well, if you remember about 700 words ago I had a bunch of nonsense about art and the badness thereof. Yeah, see, that tied in, even beyond the artsy film thing. That is perhaps a tad simple. It’s to do with the presentation of women, not just in the arts but in life. Of course, life imitates art imitates life imitates art. The Figurehead is a modern day Hadaly, a gynoid who exists to perpetuate masculine thought on the nature of art and with it the nature of femininity; when having her charges create tableaux vivants there’s always a focus on the Madonna/Whore dichotomy in the roles they’re given, the two roles traditionally afforded to feminine beauty in art, or post-Christian western art at any rate, the main kind of art that Civilisation was interested in; great men painting beautiful women. This feeds into the perception of women in society as a whole. Maclean mentions in interview her fascination with social media as a place for people to explore identity, and yet a lot of female Instagram lifer types she looked at inevitably ended up falling into the same traps with regards to striving to attain a certain stereotyped homogenous attractiveness, in terms of dress, makeup, hair, sometimes eventually culminating in surgery.

The whole enterprise isn’t particularly subtle about its ‘woman used as expression of masculine art’ thesis. Aside from Figurehead speaking in the voice of Ken Clarke (usually; other (male) art critics are available!), there are obvious points such as the congregation of women being quite literally silenced via a volume control and the eye shaped cameras that express approval or disapproval of their actions no matter how mundane… and when we switch to their point of view spend an awful lot of time assessing the women’s curves. That’s not to say that the film has an entirely straight view that the common accoutrements of femininity are bad; they do end up playing a major role in exploring and combatting the cycle the women are part of. Ultimately these things are tools and it’s how you use them and all that. Even then, evil can be defeated, but cannot be destroyed. It takes more than platitudes to resolve the issues at the film’s core, and it seems acutely aware of this fact. Even with it defeated however, all that is left in its wake is debate. No one is left to speak authoritatively (deservedly so or not), so where to proceed is a matter of speculation; whether or not evil will stay defeated is ultimately up to the survivors of the battle.

† Well… maybe Marriage of Reason and Squalor has it beaten. Come to think, that’s another low budget film by someone better known as an artist that makes heavy use of green screen and body horror.