THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT: Jon Ronson On... Pornhub

The Butterfly Effect, Jon Ronson’s latest documentary, is about streaming.  More specifically it’s about Pornhub, and looks at the ways that different people’s lives have been affected by it, in often unexpected ways.

The first episode, deals with the growth of the company from one 16 year old (Fabian Thylmann, a pleasant but unashamed interviewee) scamming pornsites to get them for free to him making them redundant by pilfering their work. Ronson follows up all sorts of tangents in the following episodes, in a manner very similar to his Jon Ronson On… Radio 4 series.

So, we meet an old school porn director in the US describing how Pornhub has affected his livlihood; a porn star agent, who sounds every bit is ruthless and sleazy as you might expect; the porn star who was told to stop tweeting about how unhappy she was because it wasn’t sexy.  There’s the really rather sweet company that makes bespoke porn films (including a clothed woman swatting a fly, and someone who wants to see his stamp collection burnt); a man who found a sex doll who looked exactly like his first love, which he bought and now dresses and shares a bed with it (while his incredibly patient wife sleeps in the spare room); and the darker tales of a pastor who committed suicide after the Ashley Madison leaks (Ashley Madison was owned by PornHub), and children as young as 6 being put on the sex offender register.

There’s a lot to take in, and the series being over 3 hours long it never runs out of steam.  Until I listened to the documentary, I had no idea what a porn hub was, and so finding out that there is such a thing as a YouTube for porn was quite enlightening.  Streaming as an issue is something I’ve written about before on this blog and one of the data analysts from PornHub points out that it is technology that is here to stay and people have to adapt.  That’s true to a degree.

But whilst it might seem pretty much the same, streaming music and films is a separate conversation and has to be treated as such.  As I see it there are two main reasons.  Firstly, YouTube was created primarily to enable users to upload and share their own content, the copyright implications of uploading other peoples’ property didn’t come in until later when it had really taken off.  Pornhub was created to enable users to get porn for free instead of paying for it.  Ethically, it is more like torrenting - whereas Spotify was set up with the intention of reducing piracy, Pornhub was set up to make it easier.

Secondly, it’s porn, so Pornhub can get away with it.  Society has no great love for pornographers and because of the moral grey area that porn lives in, it is easier to dismiss their concerns than it is of your favourite musicians.  The very start of the series has Ronson describing meeting a porn actress to interview for a different story, and seeing the look of utter contempt a man gave her when she walked in.  Fabian Thylmann accepts it’s an absurd situation that porn actors often find it hard to open a bank account and the bank manager is statistically likely to be going home to watch porn on Pornhub that evening.  A girl who was at the college where the pastor who killed himself worked admitted to having had a Pornhub addiction, and also admitted she didn’t know the names or really care about the actors she had seen.  It’s a very different situation to other streamed media, where the stars and creators are idolised.  

However, that isn’t really the point.  The documentary uses Pornhub as a jumping off point for Ronson to do what he does best, which is to interview people with quirky, unusual often surprisingly moving stories to tell.

For instance, my favourite part of the documentary was the bespoke porn company mentioned earlier.  They receive requests - nothing is considered too bizarre, and a lot of it is very bizarre.  The couple who run it have more of a personal relationship with their customers even if they never see or speak to them - the deeply specific nature of the fetishes means that someone is really opening up about something that probably embarrasses them to strangers.  A great deal of time is put into trying to contact the “Stamp Man”, and by a coincidental conversation to a porn actor they manage to make contact.  It turns out he gets off on watching his stamp collection being burnt by the girls (and it is his actual collection - he sends it to them to be used in the films) because he was once really into collecting stamps and his therapist mocked him for it and told him to stop.  This obviously left its mark on him and it’s a remarkably sexless and bittersweet story.  

The series revisits the same company towards the end - one of the requests is for a clothed actor to read out sentences he has prepared to dissuade him from suicide.  They tried to get in touch because they were worried, but he never got back to them.  They were disturbed, and made the video for free in the knowledge he might have just been embarrassed or have already done the deed.

These are the sorts of ripples that Ronson examines after the Pornhub boulder has been tossed in the lake in the first episode, and it’s these unexpected and unpredictable stories that are the most rewarding.  He is very good at putting people at ease by seeming to have a conversation with his interviewees rather than, well, interviewing them.  Even if you have no interest in porn, Pornhub or streaming, if you’re interested in people this is an excellent series.

The Butterfly Effect is available now on Audible and will be released everywhere else in November.

BOOKS/MUSIC: Triptych - The Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible

“The album was written with an almost academic discipline... We sat down and gave ourselves headings and structures, so each song is like an essay." - James Dean Bradfield

“If the Holy Bible was meaningful to you then I wouldn’t recommend spending six months thinking and writing about it” - Daniel Lukes (co-author of ‘Triptych’)

Triptych is a book published earlier this year comprising 3 dissertations on the Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible.  If any album deserves a book like this it is The Holy Bible.  The Manics always invited analysis of their lyrics, but The Holy Bible is the only album that demands it.  Richey Edwards’ words are dense and just listening to the words isn’t enough because it’s too much to take in with the speed of delivery.  

It’s a powerful album, critically acclaimed and compelling. The album’s subject matter takes in prostitution, political extremities, anorexia, the Holocaust, nostalgia, self-mutilation, a yearning for innocence and the morality of the death penalty.  And it mainly manages to get it right - done badly, an album covering these subjects would have been immensely embarrassing (‘Revol’ doesn’t get it right and has always been embarrassing).

I came to the Manics long after Richey’s disappearance - I heard ‘Design For Life’ played alongside contemporary Britpop singles from Blur, Oasis, etc then immersed myself in its parent album.  We had a ritual in my family of going to the library every couple of weeks to rent CDs for 20p a pop and taping the ones we liked.  I saw the The Holy Bible and we played it in the car on the way home.  It was a little bit different - my Dad hated it.  My Mum, who always encouraged getting into different things like The Prodigy and Joy Division, probably wasn’t keen on the music but was reading the lyrics in the passenger seat and said they were very good.  I’ll always remember that first exposure to the confrontational nature of the album for everyone and the way it demanded an immediate response.  It wasn’t, and isn’t, background music.

‘Triptych’ is confirmation of the importance the album holds over people.  Rhian E Jones, in the first essay, compares listening to the Manics now to thinking of embarrassing exes, which I very much relate to.  That said, she goes on to say that in a world where our generation is the first to be poorer than the previous one adolescent angst shouldn’t be confined to adolescence.  Her essay is the most personal, using her own experiences to make sense of the album; it’s also the most straightforward, putting it in a post-Thatcher, pre-Blair context and examining the political obsessions of the day.

Daniel Luke’s chapter is extremely interesting, and in theory a good idea - to read all the books that inspired Richey and Nicky’s lyrics. This includes sections on The Waste Land, Sylvia Plath, Hubert Selby Jr - the Richey Edwards reading list.  The obvious downside to this from his point of view is that it takes a lot longer to read pages and pages of bleakly themed books than it does to listen to 50 minutes of an album. By the end of the chapter, understandably, he seems worn down by the task he has set himself and it peters out, finally beaten by trying to ‘get’ Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition in the incongruous setting of waiting to pick his daughter up from ballet.  

The third essay by Larissa Wodtke which deals with Derrida’s notion of ‘the archive’ I will have to re-read to understand, as I began to feel out of my depth.  That’s not a criticism - it’s rare that reading a book about a rock album makes you feel stupid. I liked the way that instead of cutting off after Richey’s disappearance and ignoring the Manics’ post-Bible work, she examines its effect on their later career.  It ends with her seeing their 20th Anniversary shows for the album, where the book returns to its opening approach of personal experience.

Most bands only get one album in their career where everything they stand for is coalesced into a whole if they’re lucky, and for the Manics’ The Holy Bible was undoubtedly their finest hour.  The first two authors admit to growing out of the Manics, which is something that happened to me - a band that meant a lot just stopped being crucial at some point.  I started by saying it’s a powerful album, and it is, but anyone not in their teens who really related to it I’d actually be vaguely concerned about.  Having said that, the point raised by Jones mentioned above bears repeating - given the current political climate, the insecurities and everyday emotional instability we experience as teenagers are not necessarily things most of us leave behind when we become adults these days.

CBEEBIES: The Dystopian Limbo Of Bing, And Other Theories

I wasn’t planning on doing another Cbeebies post so soon.  But since the last post, where we mentioned Bing only in passing, my wife and friends have put forward their theories about his parentage.

Then a Den Of Geek article last Thursday was solely devoted to the subject.  Obviously this is a hot topic, and it can’t be long before the scandal orientated tabloids will be knocking on Flop’s door, demanding the truth.

But who is Bing?  Bing is a loud and large rabbit, with a penchant for red checked dungarees and being a pain in the hole.  He has several friends of different species, who are roughly the same age and roughly the same size.  Sula, for instance, is an elephant, but is quite happy to play with Bing instead of trampling him underfoot because they take the same size in trousers.

Bing and his friends are analogous to toddlers.  They have parent figures - Bing’s is called Flop.  Flop is the real star of the show as far as parents are concerned, because he manages to solve Bing’s most recent meltdown so calmly - suavely even.  

A usual Bing plot is that Bing is playing with one of his friends (Sula seems to be a regular victim), or maybe just hanging out with Flop; something goes wrong for Bing, whether it’s that he lost at a game, or found out someone is better at doing something than he is, or they’ve not got food he likes in for tea; Flop patiently explains to Bing, in a very calm voice, why he’s behaving like an arse and what he can do to improve; happiness prevails.  The episode alway ends with Flop saying “[episode subject matter] - it’s a Bing thing!”  This means that a lot of seemingly everyday things are actually Bing things, including shadows, ice creams and growing.  Maybe the show is trying to claim everything that exists is Bing’s, step by step.

Flop has extraordinarily good parenting skills, especially with patience like his, and is an excellent role model for young Bing.  The reason why Bing’s parentage is of such curiosity is that Flop is a small orange soft toy about a quarter of the size of his charge.  And what takes this out of the realms of curiosity and into the land of very odd indeed is that every single animal in Bing’s town has a similar parent figure.  

Flop is definitely, in no shape or form, a rabbit (or any other sort of animal).  My longstanding pet theory is that he is, but in the land where Bing is set, children just happen to look like animals until they reach adulthood - when Bing becomes an adult he will overnight turn into something rather like Flop (it’s heartening to see that this exact theory was endorsed by the Den of Geek post).  My wife’s theory is that Bing and all of his friends are in foster care, and that the town is essentially a foster town, with altruistic bean bags taking on animal children from broken homes.

After posting the previous post, which wasn’t even about Bing, several theories from friends came forth on Facebook, including:

“Bing exists in a dystopian limbo in which young animals with learning difficulties are banished to be cared for by pastel-coloured knitted golems.”

“I've always seen Flop and his ilk as social workers or foster carers, but then coco's equivalent appears to be a very busy business 'woman', dumping them on anyone that'll take them, doesn't even say hi or thanks to flop for babysitting. Rude.”

“I've spoke to [my daughter] about it, and she very much thinks that Flop is Bing's dad. “

The Den Of Geek article covers several of the above theories and several others (and the internet at large has even more).  It’s obviously a matter of growing national concern, and it’s only a matter of time before the heavyweight journalists get involved and bring us the truth.  Unless Flop is bribing them to keep his story safe.

However all of this parentage stuff is a bit of a distraction from the main issue I have with the problem which is that Bing is an insanely irritating character.  He has an extremely whiney voice, and almost anything he says is bound to annoy me - but the worst is in the title sequence, where he trips, Flop says “are you alright Bing?” and he replies “yuh-hu-uh!”.  I don’t know why this bothers me as much as it does.  It’s probably the lack of basic vocabulary - I expect more from a cartoon toddler rabbit on the BBC.  But as a character he is also very prone to being selfish and just always has to be the centre of attention - he’s very much a drama queen.  If I owned a rabbit like that, I’d probably try to give him up for adoption to a bean bag creature myself.

In closing, it should be noted that my son cares considerably less about Bing than I do.

Spot The Celebrity Voice - Mark Rylance (yes, RSC trained, Wolf Hall star Mark Rylance) as Flop.  The first celebrity voice I noticed on Cbeebies, it blew my mind how many famous actors were on the channel at first.  These days it seems odd if I don’t recognise any names at all.

TV: Rick and Morty

I love ‘Rick and Morty’. I'm not sure what I love best. It's funny of course. It lays sci-fi concept after concept on each episode so much so it doesn't feel like a 22 minute show. It follows its freewheeling internal logic much like Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python, which is the exact same analogy I used for Cbeebies programmes last week.

‘Rick and Morty’, for the uninitiated, started as a one off spoof of Doc and Marty from Back To The Future. Rick is a scientific genius in the Doctor Who mould (ie, a main character who demonstrates very little actual science but is the figure we depend on for all the interesting and/or weird ideas) ; unlike The Doctor, he’s a hard drinking, foul-mouthed and (most of the time) callous old man.  

Morty, his grandson, is the straight man/fall guy/butt monkey, a stereotype teenager as per any other sitcom but a perfect foil and moral compass to Rick. They go on adventures together, and as time goes on the rest of the family get more involved especially Morty’s sister Summer.  The nature of these adventures are… diverse.  Trying to summarise any of the plots is hard, but they tend to involve one or two sci-fi ideas exaggerated to comic effect - one episode has a ‘Meeseeks’ box that creates aliens that solve a user’s problem and disappear - they start multiplying rapidly and then rebelling when they can’t help Morty’s Dad Jerry lose two strokes off his golf game. Meanwhile Morty tries to prove to Rick he can lead an adventure, murders a giant and nearly gets sexually assaulted by a jellybean (it is at this point, I admit, where Cbeebies comparisons no longer hold up).  There’s usually a hell of a lot packed into a 22 minute episode and whether you enjoy the programme or not you’re unlikely to be bored.

So the long anticipated third series has launched (although the first episode has actually been on YouTube since April). ‘The Rickshank Redemption’ is a classic example of this sort of dense plotting. The second series ended with Rick incarcerated so

this is about resolving that and pressing a reset button. It features Rick being tortured for information in a virtual reality system (that he outplays complete with a fake origin story); Morty showing Summer the consequences of Rick's ‘Doctor Who’ like hit and run approach to adventures by showing her his home dimension ruined in a callback to an episode from the first series; Rick transferring his mind into various other characters, including evil Ricks from the Council of Ricks; seemingly destroying all the plot continuity from previous episodes (whether the show really has done a Year Zero on its own past is yet to be seen but if it has it's a massively bold move)... And it still finds time to deal with Beth and Jerry's divorce.

A common plot of many ‘Rick and Morty’ episodes is this sort of Russian Doll - a simulation within a simulation within a simulation, a dream within a dream within a dream, a living battery within a living battery within a living battery, and so on. This episode takes that to its logical conclusion, with a Rick within a Rick within a Rick. It pulls it off again, although now I've recognized this formula I hope the show doesn't overuse it. ‘Family Guy’ was ruined for me quite early on when I became too aware of ‘remember that time when… ‘ cutaway gags being how the show worked.  That aside it makes for an extremely promising start.

The second episode, which is for many the first brand new episode, feels slightly underwhelming just because the first is just so batshit crazy - it's a Rick and Morty does Mad Max thing, which is still pretty good but I don't really like it when animated series (and it is largely animated series, especially the Simpsons) spend a whole episode on a parody of a specific thing. That said, this being ‘Rick and Morty’, there’s plenty going, including a revenge-bent arm and Rick bringing down the dystopian society by introducing free cable TV. I guess it's necessary to have a less complex plot for this episode as it's largely concerned with character development.

Terry Jones wrote of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy books - an acknowledged inspiration for the show - that people don't really read them for the plots or the characters but for the sheer number of ideas that flow out. This is true of most of Rick and Morty - it spends more on character but I’d be very surprised if there are people who watch it to find out what happens with Beth and Jerry's marriage.  It’s probably obvious that I’m in it mainly for the sci fi surrealism, so this episode didn’t do it as much for me for that reason.

It’s still in my view the most creative show in any format right now though, and I’m incredibly happy to have it back.

CBEEBIES: Baby Jake, Raa Raa & Teletubbies

An occasional look at the weird, occasionally wonderful and often deranged world of programmes for toddlers

My morning routine more often than not involves Cbeebies.  I’m sure I’m not the only parent who is in the Cbeebies zone, although I’m sure some are happier to be there than others.  

One thing I like a lot about most Cbeebies programmes is the freewheeling logic where anything can happen - there’s often the surreal anarchy of Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python.  One of my favourite such moments is from Sarah And Duck, where Sarah and her best friend, a duck, are having a bonfire and the Moon just joins in and starts chatting to them.  It doesn’t change size or anything, it just develops hands and a mouth and the programme carries on as normal.  

I’m planning to look at much more of the Cbeebies programmes over time, but let’s start with some of the ones I see most regularly first thing in the morning:

BABY JAKE

Baby Jake is creepy.  Basically, Jake is a real baby who becomes a South Park-style cut-out animation character with a permanent smile.  In fact, more specifically, he is like Saddam Hussein in South Park: The Movie.  The narration is done by his in-story brother Isaac, and there are songs as well.  Luckily, I’m usually in the shower while Baby Jake is doing his thing, because he really creeps me out.  I think it’s just the cut-out thing - in the live action scenes that bookend the show he’s a perfectly cute little boy.  I’m obviously the sort of person who can’t help overthinking things - I am writing a blog about TV for toddlers for a start - but making the cut-out do things makes me think of some horror concept where a character is forced to do things like a marionette.  The jolly child narration and singing doesn’t alleviate this - in fact it probably reinforces it.  The episodes themselves demonstrate the freewheeling plots I was talking about perfectly - the one I just looked up at random is a space adventure with hamsters, and has plenty of bits of cut-out Jake flying past stars and planets.  

I do sometimes wonder whether in 15 years time real life Jake’s parents will boast to the girls he brings home about how he used to have his TV show and embarrass the hell out of him - I know I would.  I hope his parents are kinder than me.  Anyway, using our own toddler for experimentation purposes, he is mildly interested in the Yaccki Yaccki Yoggi song but generally the programme doesn’t grab his attention.  Sorry, Jake.

RAA RAA THE NOISY LION

Raa Raa is, indeed, a noisy lion.  He lives in a Jingly Jangly Jungle, claymation style.  His friends are a monkey, a giraffe, a zebra an elephant and a crocodile, who are all the same size as him.  Raa Raa is a good entry-level example of this sort of thing - if you can’t hack it with Raa Raa, Bing is going to be too rich for your blood, but that’s for another time.  

Raa Raa and his friends are quite fun - the episode I saw a few days ago had Raa Raa singing about his favourite things, taking them out on a walk, losing them all and his friends help him find them.  The tickling feather Zebra and Monkey were enjoying is nobly given back to Raa Raa when they find out it is his feather - or maybe they’re just worried if they don’t give it back they’ll be eaten.  The jungle setting is strangely white, which I have just realised as I write this, puts me a little bit in mind of episode 1 of the classic 60s Doctor Who story ‘The Mind Robber’.  Raa Raa’s relentless optimism and energy (and indeed noisiness) grates on me after the first five minutes or so, but that’s my problem for not drinking coffee before it’s on.  Lorraine Kelly does the narration by the way - for the uninitiated there’s more than a few ‘spot the celebrity voice’ moments on Cbeebies.  

For our son the theme tune will get him stood to attention watching - however, during the main programme he will run around losing his own favourite things.

TELETUBBIES

Teletubbies is the most famous of the Cbeebies programmes.  If you have never tuned in to Cbeebies you more than likely still know of the Teletubbies and can probably name them.  There is a laughing baby’s face for the sun, then Teletubbies come leaping out of holes in the ground like colourful moles.  The first bit of the programme normally has them picking up signals for us to watch something on their tubs.  This is normally a minute of a day out to a farm or a car show or some such, which is then repeated immediately.  After this, the Teletubbies, go and look at their children (Tiddlytubbies), eat some Tubbycustard or Tubbytoast, then it’s time for Tubbybyebye.

Which actually all seems quite conservative and low key in the current land of Cbeebies.  Even Postman Pat, in his super-turbo-charged Special Delivery Service incarnation somehow seems more modern.  That’s not a criticism of Teletubbies, a lot obviously goes into making it.  Its formula is quite strict, and is never really deviated from - the reasoning presumably being that children find comfort in repetition.  

Spot The Celebrity Voices: Jim Broadbent, Fearne Cotton and occasionally Jane Horrocks - not that you can recognise any of them

It’s not really something that keeps me interested but, crucially this is a programme that really does get our son watching, usually to the point where the only movement he makes is jumping up and down or pointing at the screen.  And that should be the main aim of any children’s programme.