Computer games are a strange medium for art, and gamers are a strange audience for it. As soon as a game comes out that aspires to art, it takes about five seconds before someone on the internet gets out the big word: “Pretentious.” Give it another ten seconds and someone will say, “Ah, but is it a game?” It’s as if too many gamers would prefer their medium to be one thing only, forever, with no potential to become something more. And that’s ignoring the other side of the debate, the old-timers shouting, “Get off my MOMA-curated front lawn, you kids!”
I wonder what Old Man Ebert would say about Kentucky Route Zero, an indie adventure game whose first part (or Act – the game wears its many artistic inspirations on its sleeve) came out a couple of months ago. It’s as if David Lynch, Edward Hopper and Gabriel Garcia Marquez had collaborated on an old-school point-and-click adventure – but while it’s easy to point out how Kentucky Route Zero derives from a number of artistic traditions, in its first act it already manages to become something entirely its own and entirely of the medium, doing things that wouldn’t be possible in this particular way in any other medium.
The game excels at atmosphere, evoking a mood that is homely and uncanny at the same time, nostalgic and unsettling. As much as Lynch at his best, Kentucky Route Zero is dreamlike, surreal around the edges, but without giving in to the facile randomness that surrealism is sometimes prone to. The art, the writing, the soundscapes and music – all of these come together to create one of the most unique, compelling experiences I’ve played, well, since I took hold of a joystick in the early ’80s.
It is likely that hardcore old-school gamers without an interest in unique experiences with, yes, artistic pretensions will have issues, though. Compared to the classic games of the genre, Kentucky Route Zero doesn’t offer challenging puzzles. In fact, there are hardly any puzzles in the conventional sense as well. What the game does offer, though, is exploration – in more than the expected way. The characters, the conversations, even such simple things as a ride through an old mine on a cart, all these offer glimpses into a world one step away from our own.
It’s difficult to give any criticism that seems adequate. Yes, Kentucky Route Zero Act I is a short pleasure; in the conventional terms of game longevity, it does lend itself to multiple playthroughs so the different conversation choices can be explored, but for the asking price of $7 it offers a couple of hours of gameplay only. However, for gamers in any way receptive to the moody, fascinating world the game evokes, those couple of hours will linger long after Act I closes.
P.S.: Act II is to come out within the next month or two; the entire game can currently be bought for under $20. For anyone who’s simply curious to check out the look and feel of Kentucky Route Zero, the developers have released a free tech demo called Limits & Demonstrations that provides a glimpse especially into the project’s overall artistic sensibilities and the writing. Well worth checking out, which shouldn’t take more than half an hour.
What is a film director’s job? Ask a number of different directors and you’ll get very different answers. For some, working with the actors is an integral part of the job; for others (such as Ridley Scott), acting is solely the responsibility of the actors and the director’s there to focus on the look and feel of a film. (At which point the cinematographer may be going, “What about me?”) Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
Generally, a film director controls a film’s artistic and dramatic aspects, and visualizes the script while guiding the technical crew and actors in the fulfillment of that vision.
Remember Tom Hooper? He directed The King’s Speech, the HBO miniseries John Adams – and Les Misérables, the film version of the Boubil and Schönberg musical. Based on all of these, I am confident in saying that Hooper does a magnificent job at getting great performances out of actors. I am equally confident in saying that, at least according to the Wikipedia definition as well as my own understanding of what a film director does, Tom Hooper is one of least talented successful directors of recent times.
I don’t want to get into the whole discussion of Les Misérables‘ recording the actors’ singing on set. I don’t even mind (well, not all that much) that Russell Crowe can’t really sing and that he butchers Javert’s songs in the film. When there’s a choice between flawless singing and acting at the expense of voice, I tend to favour the latter, but then musical fans may wonder what’s the point of having your actors singing if the acting gets in the way of a good tune.
What I do want to get into is Hooper’s downright obnoxious use of the camera. Already in John Adams, a handsomely produced, beautifully acted, intelligently written series, the director kept throwing in jarring dutch angles, their main effect being that they drew attention to themselves. It didn’t feel like a conscious use of a technique in order to achieve a certain effect; instead it felt like a directorial gimmick, a distracting flourish with little to no relation to what was going on on the screen.
This obnoxious use of ostentatious techniques is taken to extremes in Les Misérables. Practically the whole film is shot in hand-held, dizzying close-ups – and it’s too intimate. It’s too intrusive. And where it’s effective for a few minutes, it turns into a freakshow – less a method of putting as little distance between the acting and the audience and more a “Check out the tears! The snot! The blood! It’s all real!” Apart from the technique becoming almost exhibitionist when it’s used in 90% of all the shots, there’s no modulation, no rhythm to the images. Crowd scenes, intimate moments of soul-searching, Hooper treats them all the same, to the point where you have to wonder what the hell the director’s doing.
The sad thing is, for every moment where Hooper’s technique is effective there are ten scenes where it’s irritating and distracting. We’re supposed to feel with the characters, and the poor actors are acting their hearts out, but the camera keeps putting us uncomfortably close, so that scenes tip into becoming embarrassing or involuntarily comical. When the film is at its worst, what should come across as earnest and heartfelt becomes pushy and needy. As a result, the film rarely works as the grand spectacle it was written as, and it rarely works as intimate drama. Mr Hooper, seriously – techniques should be geared towards what the film needs, they shouldn’t be an affectation or a nervous tic. You do great when it comes to getting performances from your actors… and then you shoot yourself in the foot with everything else. Do me a favour and read this before you make your next film, ‘kay?
I’ve been underwhelmed by three of the most recent films I’ve seen: Zero Dark Thirty, Django Unchainedand Lincoln. Yet these are all films that have received rave reviews from the critics; for instance, Kathryn Bigelow’s latest received a Metacritic score of 95/100, Django Unchained has a Rotten Tomato score of 88 out of 100, and all three were Best Picture nominees at the recent Academy Awards.
Obviously an argument can be had about the Oscars and whether they truly reflect what’s best about movies – an argument I’m not particularly interested in getting involved in. What I’m more interested in is this: do all these films depend on the particular culture that gave birth to them? More specifically, to what extent do they depend on an American audience?
As a non-American, it’s not that I’m disinterested in the films’ topics, but I don’t have any connection to them. Slavery, particularly as it was practised in the United States, and the hunt for Osama Bin Laden – neither of these have any particular, personal relevance to me. Going into the films, though, I felt that they required, perhaps even demanded such a personal connection to be at their most effective. For an audience that saw the 9/11 attacks as aimed at them – not at the Western world in general, but at them as Americans – it might be easier to identify with Zero Dark Thirty‘s heroine and her obsessive hunt for Bin Laden. For an audience that culturally still lives in the aftermath of slavery and its legacy, the sight of a black gunslinger exacting brutal revenge on the one side of the cinematic spectrum, on the other a tall, gangly president seeking to end not only a war but a racist, inhumane practice deeply entrenched in the national culture – I expect that these resonate in ways particular to that audience.
Except that resonance wasn’t there for me. Whereas 9/11 felt like a shared event even on this side of the Atlantic (with some caveats – the discussion on the terrorist attacks very quickly became critical of the United States in Europe), the hunt for Bin Laden didn’t. The most personal connection I have to slavery is remembering seeing Roots on TV, which barely counts. Yet there are films that manage to make essentially American topics more universal, where I don’t feel I have to have grown up in a specific culture to connect to them. Did these three films end up less effective, and less successful as movies, because they were aimed at a very specific audience?
It’d be interesting to hear some opinions on this issue. What were readers’ opinions of these three films? To what extent did you feel that they spoke to you – or failed to speak to you?
Note: While Argo could also be said to be about a particularly American topic, it didn’t feel like it to me. This doesn’t mean I agree with the Academy’s opinion on the film – I enjoyed Argo but would call it a good film, not a great one – but in the end I enjoyed it more than either Zero Dark Thirty, Django Unchained or Lincoln. Then again, I haven’t fully enjoyed any of Spielberg’s movies in a very long time… but that may be material for another blog post.
I’ve written about the first season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror when it first aired (here and here). I didn’t consider all three of the original episodes equally successful at presenting a dark, satiric funhouse reflection of people in the age of omnipresent smartphones, tablet computers and social media, but Brooker’s takes on how technology reinforces human nature in weird but not always wonderful ways were always eminently watchable.
To my mind, the second series (which recently finished on Channel Four) dropped the ball somewhat on its final episode, but again, it has held a fascinating black, quite possibly Apple-branded mirror up to us, and the reflection is not always pleasant. It’s not necessarily scathing, though, so much as sad; other than in his editorials, though, Brooker tempers his satire with empathy for his characters. Well, some of them. Let’s look at the individual episodes, though:
Be Right Back
The first episode is probably the one I liked best, and it is the one that I related to most. “Be Right Back” is the story of a woman whose husband dies in a car crash; a friend, also recently bereft, signs her up to a service that creates a simulacrum – first virtual, later physical – of her husband based on his digital footprint: his Facebook posts, his tweets, his e-mails, the many photos and videos. (Sound far-fetched? Check this site out and tell me if it still does.) While initially the simulation consoles her, being almost like her husband in how he talks and acts, that almost becomes impossible to bear, in a sort of emotional uncanny valley effect. So much of him is there, bringing into stark contrast the ways in which the simulated husband falls short of the real thing.
Perhaps more than most episodes, “Be Right Back” needs its near-future vision of where technology will take us to tell a story, but the story it tells is not about this technology. It’s about loss, mourning and the inability to let go. It’s about the characters, which is why it works eminently well but perhaps falls somewhat short in its ability to comment on the titular ‘black mirror’. Still, it makes you wonder: what if the sci-fi tech had created a more perfect copy of the protagonist’s husband? Is it the imperfection of the process, the ways in which its result falls short of reality and memory, that’s the problem? There are shades (or perhaps digital ghosts?) of Solaris that resonate throughout the episode.
White Bear
If “Be Right Back” was tragedy, “White Bear” is closer to the horror genre, reminiscent of 28 Days Later: a young woman wakes up with no memory (except for occasional flashes) of who she is. Trying to figure out her situation, she finds that everyone films her or takes photos on their smart phones, but otherwise they ignore her – except for the masked weirdos wielding shotguns, electric saws and other implements of unpleasantness. They’re the hunters, apparently using the disconnected voyeurism of the watchers to do whatever they damn well please, including torture and murder.
So, a comment on how people make themselves into audiences, how they film violence and atrocities and put these online for all to see, instead of becoming involved and helping those at the receiving end of the violence? Wrong, at least sort of: the episode pulls the rug from under the main character’s (and our) feet, revealing that this whole thing is an elaborate, grotesquely ironic punishment: she is a convicted criminal, having filmed her boyfriend torturing and killing a child, so her memory is wiped and, in a modern twist on Dante’s contrapasso, her crime is visited on her… day after day after day.
In other words, the episode is about mob mentality, witchhunts and how modern media twist justice by ‘democratising’ it, right? Well, that’s partly the problem: the episode is about both of these things, to some extent, but I’m not sure it succeeds at bringing them together in a satisfying way. Arguably, the sort of disconnectedness that can be heightened by perceiving everything through the filter of a digital camera or smartphone can in turn reinforce the mob’s hunger for revenge, which in turn isn’t necessarily far from a simple hunger to see lions tearing apart Christians in the arena. And there’s clearly the irony of the punishment making the ones inflicting it (the audiences with their phones and cameras) into the person they’re punishing, mirroring her crime. But the two themes are an uneasy fit – and perhaps that unease is part of how Brooker tries to make us uncomfortable.
What is way more uncomfortable, though, and in that sense entirely in keeping with Brooker’s series and his themes, is how on so many online review sites a sizeable portion of the (mostly anonymous) commenters felt the episode’s punishment of its main character was absolutely, 100% justified, i.e. the bitch got what she deserved. Democratising justice, eh?
The Waldo Moment
I’m not sure I would have ended the series on “The Waldo Moment”, not least because it’s very clearly the odd one out. If Black Mirror is indeed about the effect the new media and technologies have on our lives, that element is utterly unimportant in the episode: yes, it features a motion-captured virtual cartoon, but the story could pretty much be exactly the same if Waldo, the sarcastic blue bear, were a sock puppet. The episode feels like a left-over from a different project, probably because that’s exactly what it is. (It incorporates material originally written for Nathan Barley, Brooker’s collaboration with Chris Morris of Four Lionsfame.)
“The Waldo Moment” makes a good point about the general cynicism about politics, and how so many of the things we blame politicians for – their pandering to the lowest common denominator, for instance – we’ve fostered in them ourselves. Politicians deserve to be criticised, but at least some of the blanket criticism they’re exposed to is hypocritical: we slam them for being undemocratic when they act differently from what we’d want, and we slam them again for lacking integrity and being in it for the votes only when they act in ways that appeal to the majority. Our cynicism is facile – and, Brooker suggests, dangerous, making us vulnerable to demagogues in the guise of those speaking the truth and sticking it to the man.
The thing is, while I think there’s something to the point, it is presented in a similarly shallow way that simply fails to carry the episode for its full length. Compared to “Be Right Back”, the characters don’t carry the story enough, and the pace is much slower than in “White Bear”. “The Waldo Moment” has material for perhaps half an hour, but even then it isn’t all that perceptive or incisive. There is one strong moment, both funny and chilling, where an American from “the Company” comes to the protagonist, the comedian who breathes life into foul-mouthed Waldo, and suggests a global roll-out, starting in South America. Indeed, if you’re in the business of toppling regimes, why not do it with a friendly blue cartoon face?
Regardless of being underwhelmed with the final episode, I’m curious to see where Brooker’ll take Black Mirror next – or, if he thinks he’s exhausted the topic, whether he’ll find another topic to turn into a fascinating, witty, angry, sad series. Waldo or not, I’ve enjoyed this journey into the near-future with Mr Brooker (to say nothing of the pig).
A Damn Fine Cup of Culture 