Wildlife on One '03: Amazon Assassin - A Wildlife Whodunnit (aka The World Must Seem Oddly Frenetic)

Last year, when I covered the Wildlife on One episode "Uninvited Guests", I mentioned an episode called "Amazon Assassin" that I remembered being pretty darned peculiar, and lamented the then-elusiveness of said episode. Elusive no more, however - "Amazon Assassin" recently emerged from hiding, so the time has finally come to dig in and get to grips with how peculiar.

"Amazon Assassin" first aired on BBC1 on 16th July 2003. At this point, Wildlife on One had been a fixture of the BBC's programming for more than thirty seasons; alas, it did not have much longer to go, and the series' twilight years were among the most fascinating for some of the more experimental tactics it engaged in in an effort to keep the format fresh. "Be An Animal", which aired the previous summer, centred around the playthrough of a fictitious video game in which the player was required to make choices that, for the computer simulations' real-life counterparts, could mean the difference between life and death. It was hard to envision a freakier direction for Wildlife on One, but "Amazon Assassin" gave it a run for its money in assuming an approach that was every bit as novel. This film demonstrates how similar techniques to those used in forensic science can be applied in studying animal behaviour, and does so by adopting the format of a good old-fashioned murder mystery. The skeletal remains of a sloth have been uncovered from the rainforest floor; the skeleton itself seems unusually intact, suggesting that it was not devoured by a large predator likely to have given the carcass a more thorough mangling. Close examination of the bones determines that the sloth was young and healthy, ruling out old age and disease as potential causes of death. Likewise, the absence of any broken bones would appear to confirm that the sloth was not the victim of a fatal fall. The probability points increasingly to foul play - presumably, the sloth was done in by one of its fellow jungle dwellers, but who? The problem is that none of the blemishes detected on the sloth's bones seem entirely consistent with any one Amazon predator's style of killing. Can we piece together everything we know about the complex web of life in the rainforest to deduce how that final, deadly scenario played out for our three-toed friend and with it, the identity of the elusive sloth slayer with whom it had the misfortune of tangling? As with any riveting whodunnit, our investigation is wont to lead us into some truly unexpected and unsettling territory.

"Amazon Assassin" was actually the second installment in a conceptual two-parter - before it, we had "African Assassin" (not currently on The Internet Archive, but give it time), which applied the same formula to an act of carnage on the grasses of the savannah, the victim in this instance being a baby Thompson's gazelle. David Attenborough gave a run-down of several prominent predators who could potentially have done the deed, before DNA testing revealed that the gazelle was, in fact, killed by an animal previously framed as being above suspicion (although perhaps it would not surprise you if you'd remembered one of the scenarios from "Be An Animal"). Reaction to the two episodes was presumably very positive, because an entire spin-off series, Animal Crime Scene Investigation, was commissioned in 2005 (regrettably, I largely missed out on that one, although I am aware that two of the episodes were straight-up remakes of "African Assassin" and "Amazon Assassin", padded out with an extra fifteen minutes' worth of material). The whole enterprise was presumably conceived in response to the popularity of contemporary CBS series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and while it certainly was an inventive mash-up, there is a degree of philosophical incompatibility between the two genres that "Amazon Assassin" intermittently struggles to overcome. Crime dramas such as CSI are rooted in ideas about moral boundaries, the inherent abhorrence in transgressing such boundaries and the necessity of bringing any and all transgressors to justice, concepts that obviously don't apply when scrutinising how the animal world functions. In reconceptualising the sloth's story to fit the familiar narrative patterns of a whodunnit, "Amazon Assassin" ends up adopting terminology that would be huge no-nos in a more conventional wildlife documentary - the sloth is described as an "innocent victim", while one of the top suspects, the harpy eagle, is tagged a "sloth serial killer". To an extent, this is a necessary evil in keeping with the genre it's aping - even the term "murder" carries uneasy overtones of human judgement - and while it's evident that the CSI homages are intended to be more than a little tongue-in-cheek (we get shots of the supposed "crime scene", complete with police barricade tape), it is nevertheless rather jarring to hear the words "sloth serial killer" coming from a voice as authoritative as Attenborough's. But then, to get too hung up on this point would detract from the real purpose of the documentary, which is to teach us about the complexities of life in the Amazon, and of the numerous challenges to which the sloth and sloth predators alike have risen in order to carve out a living therein. It's easy enough to dismiss the whodunnit angle as a hollow gimmick designed to hook viewers who might be indifferent toward more conventional approaches, but it does offer a very unique and effective perspective - by emphasising the blind spot in our narrative understanding, it increases the immediacy and menace of the situation, attuning our awareness to the hidden perils we otherwise might have overlooked. No better way for us to appreciate the multitude of hazards lurking within that dense Amazon greenery than for us to match our mental wits against it. On top of which, if you can allow for a little artistic licence, the whodunnit approach is, simply put, a whole lot of fun.

In this case, the victim is one that should have little difficulty eliciting our sympathies - the unassuming sloth has endeared itself to many a human heart, mass appeal that I've no doubt can be at least partly attributed to it being the specimen in the animal kingdom to most closely resemble a Jim Henson puppet, with its gangling limbs, prominent nose and comically extended neck (comprising more bones than a giraffe's, Attenborough informs us). Furthermore, it's a species that has mastered extreme slovenliness as a survival technique, and that too is a magnet for human admiration and envy alike. The sloth sleeps for twenty hours a day (expending minimal energy allows it to thrive on a diet of low-nutrient leaves - more accurately, poisonous, low-nutrient leaves, which its slow-brewing digestive system makes simple work of), it only ventures down to the ground either to shit or to move between trees, and during the rainy season it enhances its camouflage technique by developing green mold all over its fur (which also houses a huge variety of parasites). In Attenborough's words, "The sloth must make an unattractive meal - it's all insects, fur and giant fermenting gut." Is there a single thing not to love about this living Muppet? There are, of course, limitations to how far the way of slothfulness can take you, as our sloth's sorry story demonstrates. A sloth's two key weaknesses are a) its inability to regulate its body temperature, meaning that it must intermittently break its camouflage to bask in the sunlight and b) if ambushed by a predator while on the ground, it's as good as defenceless. Attenborough surveys the various jungle killers with the means to exploit these vulnerabilities, and measures up how their respective methods compare to the state of our decomposed sloth.

In visualising how these prospective attacks would play out, the episode runs into a few obvious technical limitations - it rarely has actual footage of the pertaining scenarios, so most visualisations are reliant on creative editing (you'll rarely see the sloth in the exact same frame as each predator) or clever use of props (look closely, and you'll notice that a stuffed sloth endures an awful lot of abuse throughout this film). Some of these recreations are more effective than others, the least convincing involving a certain piscine predator (see below), but then if you think that sloths are so endearing, odds are that you don't want to see a documentary comprised of nothing but scenes of genuine sloth slaughter. A little chintziness is welcome in taking the edge off.

The sloth is at its safest when it's in its element, clinging statically to a branch suspended way above the forest floor. It's not a guarantee, however, so Attenborough begins by looking at the hunters that might have poached it from up high:

• Harpy Eagle: Earlier, I scoffed at the idea of this bird being labelled a "sloth serial killer". Regardless, I can comprehend why it, out of all of the suspects, received such a loaded and macabre title - its preferred raw materials for building its nest are a) branches and b) the bones of its victims. Very Buffalo Bill, no? The intact nature of the skeleton indicates that our sloth was not eaten by a harpy eagle; the lack of breakages likewise suggests that the sloth was not dropped by an eagle while en route to its nest.
  
• Human: The indigenous people of the Amazon hunt tree-dwelling mammals by felling them with poisoned blow darts. Attenborough points out that this technique is more effective at bringing down monkeys than sloths - a sloth's grip can be locked so tightly that it could continue to dangle from the treetops even with a poisoned dart lodged in its torso - but if it was successful, then the sloth should certainly expect to break a few bones on the way down. Already this isn't looking very probable.
  

 

Due to the lack of broken bones, Attenborough proposes it more likely that this sloth was ambushed while traversing the forest floor. Canopy hunters are eliminated, and we instead look to those predators that operate at the ground level:

• Army Ants: These tiny but tenacious killers generally target other invertebrates, although a sloth is one of the few mammals incapable of outrunning them; it's well-covered, however, by its thick hide and long coarse coat, which the ants' teeth would have difficulty penetrating.
  
• Jungle Rattlesnake: Has the right teeth for the job, although the sloth's skeleton shows no signs of deterioration from venom.
  
• Jaguar: Described by Attenborough as our prime suspect, although deer are this cat's preferred prey and it is less likely to target a sloth during seasons in which their numbers are plentiful. In the breeding season (December to May) a pregnant female might broaden her diet to include sloth.
  

 

With that in mind, Attenborough suggests that it would fruitful to study the skeleton for evidence of when the sloth was killed, and it's here that we really get the opportunity to marvel at the proficiency of the forensic techniques and what they can tell us. Roots growing between the bones are telltale signs that the sloth has been dead for several months, which pinpoints the time of the killing back to the wet season, when the forest floor would have been covered with flood water. Even more remarkably, forensic tests for microscopic algae known as diatom can indicate whether our sloth was a victim of drowning; diatom are present in the sloth's bone marrow, confirming that it was indeed dragged to a watery grave. Mystery solved? Not really - the sloth is a very capable swimmer; if anything, it makes the process of transferring from tree to tree easier, as a sloth can move three times as quickly in the water as on land. Once again, it seems that another creature sealed our sloth's fate, one adept at handling a more aquatic domain. This revelation looks to be a real game-changer for our investigation. Land predators are eliminated as suspects, and our attention instead turns to a whole new line-up of prospective water assassins:

• Amazon River Dolphin, aka Boto: These guys have crocodilian jaws and, as per the local folklore, a predilection for shape-shifting in order to pick up human women. Their taste in cuisine swings predominantly toward fish, however, so sloth is presumably off the menu.
  
• Giant Otter: The concept of an otter the size of a wolf is...a little nightmarish, admit it. Fortunately, they too are unlikely to deviate from their primarily fish-based diet.
• Anaconda: Every ophidiophobic's worst nightmare. A sloth would indeed be a viable meal for the world's largest and most powerful snake. What's less probable is that the sloth's skeleton would be able to withstand the snake's method of killing - by squeezing the life from its prey - without anything giving way.
  
• Electric Eel: I think this episode aired somewhere near the time that Hula Hoops were threatening to unleash these beady-eyed bruisers into the UK waterworks. The eel is no sloth hunter, but could potentially deliver a shock in self-defence if it were accidentally stepped on. Attenborough emphasises that it's unlikely, but not out of the question.
  
• Arowana: This fishy foe seems an unlikely candidate for sloth carnage - primarily, it's an insect eater, and hunts by leaping out of the water and picking its prey off of overhead branches. Adults can grow to be two feet in length, however, and some pretty unexpected artefacts have been uncovered from the guts of individual specimens - including two baby sloths in one instance. As Attenborough observes, "to hunt one sloth might be seen as a freak occurrence. To hunt two is the pattern of a killer." Sounds convincing enough, only the visuals used to accompany this sequence somewhat undercut the menace with their borderline comical shoddiness; footage of an arowana leaping is juxtaposed with that of a sloth lowering itself, and it is a stretch to envision any kind of connection between the two.
  
• Piranha: Another fishy foe, and one whose fearsome reputation certainly precedes it - although Attenborough implies that this reputation may be at least partially exaggerated. Nevertheless, this is our first lead in which we have actual physical evidence to go on, and not just speculation. The sloth's skeleton is covered in tiny indentations resembling the bite marks of piranhas, indicating that the fish at least had a hand in picking clean the sloth's carcass. Contra the barrage of popular myths surrounding the piranha's voracious killing habits, Attenborough considers it unlikely that a school of piranhas would attack a healthy sloth - and besides, there are signs of greater bite marks in the sloth's skeleton still, suggesting that it was mauled by a larger predator before the fish got to it. Our search continues.
  
• Caiman: The jaws on these crocodilians are certainly large and impressive, and could potentially have poached a passing sloth - however, the caiman's blunt and rounded teeth are inconsistent with the bite marks on our sloth's skeleton.
  
• Bull Shark: Sharks have been found in the Amazon river, with the bull shark in particular being detected as far as 3,000 miles along. It specialises in shallow water attacks and, Attenborough tells us, is responsible for a higher number of human fatalities than either the great white or the tiger shark. Attenborough dangles this alluring theory only to abruptly pull the rug from under us; the odds of a sloth and shark encountering one another in the Amazon, he assures us, are so miniscule as to effectively render this entire trail of thought moot. Better stick to less laboured scenarios.
  

At this point, Attenborough admits that we have a problem. We've eliminated all potential suspects, so clearly something went awry with our detective work. Our only recourse now would be to retrace our steps and to consider where we might perhaps have underestimated any of our past candidates.

It turns out that our investigation made not just one, but two missteps. The first of these was in ruling out the possibility of a canopy ambush on the grounds that the sloth had no broken bones...for if it landed in the water it might not have broken any. The second was in automatically eliminating all land-dwelling predators upon learning that the sloth was killed during the wet season. In an environment that spends a significant portion of the year covered in flood, it shouldn't surprise us that land predators, much like the sloth, aren't perturbed by a little water. We had, previously, skimmed over at least one suspect that could handle all three domains - the jaguar is both an excellent swimmer and climber. And those large bite marks on the sloth's skeleton are indeed consistent with a jaguar attack.

Whereas "African Assassin" used the classic whodunnit device of the betrayal, with the killer being someone whom we were, up until the end, led to believe we could trust, "Amazon Assassin" plants its own twist in that of the double bluff - Attenborough had explicitly advertised the jaguar as our most probable candidate, and perhaps we are reflexively inclined to direct our suspicions elsewhere upon hearing those words. After all, the familiar pattern of the whodunnit dictates that prime suspects are ordinarily red herrings. The real clue, however, is in how easily Attenborough allows himself to become sidetracked in reviewing our supposed prime suspect. This is a deliberate tactic designed to misdirect the viewer into assuming that the killer must be more aquatically-inclined. Pay close attention, and you may pick up on a loose thread that Attenborough seems initially content to leave dangling. We are told that the jaguar is a "fickle villain" and that so long as there are ample deer about it will generally ignore sloths, although a pregnant female may deviate in order to supplement her diet. The implicit suggestion, which Attenborough does not at first pursue, is that there may also be periods where the deer population dips, in which case the sloth might find itself a greater target. This is finally addressed at the episode's climax - during the wet season, when the forest becomes flooded, the deer will move on to dryer terrain, but the jaguar may remain and sustain itself in their absence by catching fish, or by venturing into the canopy and taking on arboreal prey...which is how our sloth and its killer would have encountered one another.

The evidence points to the jaguar having dealt the fatal blows, but not actually having eaten the sloth. So what happened exactly? Attenborough speculates that the jaguar would have attacked and mauled the sloth in the treetops - yet while the jaguar can cope with heightened hunting, it isn't as specialised at it as bringing down prey on land, and will inevitability knock some of its would-be meals into the waters below. In which case, to the piranhas the spoils.

With that, we can close the book on our mysterious sloth killing. Attenborough suggests that this might be seen as a "rainforest conspiracy", with a whole multitude of factors combining to engineer the sloth's destruction - the real message being that life in the Amazon (or any natural environment) is complicated, and that animal lives will intersect and interdepend in surprising ways. He concludes by anticipating what new insights into animal behaviour we might gain from the increasing sophistications of forensic science.

Finally, to answer a question I posed in my coverage of "Uninvited Guests", does "Amazon Assassin" have it licked in the quirkiness arena? Honestly, I'm not sure. As offbeat as the wildlife whodunnit's approach is, "Uninvited Guests" has an understated warmth to its weirdness, and I'm inclined to give that the edge. But now that I've touched on it, that "Be An Animal" installment was also seriously odd, and might be an even worthier contender still. That episode currently survives in little bits and pieces on BBC Earth's official YouTube channel (again, beware if you don't want to have "African Assassin" indirectly spoiled for you), but until I can find it in its entirety, I'm not going to make a judgement. Let the jury stay out another day.

Logo Case Study: MTV Films (aka No One Can Hear You Scream)

The MTV Films logo is another that I don't think enjoys half the notoriety it deserves among aficionados of logo-induced terror. I surely can't be the only person whose experience of seeing Beavis and Butt-Head Do America during its theatrical run was somewhat marred by the horror of having a giant astronaut come lurching toward me from the great black abyss right beforehand. I mean, within the proper context, astronauts can be incredibly unsettling, no? There is an element of the uncanny in them - human-shaped, and yet their human features are obscured. You can't see who or what is buried beneath all of that aluminised Mylar. All I know is that this particular 'naut seems to be thirsting for my blood the instant it sets its sights on me - as it drifts serenely on by, already you can see its fingers stirring in your direction. Just when you think it's safely out of range, it moves in very suddenly for the kill. Even this uncomfortably close and personal, when you're forced to gaze directly into this aggressor's non-existent face, still no human characteristics reveal themselves. You see only what's reflected back at you in that monstrous fishbowl - namely, the MTV logo, and what appears to be the astronaut's torso and assorted appendages dangling about beneath them. Except, the way it's positioned, it almost looks as though that could be your torso and appendages spread out before you. Meaning that you, too, are an uncanny space demon floating across the vast unknown? That the two of you have been fused into one horrifying entity? The backwards MTV logo certainly helps fuel the impression that something is desperately askew in the far-out reaches of space.

MTV Productions begot MTV Films in 1996, as the Gen-X baiting media team grew increasingly ambitious about giving their established properties the big screen treatment. Their initial release, Joe's Apartment (a feature length expansion of a short by John Payson), went with a more subdued logo directly acknowledging the company's television origins (in which the MTV "M" was shown filled with TV static, while a chorus of cockroaches screamed on in approval), but by Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (the film that helped shore up their critical and commercial credibility), they'd decided to embrace the full power of the theatrical setting by adopting something of greater visual intensity. The astronaut itself was a familiar image among MTV viewership, it being a nod to the "One Small Step" ident that had featured on the channel at the time of its launch in 1981. Only whereas that ident was colourful and invigorating, mildly subversive in its playful appropriation of an iconic moment in human history while championing space exploration as the heralding of what tremendous possibilities could still lie ahead, the MTV Films logo plunges the viewer directly into the cold, dark horrors of outer space - a formidable vacuum of insurmountable otherness in which even your fellow Earthlings seem to have shed their familiarity. Of course, depending on which MTV production you're watching, the logo might inevitably lose some of its impact if our spaceman attacks to the sounds of "I Want Candy" by Bow Wow Wow. It's at its most effective when viewed in its silent form - or, as in the case of Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, with muted, ominous audio - reminding us of that stark reality suggested in the promotional tagline to that science fiction slasher that everybody knows. Whatever terrors are waiting to greet us out in the atmosphere, whether human or otherwise, are going to strike without making a sound.

MTV continued the astronaut theme into its succeeding logo, which first appeared in 2005, and did little to quell the feelings of astrophobia brought about by its predecessor. Instead of contending with just one astronaut, we now found ourselves face to face with an entire auditorium of the fishbowl-headed devils as they communed for a theatrical experience of their own, complete with packets of zero-gravity popcorn. At least this time, rather than having the astronaut close in us, we begin with an intense close-up and then zoom out, even if it's all to reveal just how frighteningly outnumbered we are. Once again, emphasis is given to what's reflected in their visors and, on this occasion, it's something comforting and familiar - good old planet Earth - but viewed from a startling distance, affirming that we are now out there among the otherness looking in. Since the astronauts are watching Earth, is the implication that our terrestrial lives are all a great spectacle to them? Or are they slowly but surely drawing their plans against us? (Again, you can't be totally certain what's actually lurking inside those suits.)

By 2010, MTV had opted to tone down the uncanniness and re-emphasise the funkier side of astronauts - their next MTV Films logo was a straight-up remake of the classic (and entirely non-threatening) "One Small Step" ident. Then in 2013 they experimented with ditching the astronauts altogether, with a logo instead comprising a montage of various close-up shots of the human eye (possibly to compensate for its conspicuous absence from their logo history up until now). But as we all know, what's old is new, and with that in mind, we should've guessed that, sooner or later, the original MTV Films astronaut would come creeping back to terrorise us in one form or another. As of 2019, beginning with the VOD release Eli, the cycle of interstellar dread has been kick-started for a whole new generation.

A very happy 40th anniversary to you, MTV.

Levi's '95: Spaceman (aka Park In It, Man)

 

I've spoken a bit in the past about Levi's ads and their established history of doubling as covert marketing tools for chart hits in the making. So let's look at the most notorious example - that time at the dawn of 1996 when Bartle Bogle Hegarty tricked the pop-partial public into buying a single they appeared to find overwhelmingly repugnant. Welcome to the strange and infuriating world of "Spaceman" and Babylon Zoo.

So great is the song's notoriety that the anecdote has become something of a cliche - you caught the ad in late 1995 and dug the accompanying track with its kitschy blend of sci-fi infused electronica and Chipmunkese. At the very least, it was an off-centre enough combination that you just had to know more. When the single was released the following January, you raced out and bought it, raced back home and shoved it into your CD tray. You felt the adrenalin surging as the intro started up, knowing you were about to be transported to somewhere as euphoric and other-worldly as that Levi's ad had promised. You were, however, in for a heck of a come-down when, a mere 30 seconds into the track, the spacey synths and pitched up alien vocals came to an abrupt halt and were replaced by this lifeless, unlikeable dirge with some hack griping about the pungent smells consummating his home. Was this a pressing error, or just a sick joke? Where was the real track? Apparently this was it - said hack did eventually move on to regurgitating the track's familiar hook, but in such a leaden, joyless fashion as to appear to have arisen from a deliberately churlish cover of the song you were actually expecting to hear. You were so enraged that you threw the CD in the trash and swore off buying any more Levi's jeans for life - until that delightful Flat Eric character showed up three years down the line, and suddenly all was forgiven. (Actually, I have no data on how effective the ad was in its intended purpose of shifting jeans, but I am deeply conscious of the fact that this wasn't too far off the bleak cry of desperation that was Kevin the moribund hamster, so its powers were potentially more limited on that front.)

This story is not exactly my own Babylon Zoo story, although there is a degree of overlap. At the time, I don't recall ever seeing the ad in question and I did not buy the single - in part because I was just shy of 11 years old and I didn't get into buying singles until much closer to 12 (my conscious is clean with regard to this track occupying the top spot in the UK charts; I sure wish I could say the same about R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly"). I was, however, exposed to the song a lot via radio play, and the first time I heard it I remember being bemused by the intro and the way it reminded me of the singing mice from the recent movie Babe, if they'd become slightly weird and insomnic from one too many late night X-Files marathons. So bemused that I was definitely bummed when the song took its abrupt turn into the morose. The lyrics are sufficiently weird, but there's a kind of weighty humorlessness to the weirdness; a smidgen of the camp wit that enabled contemporary band Space to score a few hits with the sinister and eerie would certainly not have gone amiss here. All the same, I will admit that, sharing the popular dislike of the complete disconnect between the opening and the song itself, I cannot bring myself to wholeheartedly dislike "Spaceman". Perhaps some of that intrigue I felt upon first hearing the introduction has stayed with me, and it's enough to carry me through the rest of the track. Perhaps the beguiling evil that is nostalgia has re-coloured it; it might not take me anywhere particularly otherworldly, but it is, like magic, able to transport me back to that very specific point in my preadolescence, and that's just as valuable. Or perhaps there is a moment where that barrier between the churlishly incomprehensible and the freakishly unsettling is momentarily punctured and I feel like I'm getting a glimpse into this vaguely more dynamic track buried beneath its surface. More on that in due course. (Oh, and for the purposes of this piece I looked up the lyrics to "Spaceman" for the very first time and have noted that it's "Intergalactic Christ". I've been hearing it as "Intergalactic crime" for all these years. Whoopsie.)

The success of "Spaceman" is certainly nothing to be sneezed at. 383,000 copies were sold in its first week of release, making it the fastest-selling debut single in UK history. It was also a smash hit in numerous other countries, topping the charts in France, Germany and Denmark, among others. Zoo apologists like to point out that, despite the popular narrative that everyone went off the song the instant they'd heard it in its entirety, it spent a whopping five weeks at the UK number 1 spot. And true, I'm not sure what to make of that. Either people didn't hate it quite as much as all that back in early 96, they REALLY loved the track's opening, in spite of what it became, or they bought it because at the time everyone was buying it and they didn't want to be left out of a phenomenon. Whatever the reason, the Zoo sensation was not to last. As the "Spaceman" dust settled, it became increasingly apparent that the band were headed for the dreaded "one hit wonder" tag. Their follow-up single, "The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes", was a comparative flop, reaching no. 32 on the UK singles charts, while their album, also called "The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes", peaked at a respectable no. 6 position but rapidly lost momentum. Band frontman Jas Mann had, meanwhile, gained a reputation for having let the fleeting taste of success go directly to his head, prompting the music press to take a thoroughly unsympathetic view of the band's descent into oblivion - and if the quotes attributed to Mann in this article are accurate then I have to agree that that scorn and ridicule was very richly deserved. Babylon Zoo returned with a second album, King Kong Groover, in 1999, and a single "All The Money's Gone", a more conventional Britpop track, arriving a couple of years after the Britpop scene had already choked to death on the self-indulgence of Oasis (it would be wrong to imply that Mann was the only musician at the time who had an ego that could eat a whale). Neither made much of an impression. Mann's last real turn in the limelight was in an episode of faux current affairs show Brass Eye in 1997, where his apparent reluctance to dismiss the suggestion that he possessed more genes than your average human did little to reverse his fortunes.

The grand irony is that, for all of Mann's confidence in the lyrical and musical genius he'd exhibited in "Spaceman", the part of the song that everybody responded to - the Chipmunkese opening - had nothing to do with him and was rather the innovation of DJ Arthur Baker, who'd added it in while remixing the track. The original demo had instead begun with Mann hissing, "I killed your brother! I killed your sister! I killed your mother!" over and over, and obviously that had to go before the thing was going to receive mainstream radio play. Mann's subsequent cry of, "I killed you all! I killed you all! I killed you all!" still shows up in the released single's interlude, however. And it's here that I'll admit that the song achieves something slightly different for me. In that anguished, only semi-intelligible outburst "Spaceman" becomes momentarily unsettling, as if the veneer is peeling and a darker subliminal message nestled at the track's core is being tauntingly revealed. That message is but another example of the meaningless babble that characterises Mann's lyrics, but the animated anguish with which Mann howls out his inexplicable confession is at odds enough with the dreary nature of the song around it as to seem really disconcerting. It's a window into the "Spaceman" that could have been had the song trusted its own latent creep factor.

That's the lowdown on the song, anyway. But what of the ad itself? How does it hold up on its own merits? The 60 second spot, named "Planet" and directed by Vaughan Arnell and Anthea Benton, held significance other than giving a deceptive jump start to a baffling and much-derided grunge single. After the long line of ads focussing on male denim devotees, beginning with Nick Kamen's iconic laundrette trip in 1985, "Planet" was the first ad to feature a female lead (Russian model Kristina Semenovskaia), with the intention of promoting a new line of 501 jeans aimed at women. It's another premise centred around Levi's being a beacon of non-conformity amid life's daily mundaneness, the twist being that the "mundane", in scenario, is a futuristic suburbia, where our heroine arrives back home, having borrowed her father's space vehicle, and dazzles her slack-jawed neighbours with her denim affinity. It is a future that, while visually strange, exudes a convincing banality, with the emphasis on domestic gadgetry and vapid consumerism. The mid-90s computer effects will obviously look fairly primitive to modern eyes, but in a manner that enhances the retro-futuristic kitsch of the piece - it feels like a glimpse not merely in an alternate timeline where "Spaceman" morphed into a genuinely exciting slice of electronic pop, but a vision of the future that nowadays seems charmingly quaint. And there's just enough of the uncanny in there to make the ad sufficiently unsettling - for example, what is up with those purple contacts in all of our extraterrestrial suburbanites' peepers? Is this BBH's idea of space age fashion, or is the implication that the subjects aren't quite human and might in fact be an alien race or a colony of cyborgs?

What would fast become a cliche was this trend for closing out ads depicting futuristic scenarios with a shot of the Earth hanging hauntingly in the distance, the gob-smacking twist being that we were on some other planet all along. Orange Mobile did something very similar in a 1998 ad, in which they made some reasonably prescient predictions about the impact technology would have on our upcoming communicative habits (many of them no-brainers, at least one downright depressing to me). It's an image that carries the sensation of awe and trepidation at finding ourselves out in the vast unknown, coupled with the thrill and bittersweetness at the thought of having transcended our Earthly limitations, even if all we did was to go and replicate all of our Earthly consumerist tendencies elsewhere within the solar system. I guess that with the new millennium approaching this kind of lyrical hypothesising about what the future might hold seemed genuinely provocative to people. Now, we've seen more than a fifth of what the 21st century has to offer, and are possibly a mite too jaded to be looking to the stars for consolation - modern communications technology mostly has us going at one another's throats all day, and space just became a dick-measuring instrument for insufferable billionaires. #NotMyIntergalaticChrist

Gerry (aka Passion In The Desert)

Gus Van Sant has had quite the chequered career. One of the most prominent figures in the emerging queer cinema movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Portland-based director got his start with such singular independent fare as Mala Noche (1986), Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and My Own Private Idaho (1991). His initial attempt to play around with an expanded budget went over poorly, with the ill-fated adaptation of Tom Robbins' cult novel Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (1993), but he rebounded in 1995 with To Die For, a blackly comic media satire starring Nicole Kidman. Having achieved real breakthrough success with the Academy Award-winning Good Will Hunting in 1997, still his most popular and well-known film to date, Van Sant followed things up with what many would deem to be his all-time career low, a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which flopped both critically and commercially and has lingered in the discourse purely as its yardstick for an exercise in confounding pointlessness (although if you ask me there's a whole spate of recent Disney pictures that give it a run for its money). Now, Psycho '98 is one of those films that I probably could say a whole lot more about at a later date, given my deep reverence for the original, and for Anthony Perkins' Norman, but I am conscious that it's been many years since I saw it and my enthusiasm is not such that I can see myself revisiting it any time soon - and besides, I suspect that my observations would ultimately boil down to the most predictable criticisms imaginable (William H Macy does a reasonable job, Viggo Mortensen and Julianne Moore are both pretty bland, though arguably no more so than John Gavin and Vera Miles...but holy shit is Vince Vaughn woefully miscast as Norman). Van Sant's great transgression, of course, was less in making an ill-received picture than in taking a wide, salivary bite out of one of Hollywood's most sacred cows in the process, and in an effort to clear the soured air his next step was the moderate hit Finding Forrester (2000). Nevertheless, the mainstream arena seemed to have already lost much of its lustre for Van Sant, as the new millennium saw him going in search of his indie roots with a string of aggressively anti-Hollywood projects that would be come to be affectionately known as his "Death Trilogy" - Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003) and Last Days (2005). A threesome of films that, as their collective term implies, all have human mortality on their minds, but also lengthy silences, unhurried pacing and narratives stripped down to their most unrelentingly austere cores.

Gerry in particular is as brutally barebones a cinematic yarn as they come, a Man versus Nature tale comprised of very little other than a pair of human figures (Matt Damon and Casey Affleck) traversing a seemingly unending landscape, searching for a route back toward a civilisation that remains wildly elusive. The characters themselves remain as blank and unchartered as their surroundings - over the course of the picture, we learn few of the finer details regarding who they are and what kind of lives they've inadvertently walked in from - which is not to say that either character is any more interesting or enigmatic for it. Hollywood convention has conditioned us to expect some kind of grand revelation in the midst of crisis, in which heroes come to understand themselves better and how to navigate through some broader personal dilemma - a convention roundly mocked in one of the film's more prominent contemporaries, Spike Jonze's Adaptation. (2002) - but none occurs here. We don't even learn their names, really - the characters refer to one another by the common moniker "Gerry", but then they seem to refer to just about everything as "Gerry". It is a catch-all term in slang that might well have been concocted exclusively between them. Gerry is a picture that runs on its own terrifying emptiness. The only obviously Hollywood-friendly aspect of the picture is in the presence of Damon, who had accumulated significant star power in the years between Good Will Hunting and Gerry (Affleck, who had previously worked with Van Sant in To Die For, was still a relatively minor name at this point).

Gerry was first screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002, but would not receive a theatrical distribution until the following year. Overall, reception was less enthusiastic than it was for succeeding "Death" installment Elephant, a fictionalised interpretation of the 1999 Columbine high school massacre that netted Van Sant the Palme d'Or at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. Elephant stood out, in part, for having topicality on its side - it had the advantage of appearing to be about something, whereas Gerry (despite also taking inspiration from a recent real-life killing, albeit loosely) appeared to be, quite literally, about nothing. The characters disappear into a vacuum between two seemingly arbitrary narrative poles and the viewer gets the experience of disappearing along with them. Another exercise in confounding pointlessness, then, like Van Sant's earlier misadventure in resurrecting the timid taxidermist? Or does Gerry tease us with the slightest possibility of a hidden depth, if we're willing to gaze long enough into its arid abyss? Critics have certainly attempted. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw proposes that the film might be perceived as a commentary on the demise of the American dream - "there's something parodically American in their horror of the vast and implacable emptiness of an uncivilised landscape which in the 21st century is no longer fertile with opportunity but merely a concealed abyss of fruitless inconvenience and danger." Donato Totaro of online film journal Offscreen interprets the film as a "a studied play on cinematic seeing and hearing, more accurately how the camera, character, and spectator ‘see and hear’ differently. I don’t think the location choice of the desert, land of illusion and mirage, was a coincidence." Speculation has been made over Van Sant's probable influences, including Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot (a play where, in the words of contemporary critic Vivian Mercer, nothing happens, twice) and Hungarian film-maker Bela Tarr, from whom Van Sant borrows the technique of almost unbearably stretched out single takes.

It goes without saying that Gerry is not to all tastes. You can probably tell from reading the plot outline whether or not it's for you. Personally, I have long championed it as Van Sant's masterpiece. This could indeed be a film about absolutely nothing. But I would argue that "nothing" does not automatically equate to pointlessness in the vein of Psycho '98. Oblivion is one heck of an enthralling subject, after all.

Gerry opens with our protagonists driving to a location vaguely defined as the "Wilderness Trail", with the half-hearted intention of reaching the even more vaguely defined "thing", a lacklustre term that seems designed to discourage the viewer from forming even the slightest whisker of narrative curiosity as to what it might be. Geoff King, who brings up the film in his book American Independent Cinema, describes the opening sequence as "deliberately arbitrary and unconvincing" (p. 147), by which I presume he's referring to the transparency that neither Gerry has very much interest in finding "the thing" in the first place. The film does not devote too much time in trying to convince its audience that it's headed for anything particularly solid or defined. Totaro suggests that the "thing" might be seen as a nod to the mainstream Hollywood conventions the film so determinedly avoids: "The characters/film ‘strays’ from the sea of Hollywood conformity (of which Van Sant was himself trapped with Good Will Hunting (1997) and Finding Forrester [2000]) and becomes ‘lost’ in an oasis of personal, visionary cinema." In other words, the "thing" signifies the plot we might have expected to develop in a more conventional picture; the protagonists' total indifference is both a teasing concession to that expectation and a mistrustful dismissal of the value of narrative convention - the film goes through the motions at the point where it feels obligated to develop some kind of perfunctory narrative trigger. As Affleck's character proclaims, "Fuck the thing!" Does anybody care about the thing, really?

The more intriguing narrative puzzle occurs at film's climax, when Affleck's Gerry informs Damon's Gerry that "I'm leaving", whereupon Damon's Gerry proceeds to strangle him, a seemingly unmotivated action, and go the rest of the journey alone. As it turns out, he does not have far to travel. No sooner has he abandoned Affleck's freshly-strangled corpse than do the miniature shapes of distant vehicles appear on the horizon, and Damon realises that he is within reach of an adjacent road. Damon makes his long-awaited reconnection with civilisation by hitching a ride with a parent and child. No words are exchanged between them. The characters sit in an uncomfortable silence, barely even acknowledging each other. The closest we get to any interaction between Damon and his saviours is in the voyeuristic glimpse the driver sneaks at him in his rear view mirror, shortly before the picture fades to blue. The final word, appropriately, goes to the landscape itself; we get another extended shot of the desert from the perspective of the car window. Its presence continues to dominate and haunt the surviving Gerry, and he regards it with such a manner suggesting that it is now the world with which he is better able to identify.

The film's baffling final outcome - the inexplicable slaughter of one Gerry by the other - was later echoed in Elephant, where one of the two shooters abruptly turns his gun on his own partner (with whom he had prior shared an intimate kiss) while their massacre is still underway. Unlike Elephant, which makes the bold and unsettling move of ending before the massacre does, Gerry bows out on a relatively conclusive note, with the restoration of one of its two protagonists to the world from which they diverged. The film has a cyclic structure, opening with the two main characters on the road and closing with Damon's character riding along inside a vehicle once again. Noteworthy is that Damon is the passenger in both cases - although he is clearly the more dominant and emotionally composed of the two Gerrys throughout the crisis, he is not, at the beginning or end, behind the wheel and in charge of where he is headed. Affleck, meanwhile, visibly the younger of the two Gerrys, emerges as the more desperate and misfortune-prone of the two - if the ending comes in any way as a shock to us, it is certainly no surprise that this particular Gerry would be the one dispatching this particular Gerry. It is also Affleck with whom the viewer is more likely to sympathise; his vulnerability and barely-concealed despair in the face of endless uncertainty seems more relatable than Damon's stoicism. Affleck's vulnerability is further enforced during a monologue from early in the picture, the most substantial portion of dialogue we experience from either character, and the only real illumination we get into the world our world have left behind. Only even then, it is a fantasy life that Affleck has experienced via a video simulation - he mentions to Damon that he has "conquered Thebes" and describes how, due to his failure to appease Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest ("she got really pissed off, she made my fields infertile"), his empire slowly crumbled. It is not explicitly acknowledged, but he is talking about his fortunes in playing the video game Civilization. The specifics of Affleck's dialogue tend not to elicit much curiosity from commentators - it has no bearing on the story and seems almost absurdly detached from the reality of their situation. Nevertheless, I find it interesting that Affleck is describing the process through which human conquest is thwarted by the forces of nature, and the various individual threads that, when pulled, cause society to collapse completely. The fragile barrier that stands between civilisation and barbarity is echoed in the startling ease with which he and Damon take a few too many steps off the beaten track and wind up right in the belly of oblivion, and is especially salient if we interpret Gerry as a parable where Nature unleashes a retribution on Man, albeit with an eerie passivity. When Affleck insists that he had, technically, conquered Thebes before his fall, he comes off as ridiculous, particularly for as little and overwhelmed as he is out here in the world - we know that he has no more conquered Thebes than he was ever in control of his own destiny, despite his positioning in the driver seat in the opening sequence. Furthermore, his presentation of this desultory anecdote  suggests a tendency, however casually, to blur fantasy and reality, something that becomes genuinely threatening in later on when, in his dazed and dehydrated state, he struggles to distinguish between his physical surroundings and mirages.

The film's applicability to the "Death" trilogy refers to the ultimate outcome of the characters' journey, but also the geographical location, the film being partially shot in California's Death Valley. The location of the desert is never specified, in narrative terms - it is simply a vast, generic desert that seems to expand ever onward - but what the viewer actually sees is Damon and Affleck maundering across a variety of terrains, and not exclusively American. Van Sant and his crew had initially travelled to Argentina with the intention of filming the entire picture, but struggled with the local climate and wound up relocating parts of the production to Utah and California. The floating location may have made things easier on the production, but it also plays to the film's advantage. The desert's composite nature means that it has no fixed form or character, feeling less like a site to be crossed over than a rolling nightmare that morphs and expands with every step the heroes take, constantly deceiving them and spitting them out at another point entirely. The Bela Tarr influence is evident in the manner in which the film, at times, seems to play like the most low-key of horror stories, with the terror arising from the sheer monotony with which the characters are obligated to endure the apparently interminable (I had similar thoughts about The Turin Horse). In a sequence that seems plucked directly from more conventional horror cinema, a third Gerry momentarily appears on the horizon and heads in the protagonists' direction, a hazy, indistinct figure who is so out of focus as to not appear fully human, and whom the two "original" Gerrys do not seem to notice. In a dislocating twist, that hazy third Gerry transpires to be the "real" Damon, while the Damon with whom Affleck has just been conversing - living out another variation on his assertion of having conquered Thebes, in which he claims to have found water and figured out the location of their vehicle - has completely disappeared. It is here that Van Sant most obviously pits the subjective against the objective to create a sense of unravelling reality, and the extent to which the characters' already vaguely-defined identities are beginning to merge with their surroundings; the hazily-defined figure of the perpetually wandering Gerry, now an imprint on the landscape, becomes an approaching threat, a wraith lurching toward the ostensibly triumphant Affleck to commandeer the naarative trajectory and nullify his claims of heroism.

The most plausible explanation for the climactic murder is that Damon kills Affleck at Affleck's request - it is an assisted suicide carried out on the mutual understanding that Affleck is, whether physically or mentally, incapable of continuing the journey. The killing is prompted not merely by Affleck's cryptic final statement, but by his reaching out and touching the initially unresponsive Damon, an imploration that he enables him to make good on his assertion that his role in this futile non-narrative be ended then and there. Has his body already started to succumb to death, hence his insistence that he is "leaving", or is he (more likely) submitting his formal surrender - not merely to the elements, but to the narrative inertia? Perhaps it is the film's equivalent of one of the most haunting exchanges in Waiting For Godot, when Estragon insists that, "I can't go on like this", only in place of Vladimir's deeply foreboding response ("That's what you think"),  Damon answers his companion's plea with a silent humaneness that paradoxically necessitates his destruction.

If Damon's Gerry kills Affleck as an act of compassion, then is this ultimately rendered meaningless by the revelation that the characters were, apparently, only ten minutes or so away from salvation?  In this regard, the outcome bears ostensible resemblance to the ham-fistedly bleak conclusion of Frank Darabont's 2007 film The Mist - only whereas with that film the ending felt like a particularly harsh and mean-spirited joke at the characters' expense, Gerry doesn't offer the same sense of overwrought tragedy (or tragicomedy?). The ending does not seem designed to evoke a response of "If only..." Rather, one gets the impression that it is (somehow) through the destruction of his close companion that Damon himself is able to cross back into the civilised world. It is as if the elimination of Affleck has altered the very course of what lies head. Perhaps Affleck understands that some kind of narrative climax is necessary in order to progress to a conclusion, and he offers up his life in order to release them both from their entrapment. Circling back to the moment of tender intimacy shared by the young mass murderers of Elephant shortly before their killing spree, it is tempting to interpret the act of strangulation as itself an allusion to sexual intimacy. As Damon carries out the deed, Affleck raises his arms and grips Damon's back - a sign of resistance, if only reflexively? Or is he attempting to hold his companion in a final, loving embrace?The Gerrys have always been bound to one another throughout in terms of their destiny and common identity, but this is the first time we have seen them physically converge.

Multiple critics have picked up on the possibility that the Gerrys might in fact be two halves of a single entity. Bradshaw writes that, "it's tempting to think each is a hallucination the other is having, staring into a terrifying, existential mirror." Totaro compares the outcome to the Edgar Allan Poe story "William Wilson", in which a man murders his own doppelganger, and to David Lynch's 1997 film Lost Highway, observing that, "we start the film with the psychic split already having occurred; and only at the end is the psychic split healed, when the double is ‘killed’ and the character’s single identity restored." Something similar occurs at the end of the aforementioned Adaptation., in which Nicolas Cage plays a pair of identical twin "brothers", Charlie and Donald, the latter of whom is likely nothing more than a grotesque mirror image of the former (both are screenwriters, yet Donald indulges in everything that Charlie considers obnoxious and undesirable about their craft). Donald perishes during the film's climactic sequence while Charlie survives, and it is through Donald's destruction that he finds both the catharsis and the incentive he needs to navigate through his writer's block and finish the picture (both the one he is writing and the one the audience is watching). Charlie prospers by simultaneously conquering and embracing his demon, in the form of Donald; it is through the accommodation and mastery of his shadow self that he figures out how to thrive in the world. In Gerry, Damon's elimination of Affleck is succeeded by his own salvation (ostensibly, anyway), for Damon, like Charlie, discovers that he is now able to progress to something resembling an ending. But whereas Charlie appears to have successfully healed the gap between the two warring halves of his psyche, Damon is forced to leave Affleck's body out in the desert; the Damon we see riding the car at the end has not been fully restored but is instead represents one half of a former whole. We are reminded of the warning at the end of Poe's story: "from now on you are also dead - dead to the World, dead to Heaven, dead to Hope." So heavily bound is one Gerry's identity to the other that Damon's supposed survival has, in practice, amounted to his own destruction. Think back to poor Norman and to the war with Mother that he was always fated to lose.

The final image of Adaptation. is an optimistic, if somewhat troubling one. A sequence of time lapse photography shows a box of flowers thriving amid a bustling cityscape. The petals of the flowers open and close to the rhythms of day and night as a constant stream of traffic rushes past. Perhaps Jonze is being deliberately evocative of Koyaanisqatsi, but in a manner which suggests the ultimate prevailing of the natural amid the technological, much as Charlie learns to prosper in a world that seems overwhelmingly stacked against his personal and professional ambitions. The ending's sinister underside is conveyed in the tell-tale accompanying track, "Happy Together" by The Turtles, which Donald had previously planned to insert into his screenplay, a messy quagmire of Hollywood cliches about a character with (what else?) a split personality. It clues us in that the harmony is an uneasy one, and that the co-existence may eventually give way to reckoning. Compare it to the ending of Gerry, which also juxtaposes the natural with the technological, with the vehicle that carries Damon and these two strangers running alongside the desert that continues to dominate the picture until the very last frame. The aridness of the desert contrasts with the vitality of the flowers of Adaptation., in which the natural world signifies survival, an ability to thrive and move forward with which the neurotic human world has overwhelmingly lost touch. In Gerry, the natural world, for all of its awe-inspiring grandeur, is less a source of comfort and inspiration to its human cast than it is a frightening reminder of the omnipresence and inevitability of death. At one point, early on in their adventure, Damon speculates that, "Everything's going to lead to the thing, everything's going to lead to the same place", which makes me wonder if this mysterious "thing" and the desert really aren't just two sides of the same coin. The Gerrys amble along, in no particular hurry to reach their fated destination, and happen upon it far sooner than they'd anticipated.

Totaro proposes that Affleck's Gerry is the "mirage", hence why it is Damon who ultimately emerges, yet if I was going to advocate that only one of the two Gerrys is physically real, I'd be more inclined to take the the reverse position - that Affleck represents the corporeal half of Gerry, the half of him that lies motionless in the desert at the end, whereas Damon signifies Gerry's anima, represented throughout as an external character (and potentially even splitting into two figures at one point, as Affleck's grip on reality begins to fragment). Both of them cross through the Valley of Death, until Affleck finally succumbs, whereupon the road reappears and Damon finds himself headed for a new body or two with which to align himself. It represents a renewal of the cycle - a reincarnation, if you will. The final scene within the vehicle interior presents something of an enigma, for Van Sant omits what would be a crucial scene in a more conventional narrative - the rescue itself, coupled with some exposition on the identity of his rescuers. Instead, we jump abruptly to find Damon travelling with these two unknowns, leaving some uncertainty as to what, precisely, is going on. Has Damon really been rescued, or is this merely another mirage? It strikes me as significant that the child seated in the back of the vehicle with Damon (but with his gaze turned firmly away from him) looks like a younger version of himself; he seems as if he could pass for Damon's own son over the driver we would presume to be his actual father. This reinforces our sense of a rebirthing, that we are once again at the beginning of a cycle. Nevertheless, the suggestion of restoration is undercut by the obvious unease of the final arrangement - Damon's newly-acquired mirror image refuses to acknowledge him, as if disturbed by the vision of what he is fated to become, and when he looks toward the actual rear view mirror he is met with the unwelcome gaze of the driver, another supposed controller of destiny who regards this relic of a fallen would-be empire with both fascination and suspicion. Instead, Damon finds greater affinity out there in the desert, for what is important is that all routes eventually lead to it. This is something Damon understands at the end, as he contemplates his ostensible victory over the landscape - sooner or later, he's going to wind up right back there again.