Video Games as Art

Like pretty much everyone under the age of 40, I found myself disagreeing with Roger Ebert's rather misguided polemic against the idea that video games can be art. Clearly there are a wealth of games out there now that not only include artistic accoutrements but also, like Braid or Passage, tweak the conventions of video games for artistic ends.

I think it's worth focusing on that latter aspect: To the extent that we can talk about video games as art, as opposed to mere entertainment, it's because art games typically do something that is common in modern art in particular, which is to comment on the norms that have accumulated around video games over the past 20-30 years. Braid, for example, calls into question the assumptions embedded in save-the-princess adventure games going back to Mario and Zelda. Similarly, games like Shadow of the Colossus take a common video game goal -- kill the bad guys -- and subvert it: The protagonist is told by this disembodied voice to slay these beautiful, majestic creatures, and of course we, as the player, comply -- only to find out, too late, the true harm we have caused.

It may be helpful to think of video games as being more akin to the plastic arts, like painting, sculpture, or mixed media, than to narrative art forms like film or literature. Expecting video games to have the same sort of narrative density that a book or a movie have may be setting the bar too high, making it easy to dismiss video games as an art form. I like to think of a game like Passage as being like one of those interactive art installations you might find at MoMA or the Hirshhorn: It provides a singular moment of epiphany, rather than the presentation of a whole world. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more I think the comparison to modern art is apt: Compared to, say, the Lascaux cave paintings or works from the Renaissance, modern art frequently is accused of not living up to traditional standards. ("My kid could paint that!" "My kid could play that and rack up a high score!") But, of course, modern art is supposed to challenge our assumptions about art and about the world, and it seems to me that those video games that aspire to that belong in the same category.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Friday Video

La Roux: "Bulletproof"



For comparison's sake, here's the new Tron trailer:

Thoughts on The Hurt Locker

I saw the movie a little over a week ago, and I still have it rolling around in my head. Spoilers to follow.

***

One thing about this movie that unsettled me was watching characters who were members of my generation in a war zone. Of course, I know a good number of people who have served or are serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the movie reminded me that these wars, like Vietnam was for the Baby Boomers, will be an enduring feature of my generation, in ways we haven't yet acknowledged.

I disagree with this assessment from n+1, which asserts that The Hurt Locker is a pro-war film. Certainly the focus on the men of Bravo company excludes all other perspectives, and to the extent that we do see other perspectives, they aren't presented sympathetically: The Ralph Fiennes-led band of contractors suck Bravo company in a shooting match, the touchy-feely colonel doesn't know what to do when out on patrol, home life for Staff Sgt. James is drudgery, etc. But I would hazard that the tone of the movie, in its own way, exemplifies what the Iraq War has become: With the original case for war having evaporated by the time they're deployed, the men of Bravo company struggle to carry out their mission, with no goal higher than getting out of there -- or in Staff Sgt. James' case, the thrill of defusing bombs. The Hurt Locker is pro-war in the sense that it doesn't portray war as utter futility; but then, I think any attempt to tell a true war story (in Tim O'Brien's sense) could be labeled as pro-war, even as it refuses to sentimentalize about it. O'Brien himself put it best:

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done.

In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh." True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.

I will be very disappointed if The Hurt Locker doesn't get a slew of Oscar nominations -- at the least, for Best Actor and Best Director. Jeremy Renner is excellent as displaying all the contradictions in Staff Sgt. James' character; and Kathryn Bigelow does an extremely good job at creating a near-constant state of tension, even when nothing's happening. I expected to come out of the theater with my senses assaulted by war violence; instead I came out with only a weird sense of dread. In a way, that was more disturbing.

Thoughts on The Time Traveler's Wife

I liked the time traveling part more than the romance part. Spoilers to follow.

***

Time travel is a good tool for meditating on the nature of fate in science fiction, much in the same way prophecy was used in classical literature: The paradox of Henry and Clare's relationship is that you can't determine whether it began when Clare first approaches Henry in the library, saying she's known him all her life; or whether it began when Henry first visited Clare as a little girl, having already married Clare in the future. Stated as an intellectual puzzle, it's fascinating (I liked this article on the physics of The Time Traveler's Wife, for example), but to make it into a great story, you need, as always, good characters. Unfortunately, Henry and Clare in the movie come off as rather dull and not fully-formed. I understand, however, that the book presents them in much richer detail.

"This City Is Afraid of Me. I've Seen Its True Face."

My very partial review of the Watchmen movie. Major spoilers follow.

What bothers me most about Zach Snyder's version of Watchmen is his portrayal of Ozymandias. Adrian Veidt is supposed to be this Aryan demigod: enlightened, brilliant, compassionate, handsome, at peak physical condition -- the last person you'd suspect of plotting mass murder. What we get in the movie, however, is this sallow-faced wisp of a man, whose every expression screams "I'm the villain! See how I scowl!" Making him, instead of Captain Metropolis, the organizer of the ill-fated Crimebusters Watchmen supergroup in the 1960s also makes his ambitions less utopian and more a case of petty revenge against the Comedian and others (such as the oil and coal executives he upbraids in one scene). The result is that the big reveal at the end doesn't hit us with the same level of shock that it ought to.

And it ought to: for all the attention paid to the twisted psyches of Rorschach and the Comedian, the place, I think, where Watchmen really overthrows the conventions of superhero stories is with Ozymandias. Adrian's plot is, in a sense, the superhero version of the banality of evil: Rorschach and the Comedian may have killed people, but the most horrific crime is committed by someone who arrives at it as if he were working out the marketing strategy for his latest product line. (Remember the memos in the book that discuss Millennium, the new perfume that debuts after New York is destroyed and the Cold War is ended?) One of the reasons Watchmen upends the traditional superhero story is not only that the "villain" gets away with it, but that it shows how easily the idealism associated with masked vigilantism -- and indeed, all attempts to go beyond the law to do justice -- can curdle into something more monstrous than anything a supervillain could dream up. (Note how little supervillains figure into the world of Watchmen.) The logic of killing millions to save billions -- destroying the village to save it, as it were -- is shot through much of the history of the last century, and it makes sense for a comic book that plays with that history to incorporate it into its story.

The movie doesn't really convey any of those overtones very well. Part of it probably has to do with what Amanda Marcotte notes, which is that it succumbs to the temptation to become just another action movie, rather than seriously questioning it, showing how the so-called heroes become complicit with Adrian's crime, etc. The violence is absurdly amped up, 300-style, and many of Zach Snyder's changes to the story come off as pointless, if not distracting. I would even go so far as to include the new ending among those changes. I flippantly said on Twitter that the movie "needs more squid." But now that I think about it, the original ending -- Adrian fakes a alien invasion that kills half of New York City -- really is appropriate to the story, and to Adrian's ends; it's the ultimate in lateral thinking, as he would say. It's ingeniously demented, too, made all the more demented when presented by someone as cultured and great-souled as Adrian. By contrast, the new ending -- Adrian blows up a bunch of cities and frames Dr. Manhattan -- does the job, I suppose, but combined with the vindictive attitude mentioned earlier, it almost comes off like an attempt to take Dr. Manhattan down a notch and prove himself the superior man. As with Ozymandias in general, what was utopian idealism taken to horrible extremes in the book becomes a run-of-the-mill plot for world domination in the movie.

Having said all that, I think Snyder deserves credit for hewing as close to the source material as he did; the choice, after all, wasn't between Snyder's version or a perfect transcription of the book to the screen; it was between Snyder's version and a piece of studio schlock likely made by a Joel Schumacher clone. Even apart from that, I really liked how Nite Owl, Rorschach, and the Comedian were portrayed, and the much-praised opening sequence does a very good job of ushering viewers into the alternate history of the story. Overall, though, I was disappointed with the movie; I expected to be disappointed, and after seeing it, my expectations were (unfortunately) met.

One other thing: If we're going to have a moratorium on Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," can we also have a moratorium on Mozart's Requiem? Snyder's extremely unsubtle taste in music killed a lot of scenes, including Dan and Laurie's tryst on the airship Archie; but having the camera pan away from Adrian at the end to the tune of "Requiem aeternam..." was simply ridiculous.

Le Wrath di Khan

Via io9, a literal rendering of the term "space opera":



I recently rewatched Star Trek II, and remembered how good it was, at least given the state of SF movies at the time. Now, of course, we have Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, etc., which all do a better job with acting and storytelling, but Wrath of Khan still holds up pretty well.

Everything's Better with Zombies

Via John Holbo, a, uh, interesting reinterpretation of the classics:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen's classic novel to new legions of fans.

This reminds me that there was a glaring deficiency in my undergraduate education; namely, not enough about zombies. Not just in English literature, but throughout the whole Western canon. For example:

• The Republic and Zombies: Holed up in a safehouse during a zombie infestation of Athens, Socrates discusses with Glaucon and Adeimantus the nature of justice, the well-ordered soul, and the best-ruled society -- preferably one without the undead. Things get off to a rocky start, however, when Thrasymachus attacks old Cephalus and starts eating his brains.
• On the Nature of Things and Zombies: Lucretius' epic work on the atomistic philosophy of the Epicureans sweetens the bitter pill of living in a world without gods -- but with zombies -- with the honey of poetry. By breaking the bonds of religion, and by building up adequate fortifications against the zombie hordes, one can live a life of pleasure and understanding. Fun fact: the "swerve" of the atoms that enables us to have free will? It also reanimates the dead. Reality's a bitch.
• Aristotle's On Zombies: This newly-discovered treatise shows the Philosopher trying to pin down the precise nature of this undead creature. How can something be dead and still have a source within itself of motion and rest? There must be a separate quality, a being-at-work-staying-itself-hungering-for-brains, that enables the zombie to operate. Sadly, the part where Aristotle discusses the best way to defend against zombies remains lost.
  
• The Iliad and Zombies: Basically, every place where Homer kills off a soldier, replace "darkness covered his eyes" with "darkness covered his eyes -- and then he sprang up, bared his teeth, and pounced on an unsuspecting Achaean." It scans better in the original Greek.
  

And that's just the classical era!

The Problem With Bridal Movies

Amanda Marcotte nails it:

We are supposed to think that women have all the power in these situations, because they do all the planning and men are mere props in the game. But really, that’s not how it goes in this narrative, not really. After all, men carry with them that all-important power, to whip out the ring and rescue a woman from the horrible non-life of the spinster and grant her entrance into the land of the living. The reason men don’t really have personalities in these stories is not because they’re of secondary importance at all. It’s because they fill the role of the gods in this story, and as gods, they must seem slightly distant and above it all.

A Film For Our Times

At a time when the princes of high finance are held in such utter contempt, the makers of this film must be overjoyed at their great timing. It probably won't do much for their box office, though.

More Current Reading

I'm also re-reading Watchmen, in anticipation of the movie which may (or may not) come out in March. I'm struck, reading it this time, at the level of symbolism and visual punning that goes on, and how it avoids becoming mannered -- an easy trap for anything that aspires to serious art, as Watchmen does. Not to mention the telling details that are casually strewn throughout the book: right now, I'm marveling over the fact that, at the climactic scene in Antarctica where Adrian Veidt sets his master plan into action, he is wearing his Ozymandias costume -- which he never wears elsewhere, except in flashbacks. Not only that, he's wearing his costume, but not his mask. Compare this to Rorschach and his belief that only when he's in costume is he his true self -- he calls his mask his "face" -- and you begin to understand the level of unspoken commentary that goes on constantly in Watchmen.

The Apatovian Error

I saw Baby Mama for the first time over the Thanksgiving holiday; it was okay. There were some funny bits, particularly Steve Martin's "New Age guru by way of Steve Jobs" schtick, but the plot suffers from the same thing that has infected Judd Apatow's comedies and their imitators: We are given no reason why someone as educated and cultured as Tina Fey's character would ever associate with, much less choose to have a baby by, someone as completely the opposite as Amy Poehler's character. Much as Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen were paired off sort of inexplicably in Knocked Up, two people of opposite characters are thrown together, even though at least one of them can, and ought to, walk away. Yes, Baby Mama is a conventional buddy comedy, and you need something to get the laughs going, but it's still kind of hard to ignore, isn't it? If you're going to have smart people do stupid things, there should at least be some kind of story behind it.

Of course, this problem is an old one in comedy. Why, for example, does Alceste in The Misanthrope fall for Célimène? Is it because he really doesn't believe in his ideals? Is his hatred for society just a front? Is it just irrational? Alceste isn't a hypocrite, the way, say, Tartuffe is -- or is he? He at least struggles with his ideals, rather than cynically peddling them for personal gain. In any case, I think there's a lot of comedy to be had in exploring why people make choices they know full well aren't in their interests, but I haven't seen anything lately that goes in that direction.

"The Edsels of the world of moveable type"

Blog posts are well known for their invective, and I've indulged that impulse on occasion. But I would be hard pressed to write anything that let spill so much bile and reveled so much in schadenfreude as this poem by Clive James:

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.

Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyart with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots--
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun".

Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.

Movie Recommendation

Robin Hood. This is the 1991 version that was only shown as a miniseries in the US out of fear of competing with Kevin Costner's execrable Prince of Thieves, which came out that same year, but this is the far superior version. It's sort of weird to see Patrick Bergin, which I think most people know as the villain in Sleeping with the Enemy, as the hero, but it works, as does the rest of the cast. This includes a then 21-year-old Uma Thurman as Maid Marion, who plays her with a good deal more pluck and vitality than the role usually gets.

Another thing notable about the movie is that the usual villains -- the Sheriff of Nottingham, Guy of Guisborne, etc. -- are absent. Instead, the story is recast as a conflict between the Saxons, who had been living in England for centuries, and the recent conquerors the Normans. Robin is Sir Robert Hode, a Saxon landowner who gets tossed off his land by the Normans and becomes the outlaw of legend. The scenery is very naturalistic and plays up the semi-pagan nature of medieval England -- there's even a Green Man at one point. At the same time, there's still plenty of wit and humor, as a good Robin Hood movie should have.

The Star Wars Theme, Reinterpreted

Merry Christmas!

I hope to hold off on blogging until the New Year; we'll see how that goes. In the meantime, enjoy the Pogues:

90s Nostalgia Blogging

Letters to Cleo - Here and Now:



For those who can't decipher what Kay Hanley is saying in the refrain:

The comfort of a knowledge of a rise above the sky above
could never parallel the challenge of an acquisition in the
Here and now
Here and now

How simple is that?

Sunday YouTube

Stars - "Elevator Love Letter"

On Cold Mountain and Gone with the Wind

Am I the only one who finds it a little disturbing that the best Civil War films -- nearly all Civil War films, for that matter -- have an objectively pro-Southern slant to them? This is more true, of course, of GWTW than Cold Mountain, but still. There is a film that needs to be made, if not of the Civil War, then of the Reconstruction years, from an explicitly pro-Northern perspective. If Nathan Newman's recounting of the era is accurate, a great tragedy centered around Ulysses S. Grant could easily be written.

Movie Review: Enchanted

It was either this or Beowulf (non-3D version); and as tempting as a nude CGI Angelina Jolie may be, I was strangely not that enthused about the movie. But as far as Disney-approved satire goes, Enchanted is pretty entertaining, I must admit. It succeeds mainly on the strength of Amy Adams' performance, which is incredibly sweet and has more depth than a movie like this deserves.

Of course, if I were to write a Disney satire movie, I'd probably use this list as a jumping off point.

Urinetown

I saw it last weekend with Y. at the University of Maryland, and while it was delightfully acerbic, as advertised, I would have enjoyed it more, perhaps, if it weren't also an apparent harbinger of things to come.