During a seminar last week I was asked about my most important cultural experience during the previous year. The experience which immediately sprung to mind centred around the film "A Perfect Murder" which was screened - some scheduler has a sense of humour - on the same night as programmes about the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the collapse of Lehman Brothers bank last year. However, my actual choice of cultural experience was attending the Matthew Boulton exhibition at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. As an Enlightenment entrepreneur, Boulton is regarded as one of the fathers of Britain's industrial revolution, and I shall come back to him later.
Nevertheless, I've since reflected on why I so much "enjoyed" watching "A Perfect Murder". The "perfect" scheduling was certainly part of the experience. "A Pefect Murder" was made in the late 1990s, and stars Michael Douglas as a Wall Street Financier with Gwyneth Paltrow as his beautiful young wife, who is also a wealthy heiress and multi-lingual translator for the United Nations. She also has Viggo Mortensen as her artist lover, who inhabits a large pre-gentrification warehouse studio used for their amorous assignations. Unfortunately, her husband finds out about these and the plot unfolds from his discovery.
"A Perfect Murder" is an elegantly filmed B Movie-remake of a Hitchcock classic, directed by English costume drama afficianado Andrew Davies, and even stars David Suchet in the role of police detective. However, it isn't generally regarded as a particularly good film, so - scheduling apart - why did it make such an impression on my ? One reason is that I'm a great fan of film noir, and the noir genre more generally, as a vehicle for astute psychological observation, and, in partiular, its portrayals of the relationship - some migth say eternal triangle - of sex, money and gender politics. Thus in "A Perfect Murder", the Michael Douglas character is a classic financial speculator and gambler, up to precisely the kind of tricks that ever threaten to bring about personal, professional and corporate nemesis, and which, more recently, have succeeded in doing just this.
However, the Gwyneth Paltrow character turns out to be more of a gutsy girl than we initially imagine and, in my "cultural studies" view, represents an interesting take on the post-feminist heroine. A even more interesting take on this role is found in the character of Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson's "The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo", Book 1 of the Millennium Trilogy, first published in 2004 - a disturbing piece of "Nordic Noir", which has as its hero an investigative financial journalist. This part, incidentally, could have been written for Viggo Mortensen, although it would take sometone like "Monster" actress Charlize Theron to play Salander.
The reason I mention Larsson's book, aside from it being a very good one, is that its hero, Blomkvist, elegantly distinguishes between the real economy and workings of financial markets in a television interview towards the end of the story :
"... The Swedish Economy is the sum of all goods and services that are produced in this country every day. There are telephones from Ericsson, cars from Volvo, chickens from Scan, and shipments from Kiruna to Skovde. That's the Swedish economy and it's just as strong or weak today as it was a week ago...
...The Stock Exchange is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasises in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many billions, more or less. It doesn't have a thing to do with reality or with the Swedish economy".
This description brings me back to the Matthew Boulton, and matters closer to home in space and time. The problem for the UK is that our economy, even more so than that of United States, is highly dependent on financial markets and the management of assets. Thus it has become difficult for economists to distinguish between speculative and real economic performance. Hence the widespread surprise that Britain has not emerged from recession. Therefore - despite my liking for all things noir - what this country country really needs is some more "New Englightenment" enterprises, if we are not all to be plunged in to a New Dark Age.
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