Quote of the week: Williams on “the new social world”

The critical demystification has indeed to continue, but always in association with practice: regular practice, as part of a normal education, in this transforming labour process itself: practice in the production of alternative ‘images’ of the ‘same event’; practice in processes of basic editing and the making of sequences; practice, following this in direct autonomous composition.

We shall already have entered a new social world when we have brought the means and systems of the most direct communication under our own direct and general control. We shall have transformed them from their normal contemporary functions as commodities or as elements of a power structure. We shall have recovered these central elements of our social production from the many kinds of expropriator. But socialism is not only about the theoretical and practical ‘recovery’ of those means of production, including the means of communicative production, which has been expropriated by capitalism. In the case of communications, especially, it is not only, though it may certainly include, the recovery of a ‘primitive’ directness and community. Even in the direct modes, it should be institution much more than recovery, for it will have to include the transforming elements of access and extension over an unprecedentedly wide social and inter-cultural range. — Raymond Williams, from “Means of Communication as Means of Production”

If I were ever to teach a class on film, this would probably be a required text. Williams goes a long way toward clarifying the social importance to every level of society of understanding media. ☕

Whitewatching: up from “underground”

Impish as usual, Armond White’s latest dual review (a common device with him, in which two recent releases are presented as “dueling” for the soul of American pop culture) contrasts Steven Soderbergh’s alleged swan song, Side Effects, with Walter Hill’s latest, Bullet to the Head (which, given Hill’s age and its box office, might turn out to be his big screen swan song as well). What stood out to me in the review was this sentence:

Soderbergh’s Traffic, Erin Brokovich and Magic Mike belong to an era of cynical banality while Hill’s sharp, inventive technique seen in The Warriors, Geronimo and Undisputed went unappreciated (and underground in TV projects like Deadwood and Broken Trail).

Most film critics now pay lip service to the notion that television series have progressed to the point of being on par in quality with the average feature film. White is one of the old school holdouts who frequently peppers his reviews with sleights against TV in the form of pejorative references: if he thinks a film looks like crap, he’ll say it uses “TV aesthetics” or something along those lines. Of anybody working in his field, White is unquestionably the most candid about his prejudices. He thinks cinema is where it’s at, television is not, and that’s that. For this (among many, many other things), he takes a lot of flack. Justifiably so.

Yet I think it’s true that, while most folks would readily acknowledge TV’s ascendancy over the course of the last fifteen years or so, its newfound mantle as a viable medium for sophisticated art is not yet cemented. For one thing, there are very few shows that have attained what you might call canonical status. Even “classic” shows are usually framed in the context of their time, both in terms of the storytelling conventions adopted, but also budgets and available technology. The lexicon of cinema is very well documented by superb critics and widely accepted as a form of high art. The lexicon of TV, while almost as well documented, is not accepted as a form of high art, and there are very few critics who have made their names doing TV criticism. In most respects, TV criticism is from a fan perspective, rather than a critical perspective. There are many shows considered to be “favorites,” but very few considered to be “greats.”

This is evident in the non-presence of TV references in most film criticism up to the present. While shows like The Wire and The Sopranos are oft-cited as examples of shows that created benchmarks of quality — and thus are often represented in reviews of crime stories — it is not apparent precisely why those shows are benchmarks. At least, not in the context of the reviews in which they appear. Ben Affleck’s The Town invited comparisons to The Wire when it came out, but few critics teased those out. The Evening Standard and The Guardian were content simply to name-drop the series. The World Socialist Web Site asserted that the film didn’t have the show’s depth. Not that comparisons to films like The Departed or Heat are less relevant, but apart from both being crime genre and both fuzzing the moral/ethical line between cops and criminals, what are the relevant points of comparison between The Town and The Wire? Are there similar characters? Plotlines? Techniques? Even on a thematic level, do The Town and The Wire even overlap in their perspectives on the whole cop/criminal dichotomy?

This is typical of how film critics grapple with the relationship between TV and cinema. It is as if critics are aware that there is such a thing as TV; they are familiar with some several programs that they watch, or about which they’ve heard from friends, colleagues, or the buzz in the critical ether; they’ve noted the uptick in production values and aesthetic rigor in TV programming. Yet they don’t really know precisely how to merge the two worlds. So you often find TV references dangling just above the surface of film criticism, serving the purpose of telegraphing that the critics are pop culture savvy, without bothering to engage in any meaningful way with that hemisphere of the culture that keeps millions glued to their TV screens every night.

If I may inch out a little further on this limb before a chipmunk’s sneeze knocks me off, allow me to suggest that this is evidence of a prejudice that critics still harbor about television. Not just critics: us, too. I don’t doubt for a minute that most of us, if we’re honest, would acknowledge that the standards we have for TV shows are a bit lower than the standards we hold for cinema. And not just because of the vast differences still intrinsic to the two media. It’s because that’s simply how the culture views them. For all our protestations and bluster, it is my distinct impression that TV is regarded as the lesser medium. To be crude: cinema is for art; TV is for entertainment.

We all know that it isn’t that simple, though; we know it isn’t entirely true. Even a staunch TV-phobe like White is occasionally confronted by the limits of his prejudice. His Zero Dark Thirty review compares the film to ”the bland procedural manner TV viewers favor,” suggesting that it’s not so much a case that there are bland procedurals on TV, but that it is the people who like to watch TV that favor bland procedurals. In his review of Silver Linings, he says, “TV shows like Modern Family, The Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men and The New Normal turn everyday eccentricity banal.” Skim White’s reviews for yourself. Chances are, every time you find a reference to television, it is in the context of implying its erosion of good taste and standards. Yet when it comes to Walter Hill’s forays into TV Land, all of a sudden TV is “underground.” Banal, bland television gains a potentially subversive edge when the right person uses it. A medium utilized nearly four hours a day by almost all Americans is, by this formulation, veritably avant-garde.

As easy as it is to nitpick the consistency of White’s peccadilloes, in this instance, I think he’s fairly representative of his profession. There are dozens and dozens of TV critics out there who have been doing amazing stuff with their criticism (Alyssa Rosenberg does exceptional TV criticism, for instance), but film still gets the lion’s share of the physical ink, and it still occupies the place of pride in the hierarchy of artistic pop cultural pursuits. Just because this is the way things are does not mean that TV is “underground.” On the contrary. What would be useful, however, would be for film critics to start integrating TV into their discussion a little more proactively. Nobody knows for certain how technology will evolve, but it looks likely that TV and film are going to overlap a lot more in the future, so getting ahead of that curve would be a smart idea for film critics who don’t want to specialize themselves into irrelevance. The first step would be to recognize television’s potential and to start sifting through how much of that potential has been historically realized. Many critics have already begun doing this. I hope White and his kind come in from the cold sooner rather than later. ☕

Reader question: Should Christian movies be more “indie”?

I thought I’d try ye olde blogging standby of answering reader questions in the form of standalone posts. If you have a question you’d like me to consider blogging about, please let me know. The first question comes from Kyle, who posted the following:

I didn’t know where else to post this, but: SERIOUSLY? Nicolas Cage in the new Left Behind movie? Like what?

Sure, their getting hollywood in there, but…..this is not what I want for Christian movies. I think they should stay indie, and try to be innovative JUST like indie films.

P. T. Anderson: a narrative of tracking shots

At the BFI’s Sight and Sound, Kevin B. Lee has put together a video essay analyzing five representative tracking shots from Paul Thomas Anderson’s career, explaining how they function as storytelling techniques, and situating them in the context of his development as an auteur. It’s a great video, and I urge you to watch it (and don’t worry — there aren’t any spoilers, if you haven’t seen all the films discussed). One aspect upon which I’d like to comment a bit further is that Lee never uses the word auteur, either in the video or in the accompanying written introduction. Instead, by emphasizing the narrative of Anderson’s development as a filmmaker, he constructs a teleological narrative, one which tells the story of a young, brash, ambitious artist evolving into an older, just as ambitious, but more contemplative and subtle filmmaker. This raises a number of problematic issues which require some elaboration.

The dialectic of elections

“Today only [stereotyped] thinking is left. People still vote, but only between totalities. The anti-Semitic psychology has largely been replaced by mere acceptance of the whole fascist ticket, which is an inventory of the slogans of belligerent big business. Just as, on the ballot paper of the mass party, voters are presented with the names of people remote from their experience for whom they can only vote en bloc, the central ideological concepts have been codified into a small number of lists. One has to opt for one of them en bloc if one’s own position is not to seem as futile as splinter votes on polling day in face of the statistical mammoths.” – Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, from “Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Adorno and Horkheimer were writing in the long shadow of Hitler’s Germany, from which they fled along with almost all of their colleagues in the years leading up to the Second World War. The book from which the above quote is excerpted is a critique of the prevailing philosophy of civilization, one that, in the view of the authors, divides society into individuals (who worship at the altar of individuality), then forces conformity upon them (the better to control them as a collective mass). In the context of the chapter from which that quote is taken, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that anti-Semitism is essentially a symptom of the larger disease, not the cancer itself. Anti-Semitism is an expression of a cultural phenomenon that could be filled by virtually any other attitude that projects fear and self-loathing onto Difference.

What struck me about this particular passage is how uncannily — minus the period-specific references to anti-Semitism and fascism (which was, please remember, considered to be a viable and progressive political philosophy in the early 20th century) — it describes the election politics of the United States in the 21st century. One of the central themes of The Dialectic of Enlightenment is how sameness and conformity preserve the power structure of society by offering the illusion of choice to the average joe. This applies as equally to brands of soup as it does political parties. You don’t have to be a Marxist to appreciate just how much capital (cultural, economic, psychological) has been concentrated in the hands of America’s two biggest parties, and the myriad ways in which that power is wielded by both the parties’ gamesmanship and the sheer inertia of the system against the interests of the individual voters.

By dividing America in twain, the Democrats and Republicans haven’t offered choices to its citizens; they’ve categorized them as being One or the Other. If you are merely One or the Other, then you have little choice but to vote accordingly, which amounts to no choice at all. Whatever the differences between the two parties, consider that they and they alone have — together — monopolized the political establishment of this country for more than 150 years. In their theatrical struggle for power, they have exonerated the use of power itself as a political means. This is why you can hear each party claiming to “Take back America!” as if it had been stolen overnight from its crib.

Despite the changes in cultural values and their respective platforms, both parties have remained. Only those with money can gain entrance to the machine, and only those willing to perpetuate the false (that is, fraudulent) dichotomy as The Real Choice are permitted to stay. Every election is The Most Important Election in Our Lifetime. Only by giving a Mandate to Our Party can Real Change begin. The Others want to Destroy Your Country. Only We are Fighting to Preserve the Real America. Each is defined in opposition to the other, but it’s not a real contest: it’s two bullies dividing the class’s lunch money evenly between them, then flipping for that last quarter. The beauty of it is that they’ve convinced the rest of us that we actually have a stake in whether it lands heads or tails.

I’m not a Adorno/Horkheimer acolyte. But the pessimism exemplified in that quote articulates very well the frustration I feel regarding Decision 2012. It’s not a decision; it’s a coin toss. Worse than that, I know that the machine has won. Instead of seeing elections as an opportunity to direct their own political fate, the American people continue to treat election for political office as a beauty pageant. Good thing, too. We all know that the most valuable quality in an administrator is how often we’d like to have him over for a beer. The personal touch has been mechanized and commodified. In an age when the voice and image of a single person can be disseminated across thousands of miles to thousands of people via wires and electric pulses, it must be reassuring that it’s so easy to believe that, hey, I could easily imagine myself being that guy’s friend! He doesn’t even need to threaten me for my lunch money: I’ll hand it over gladly, because maybe he’ll see me for who I really am. I think he gets me, man. He really cares.

Why else would partisans work the phones on behalf of “Mitt” or “Barack”?

One more riposte from H & A. Substitute “industry” for “the two parties” and “customers and employees” for “voters and campaign volunteers.”

“Industry is interested in human beings only as its customers and employees and has in fact reduced humanity as a whole, like each of its elements, to this exhaustive formula. [...] As employees people are reminded of the rational organization and must fit into it as common sense requires. As customers they are regaled, whether on the screen or in the press, with human interest stories demonstrating freedom of choice and the charm of not belonging to the system. In both cases they remain objects.” – Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” from The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Yep, they care, all right. You’d look just darling up on the shelf with their collectible Furbies.☕

Protests, propaganda, and false narratives

Narratives give definition and structure to our stories, both in fiction and in life; they can also deceive us and teach us false truths. An object lesson in wariness is unfolding right now. According to news reports, protestors yesterday have attacked U.S. embassies in Egypt and Libya. In Benghazi, an American ambassador and at least three others were murdered. In Cairo, the U.S. flag was torn to shreds and replaced with a flag with the traditional Muslim prayer, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammed is his prophet.” So far, these facts appear to be undisputed. What is more provocative (and more relevant to this blog) is that a causal link has been made between these attacks and a film made by an Israeli-American filmmaker. The film is ironically titled The Innocence of Muslims, and it is a broadside against Islam.

Neo talks digital cinema

What’s going to happen to all the digital material that we create? How can it be stored? Because that question really hasn’t been answered. We talk about the democratization of film, the fact that these tools are becoming cheaper, faster and lighter. Anyone can do it now. And I think the filmmakers we talk to have mixed feelings about that: Who’s going to be the tastemaker? Does that mean there will be less good and more bad?

But, yeah, to answer your question — I mean, it’s not as groundbreaking as when film went from silents to talkies. Let’s say that. Or from black-and-white to color. This doesn’t have that feeling of sea change to it. But there are many implications that come out of it. Especially in the early days, there was the question of the quality of the product you’re looking at, the quality of the image. For certain artists whose vision is to make the best possible image, they felt digital wasn’t there.

The above quote is from an interview conducted by Andrew O’Hehir with Keanu Reeves, who has produced a new documentary that I’m quite pumped to see, called Side by Side. In it, Reeves chats with filmmakers about the practical, aesthetic, and philosophical considerations involved in the industry-wide transition from film to digital. The interview has only made me more excited to see the film, because rather than pontificate, Reeves poses question after question, even though the film has been finished. To me, that’s one of the strengths of documentary features: real life doesn’t necessarily conform to tidy narratives or clear answers to hypotheticals. It’s the one form of cinema in which you can get away with telling an ambiguous story with an ambiguous viewpoint, and not have the majority of the audience revolt. Even so, Reeves refers to the stories inherent in the films he likes to make, suggesting that if he does perceive a definite arc to this quest, it’s an arc whose trajectory he is still in the process of charting.

The foundation of society is culture

Individuals inspired by a great work apply and diversify its vision in their own artistic or intellectual efforts, spreading it to new audiences at different levels of refinement. The transformative power of the great work eventually affects the sensibilities, dreams, or thoughts of all, even if it does so very indirectly and in watered-down form. The perspectives of the seminal works eventually find their way into the general culture-schools, newspapers, movies, television soap operas, novels, and, not least, the imagery of advertising.

Those who enter our minds and imaginations are in a position to make particular ideas, attitudes, behaviors, and experiences seem inviting or repulsive. They can affect our notions of what to admire, what to fear, what to scorn, and what to laugh at, and they can incline us to action that corresponds to these responses.

In an erudite (and wee bit protracted) essay, Claes G. Ryn argues that conservative intellectuals and leaders have largely — and foolishly — abandoned a deep engagement with culture in favor of shorter-term, more practical political dogfights. The result is a conservatism essentially unmoored from its own culture and, therefore, its own soul. Though the essay was originally published in the 90s, the clarity of its call to action is immanently relevant. Via More Than 95 Theses.☕

Nolan apologetics

David Bordwell has mounted a strong defense of Christopher Nolan’s status as a preeminent director against naysayers like Jim Emerson. (Check out the rest of Observation on Film Art’s Nolan entries.) The long and short of it is that, while Nolan might not be particularly daring or sophisticated in his raw technique, he does flex the boundaries of mainstream cinema in order to create enjoyable films that reward critical appreciation.

Can you be a good writer without writing particularly well? I think so. James Fenimore Cooper, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and other significant novelists had many virtues, but elegant prose was not among them. In popular fiction we treasure flawless wordsmiths like P. G. Wodehouse and Rex Stout and Patricia Highsmith, but we tolerate bland or clumsy style if a gripping plot and vivid characters keep us turning the pages. From Burroughs and Doyle to Stieg Larsson and Michael Crichton, we forgive a lot.

Similarly, Nolan’s work deserves attention even though some of it lacks elegance and cohesion at the shot-to-shot level. The stylistic faults I pointed to above and that echo other writers’ critiques are offset by his innovative approach to overarching form. And sometimes he does exercise a stylistic control that suits his broader ambitions. When he mobilizes visual technique to sharpen and nuance his architectural ambitions, we find a solid integration of texture and structure, fine grain and large pattern.

Note that Bordwell doesn’t argue that Nolan’s filmmaking is flawless or terribly polished in the way of many of the more critically lauded auteurs. He spends a great deal of time showing that most of Nolan’s technique has deep, conventional roots while ruminating on how well (or poorly) Nolan utilizes these forms. The gist of his argument is that Nolan’s detail work isn’t quite as meticulous or graceful because he is so focused on the big picture — but the big picture is usually captivating and meticulously constructed in its own way. (In my discussion of Emerson’s critique of The Dark Knight’s chase sequence in relation to film editing, I referred to Nolan’s technique as “gestalt,” which isn’t the same thing as Bordwell is arguing, but the intersection between Bordwell’s appreciation of structure and the way Nolan accumulates moments within that structure is worth further investigation.) At the risk of putting words in Bordwell’s digital pen, Nolan may not be one of “the greats,” but his shortcomings are not necessarily fatal flaws. And those shortcomings are compensated for by the ambition of his narratives and the serendipitous places where Nolan’s craftsmanship operates at the level of his vision. Please read the entire article, especially if you’re invested in the critical discussion of mainstream cinema and Nolan’s place within it.☕

Limitless impatience: the Prometheus cut rate

Over at The Review Diary, Satish Naidu opens his critique of Prometheus with a discussion of its editing: specifically, the way that its shot lengths convey a feeling of impatience and aggression.

Here, it is blunt harsh cutting coupled with classical composition, reducing emotion to information, and destroying any hope for cosmic rumination. What the aesthetic rather inspires is the familiarity of the daily grind of life. As in, the industrial-reality/ structural-philosophy of everyday existence as against the mythology of our cosmic significance. [...] Consider the opening moments, which do not present a patient temporality of the earth ala 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the Darwinian nature, in all its forms, is primarily temporal over and above spatial, and where it waits with limitless patience. As opposed to Mr. Kubrick, whose composition is from the nature’s perspective, Mr. Scott aligns himself with the aggressive instincts of the human, both in their quest for knowledge and survival. He flies over mountains and valleys and rivers, and reaches just-in-time to bear witness to the point in our genesis where a humanoid drinks some black liquid from a vial and disintegrates and falls into river.

This is about the best articulation I’ve yet read of one of the little things that niggled at me during and after the film. I’ve only seen Prometheus once, and I will likely see it a few more times, but it would be very illuminating to compare the shot lengths and editing choices made by Scott in Prometheus against the decisions he made in Alien, and then to further contrast them with 2001. Jim Emerson did an excellent comparative post about these three films, in which he highlighted similarities in production design and composition, and what how those technical choices impact the thematic reception of the films. However, he does not really discuss shot length, which is a shame, given what he says about a single frame from Alien in a follow-up post:

This shot is a beautiful example of the antithesis to what I have labeled “one-thing-at-a-time filmmaking.” The basic composition (roughly symmetrical with an opening in the center) is repeated throughout the movie, as befits a movie about violation, penetration and passages of birth and death. It also gives your eye places to wander, details to soak in. It allows you room to breathe. Throughout, “Alien” gives you ample opportunity to look around and admire the industrial/organic design of the Nostromo, and it entices you to notice nooks and crannies where threats might be lurking.

My question is this: does Scott really give the viewer ample opportunity (in Alien) to look around and admire the design and contemplate the nooks and crannies where threats might be looking? My recollection is that he does, more often than not. But what about Prometheus? Are the shots lengths in that film a bit longer than those of the average summer blockbuster? Probably. But how much time are we actually given? Much of Prometheus felt rushed to me, which seemed at odds with the metaphysically contemplative ideas that were being bounced around. And the way Satish describes the impact makes a lot of sense to me. What is especially surprising is that, based on my potentially inaccurate impressions, the approach Scott takes to many of the scenes in Alien bespeaks more patience than the approach he takes to many of the scenes in Prometheus. The much more lean, nihilistic first film is accorded more awe in its technique than the more expansive, self-consciously spiritual latter film. I wonder if this is a deliberate choice, or if Scott’s impatience to unbind Prometheus after decades of development led him to cut faster and deeper than he should have. For a film about the human exploration of the most profound questions of existence, it seems that Scott doesn’t give his viewers very much time for that exploration.☕

The gods of Prometheus

My wife has a brilliant and, as far as I can tell, rather original theory about the mythos and backstory of Prometheus, which she has kindly posted on her blog. Lots of spoilers, obviously. Her theory doesn’t necessarily mitigate the many flaws in the execution of the film or the misbegotten convolutions of some character motivations (proto-facehugger fist-bump, anyone?), but it is the most coherent explanation of the clues that I’ve yet read. An example:

Just think about the uniforms the Engineers wear. They are wearing synthetic, not organic, body armor that looks strikingly like the Xenomorphs. Remember the medical room scene where they “trick the head into life,” the Scottish Doctor points out that the helmet isn’t an exoskeleton it is synthetic armor. At the end of the film when we finally see the Xenomorph alien we’ve been expecting to see for the last 2.5 hours it immediately struck me that the alien looked more like the Engineer’s synthetic body armor than the Engineer itself. A lot of people are probably citing this as some sort of logical narrative inconsistency. I think otherwise. After all, the Engineers have the figures in the vase room; they would know what it would look like when an Engineer got parasitized by a Xenomorph. I propose that they modeled their body armor, and probably gobs of other things, after the Xenomorph because they knew it was deadly and effective.

One thing I forgot to mention to my wife when I edited her first draft (sorry, Ellen! My bad!) is that her theory doesn’t touch on what happens to  Holloway and Fifield after they’re exposed to the goo. An addendum might be that the Engineers were aware of the mutant zombie side-effect of direct exposure, and that’s why they kept the goo in such a controlled environment. The direct exposure (that is to say, ingestion) of the goo by the first Engineer we see suggests that they must have been aware of it, and that the ritual of drinking it — as opposed to falling face-fist into a puddle of the stuff after your colleague stupidly tries to fist-bump a hissing cousin of the thing from the Death Star’s trash compactor — evolved as a response. As Ellen argues, an awe connected with fear is not uncommon. The mutant Fifield is faster, stronger, and more unkillable than human Fifield, and even though he’s become a hideous monster, a death cult (which is essentially what the Engineers would be, in my wife’s view) might revere such a thing. The Engineer in the opening sequence might not even be attempting to “seed” another world at all: perhaps he’s ingesting the goo in an attempt to become that superhuman freak, or die trying. After all, we don’t see the DNA actually seed anything. All we see is its accelerated corruption and dissipation.

All of this is highly speculative, of course, but I suppose that’s half the fun of grappling with a film like Prometheus in the first place. I’m still on the fence about it myself, but I appreciate that it has spurred a lot of creative, constructive dialogue. Even if I ultimately judge the film to be a failure, I think it’s a successful, interesting failure. In the meantime, check out Ellen’s post, and continue the dialogue.☕

Conservatism, pop culture, and Speed Racer

Acculturated is running a symposium this week that asks if conservatives are “bad at pop culture.”  Editor Emily Esfahani Smith lays it out for the readers:

[W]e set out to ask some prominent writers that we know, many of them conservative, about the relationship between conservatives and pop culture. Some of the questions we asked them were: Are conservatives bad at pop culture? Or, is that a myth? If they are inherently “bad” at pop culture, then why? More broadly, why do conservative writers and pundits appear uninterested in pop culture? Can you think of good examples of conservatives doing pop culture today?

Christianity and science fiction

In his latest “Books Besides the Bible” column, Christ and Pop Culture’s Ethan Bartlett discusses the way that many Christians, in his experience, have expressed skepticism of or displeasure with science fiction as a genre.  Both the column itself and the discussion in the comments are well worth reading.  My own experience has included Christian scoffers and fanboys in relation to SF.  As Bartlett and the commenters make clear, there are plenty of Christian SF fans and creators out there.  One of my favorite blogs is James McGrath’s Exploring Our Matrix, not least because he has spent considerable time exploring the theological implications of my beloved Doctor Who.  By the same token, as commenter Geoffrey R. said, there are many SF enthusiasts who champion the aspects of the genre that celebrate or endorse an explicitly atheistic worldview.  Another of my favorite sites, io9, covers the intersection between religion and science in our culture, and while the bent of the staff overall can’t be characterized as “anti-religion,” I don’t think it would be inaccurate to say that the stance of most writers is unsympathetic.  Bartlett locates the tension in the relationship of Christianity to SF in the collision between religious eschatology (which anticipates the End Times and God’s judgment) and scientific humanism (which anticipates a progressive evolution of the species).  That is certainly a component to it.  The column also mentions that there may be a generational gap between older folks who grew up with SF as a pulpy, inconsequential waste of time and a younger generation that has grown up with SF as a legitimate, dramatic form in which social issues and interpersonal dynamics can be dealt with seriously.  That is also a component.  There’s another one that I didn’t see mentioned, though.

Quotes of the Week: God, games, and player failure

Having just reviewed an anime series where the main character is a self-identified gaming god, and having just decried Roger Ebert’s argument that video games can never be art, I thought I’d do a trifecta by highlighting a few articles touching on the theological implications of video games.  The first quote is from an article by Neil Sorens at Gamasutra, in which he considers the failings of God as a game designer:

With the ability to design both the players and the game, God should have been able to create a paradigm full of synergy and free of buzzwords.  Instead, for many dissatisfied players, it is only hardcoded compulsion that has kept the player base intact.  In fact, many players leave for significant periods of time and turn instead to games with far smaller budgets and ambitions and far less powerful designers to find enjoyment.

The comments on Sorens’s post are equally provocative and entertaining, as various people debate the merits of the thesis that our Creator buggered the job.  “Larry Charles” is confused:

He designed and built an entire Universe… filled with worlds which he did all of the environment art for, populated it with fully functioning, self sustaining and self regulating ecosystems, where just one world in particular, Earth, currently hosts 6,000,000,000 plus users who are always online, in 6 days…

And you wont hire him for your next MMO project?

“Douglas Baker” presents delayed gratification as a transcendental experience:

When we forsake short term pleasure for long term goals, especially ones that are us undefined as “an eternity in heaven” we are forsaking our own default state. We become more than the flesh we are born into, we become closer to God.

In game terms–we level up.

I’d like to quote the article that brought Sorens’s piece to my attention in the first place.  Over at Christ and Pop Culture, G. Christopher Williams has penned a thoughtful response to Sorens, in which the design flaws are reframed in terms of the designer’s artistic goal:

There is a certain kind of courage that an author has that is able to hand over his creation for others to play with, to take some authority over it, or, very simply put, to screw it up. At once, it seems a very bad idea. However, it also suggests that participation with the creation is important, that interaction with a world is desirable to its creator despite the potential for “failure” on the part of the participant, as if there is an interest in the creator in not merely dictating some script of his own design but to see what others will do with it and how they choose to enjoy it or abuse it.

In other words, it’s the nature of the medium that interactivity necessitates some form of player failure.  Again, the comments for that article as equally as worth reading as the piece itself.  Stephen Newport argues that perhaps the metaphor of “God as game designer” is apropos, but not in a good way:

[T]his player [was n]ever asked if he wanted to play the game in the first place! He is never given an option to simply “get off the ride” or merely not exist anymore. No, this designer has created a reality where there are two options: Find the key or be burnt alive! This is neither free will, nor a game where the player matters. Free will would give an option to not take part at all.

So maybe we’re not the players after all; maybe we’re the NPCs.

Let me posit just one more thought experiment.  It is fairly easy to posit God as the ultimate game designer.  But that restricts God to but one role, far removed from the game experience: the celestial clockmaker who winds up his cosmic watch and just lets events unfold as they may, allowing his Creation to rust and wind down, as if the universe were created simply so He would know when to take afternoon tea.  What if God is more immanent than a mere designer?  For the sake of rumination, let’s consider the metaphor of God as the game itself.  In a way, this would make God the code, rather than the coder (although, being God, I suppose he might be the code, the coder, and the NPC visual representations of the code).  Any metaphor we can devise for God will be both inadequate to expressing what exactly he is or how he functions, but every metaphor is an apt expression of the limited terms in which humans can imagine God as a concept.  All I am proposing is that besides the function of Creator, we also consider the function of Sustainer.  Theological problems will still be present, of course, as always.  I’d just like to explore moving a bit beyond quibbling over the flaws of the game design(er) itself and focus on what the game means, how it functions, and how best to play.  Isn’t that one of the highest functions of art in the first place? ☕

Why you don’t like not liking characters

A couple of weeks ago, Dan Swensen posted a brief essay on Surly Muse dealing with one of my favorite topics: the unlikable protagonist.  Broadly speaking, I agree with almost everything Dan says on the subject.  Does a character have to be “likable” or sympathetic?  Absolutely not.  World literature is laden with characters of dubious morals and repellent personalities who are nonetheless rich, rewarding fictional constructions.  However, I have to admit (as nearly everyone will) that, even though I know in my head that a character doesn’t have to be likable in order to be a great character, there are easily dozens, if not hundreds, of stories that I don’t really like very much.  Why?  Obviously: I didn’t like the characters.  The key issue raised by our premise, then, isn’t if characters have to be likable, but why unlikable characters work in some stories and not in others.