In Depth:  Rachel Thorpe

Margaret Atwood is one of the most important and influential writers alive. Her 50 plus books — including poetry, short stories, scripts, children’s fiction, non-fiction, and 15 novels — have been translated into more than 40 languages. A Canadian literary celebrity, Atwood has won over 50 awards, including the 2000 Booker Prize, and holds numerous Honorary Fellowships. Her most famous novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), is a cultural phenomenon.

The Handmaid’s Tale is commonly described as a feminist work, but Atwood is not exclusively interested in the politics of gender. She is keenly aware of her cultural surroundings and constantly engages with multiple facets of contemporary theory and philosophy. Her work has also been critiqued in the light of environmentalism, Canadian nationalism and postmodernism. Atwood is ironic and self-aware, playing with ideas through a humorous and detached authorial voice.

White Heat is the latest original drama from the BBC, following a group of friends who meet in the 1960s.

I am young enough to remember that we studied the 60s in our history class at school. It was, we were told, a period of sex, drugs and rock and roll. The 60s are often blamed for the death of cultural Christianity in Britain, and it’s easy to see why. The rules were changing as young people attempted to take control of the world. Radically disrespectful of their parents, they set about defying the expectations of the older generations, determined to smoke, drink and dance their way into the future. Sexism, racism and homophobia were still rife, but there was a new sense that political and social freedom was to be sought, at any cost. It was the era of the Beatles, the miniskirt and the pill.

Lucian Freud is one of the most remarkable artists of his generation.

There have been numerous tributes to his life and work since his death last July. Each has helped to define his reputation as an artist that contributed to contemporary painting an intense, unashamed and unidealised depiction of the physical essence of the human animal. In an age when art was rejecting traditional naturalistic representation, Freud committed his life to portraiture, resisting the surrounding interest in Pop, Op and Abstract Expressionism. By painting his friends from all walks of life he pursued unfettered realism, creating memorable images that are both astounding and uncomfortable.

A young woman becomes pregnant. The details of the baby’s conception are local gossip. She goes into labour when she is far from home and her baby boy is born surrounded by poverty and filth. At first, it seems that his life could be under threat. But the simple joy of childbirth means that all of this darkness melts away. Just a glance at the newborn stirs such hope that, for a moment, the true glory of humanity is visible. This is how the Gospels describe the birth of Jesus, but it could equally well be a plot summary for many of the episodes of Call the Midwife.

The very stuff of life

One Born Every Minute meets Eastenders in Call the Midwife, which had been hailed as the most popular BBC drama in ten years. The show is based on a best-selling trilogy of memoirs by Jennifer Worth describing the experience of delivering babies in the 1950s, before readily-available pain-relief or the pill.

What should we make of Katy Perry and her Christian upbringing?

Katy Perry is the latest pop-star to become fodder for the gossip columns. Last month her husband Russell Brand announced that he was filing for divorce after just 14 months of marriage, on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. But there’s more to Perry than a short-lived marriage to the comedian that Britain loves to hate.

The most recent strain of Brontemania, at large throughout 2011, included major film versions of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and the sale of a Charlotte Brontë manuscript for almost £700,000.

Enthusiasm for the Bronte sisters and their work is nothing new. Their novels have spawned numerous interpretations: Charlotte’s Jane Eyre alone has been adapted for the screen almost 2,000 times¹. Each re-telling is selective, emphasising certain aspects and ignoring others in order to re-image the characters for a contemporary audience. The controversial casting of the 2011 Wuthering Heights, along with the decision to truncate the ending, is an example of the desire to both affirm and alter the message of the novels.

The National Gallery’s latest exhibition, Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, invites a reappraisal of one of the least prolific and most prominent artists of all time, posing poignant questions for the modern — and postmodern — thinker.

It is partly due to the scarcity of Leonardo’s works that the show has attracted so much attention; the exhibition is ‘the most complete display of Leonardo’s rare surviving paintings ever held’, containing several works that have never been seen in the UK¹. There is also excitement over the inclusion of the recently rediscovered ‘Salvator Mundi’. But, according to curator Luke Syson, there is a further reason why the time was right for the world to pay attention to Leonardo as a painter: ‘It was [...] important for the National Gallery to provide a sensible corrective to Dan Brown’s mystical, heretical Leonardo.’²

This year any children preparing to belt out ‘O Holy Night’ at the annual carol concert or nativity play have got a high standard to meet, thanks to hit TV-show Glee.

Following the trials of a fictional show choir called New Directions, Glee is now in its third season and has a huge following of ‘Gleeks’ hooked on the catchy sing-along numbers and cutting humour.

‘In the good old days, everyone was nostalgic.’

Few cities have been as idolised and idealised as Paris. I’m sure that I’m not alone in having covered the walls of my room with black and white memorials to the iconic Eiffel Tower, Champs Elysees and Moulin Rouge. These images travel with me, ‘a moveable feast’.

Ernest Hemingway gave the city this epigram during the years that the flamboyant, feverish transition from wartime to modernity took place. The everlasting was gradually being knocked aside by the fashionable, under Baudelaire’s rallying cry, ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable’.¹ With ‘modernism’ as the artistic watchword, the Western world seemed to be departing from its Christian roots, replacing traditional devotion with nostalgia for church paraphernalia.

Vincent Van Gogh is now a solid fixture in our cultural vocabulary.

I need only mention sunflowers or a bandaged ear to conjure up his life and legacy. Shunned during his lifetime, by the 20th century he had been declared one of the greatest painters to have lived. The publication of his complete illustrated letters in late 2009 thrust him back into vogue and this summer there have been novels, exhibitions, news stories and even a special episode of Dr. Who dedicated to the master painter.

In an industry that likes its women impeccably presented and insistently positive, Amy Winehouse was always something of a misfit.

She provided some respite from the manufactured pop-princess image, but her alternative was far harder to swallow.

We can’t ignore it any more: the world is infatuated with the ubiquitous Lady Gaga.

Recently the annual Forbes ‘Celebrity 100’ list named her the most powerful person in showbiz.¹ She played editor-in-chief of the news franchise Metro.² Her latest album, Born This Way, has gone straight to number one in both the UK and the US3. And she shows no signs of slowing down.

Karl Marx famously claimed, ‘Religion is the opiate of the people’. For the 21st century, film is the opiate of the people.

Film seduces us to switch off our brains and immerse ourselves in a colourful, glossy, life-sized narrative. Without wanting to undermine the genuine pleasure that comes from relaxing in front of a good film, I want to encourage us to re-engage our brains and to critically consider modern cinematic output. As Neil Postman writes in his book Technopoly, the surrender to technology ‘is a state of culture’ but ‘is also a state of mind’. To help us do this, I will sketch out the implications of two recent developments in film that I consider to be the most significant: the rise of a new genre of horror, and the advent of 3D films in the commercial market.

‘It takes a worried man to sing a worried song.’ So croons popular singer Paolo Nutini in a song on his latest album Sunny Side Up (May 2009). In doing so he reveals the serious side to the glossy pop culture of the 21st century.

In the era of the iPod, Spotify and free music downloads, song lyrics are fast becoming one of the most important windows into the thought-world of our society.