Month / December 2012

by Jonathan M

XCOM is NOT a Boss Fight

XCOMIt’s been a while since I’ve written anything about video games but the awesome group blog Arcadian Rhythms were kind enough to host a little something I wrote about the stylistic differences between the original UFO: Enemy Unknown and its recent re-make XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

The main thrust of my argument is that while the original UFO was an emotionally muted and ambiguous affair that conveyed its themes of cataclysmic social change and philosophical crisis using subtle shifts in tone and design, the new XCOMexplores this same set of themes using a stylistic palate that is not so much muted as it is hysterical:

XCOM resembles the Metal Gear Solid series in so far as its approach to narrative is as totalitarian as it is melodramatic. Rather than trusting their material and their audience to find one another in an organic fashion, the writers of XCOM drive home every beat and every emotion as hard as they possibly can. Where the original UFO allowed players to uncover the disconnect between terrifying world and bland corporate office on their own terms, XCOM displays humanity’s precarious position in every colour scheme, every piece of text and every poorly performed and written cut-scene.

Games like XCOM are the product of a creative environment in which there is no room for subtlety or nuance. Like advertisers and political demagogues, AAA game designers are convinced that the only way of making the audience care is by reaching into their heads and forcing them to do so. Once upon a time, game designers used certain top-down narrative techniques to break up the monotony of fighting the same three enemies over and over again. Now, game designers use variations on these same manipulative techniques to wring emotional responses from the same old poorly written stories.

The most worrying thing about this growing tendency towards melodramatic storytelling is that it is a trend that is playing out across pretty much all the major gaming platforms. A fantastic example of this emotional bloat is the difference between the beautifully low-key nihilism of Far Cry 2 and the racist power fantasies of the recently released Far Cry 3. Indeed, while Far Cry 2 had you wandering around killing people and getting progressively closer (both spiritually and geographically) to the nihilistic figure of The Jackal, Far Cry 3 presents this same journey as a sort of spiritual quest in which you become a sort of white Christ figure for a group of noble savages. As with UFO and XCOM, the two Far Cry games demonstrate a growing discomfort around nuance, subtlety and ambiguity. For the modern AAA game designer, a game does not have a message unless the message is spelled out in a reductive and simple-minded fashion.  This unease around ambiguity is beautifully apparent in what must be one of the most extraordinary interviews ever conducted.

John Walker of Rock Paper Shotgun interviews Far Cry 3‘s Jeffrey Yohalem and pretty much accuses him of making a game that is a white power fantasy aimed at 20-something White Americans. Yohalem denies this and bizarrely supports his denial by pointing to all of the story beats and tropes that would lead you to think that the game is a power fantasy:

The sex scene [at the midpoint] – first Jason is shooting at that gigantic monster. He kills the monster, and it jump-cuts to him orgasming with Citra! He’s firing sperm at this gigantic monster, and then suddenly he’s on this alter with Citra, having sex with her, and then he thinks he’s the leader of the tribe and makes the big speech, and it’s his power fantasy! That’s the other thing – it’s all from first-person, so it’s completely unreliable. There’s a reason why Jason is a 25 year old white guy from Hollywood – these are all ideas that are in his head. You’re seeing things through his eyes.

Clearly, Yohalem believes that he is being satirical and yet the game he has helped produce is absolutely indistinguishable from a non-satirical white power fantasy. In other words, while Yohalem may have intended to express ambivalence towards traditional video game narratives, the ambivalence simply did not carry across into the final game. The game is so busy trying to manipulate the audience’s emotions that it simply does not allow for the fact that the game might intend you to call these emotions into question. Yohalem points to a number of clues supporting his ironic interpretation of the game but all of these techniques are drowned out by the game’s desperation to make the player feel like a gosh-darned hero.

Melodrama is an entirely acceptable emotional register when the aim of the game is to engender an authentic emotional response to a particular text. Consider, for example, Luca Guadagnino’s majestic I Am Love (2009) starring Tilda Swinton:

The film tells the story of a woman who marries into a large Italian family. While this family provide the woman with a luxurious lifestyle, it also forces her to exist in a repressed emotional universe that requires her to be be the perfect wife at all times. However, this universe is shattered when the women meets a local chef who unlocks her emotional core and drags her into a whole new world. Let me be clear on this: I Am Love is one of my absolute favourite films; I think Guadagnino’s ability to use music, lighting, architecture and colour to create different emotional worlds is absolutely astonishing and when the woman finally breaks free from her old life, I wept openly in the cinema. I did this because Guadagnino is an absolute master at emotional manipulation.

The difference between I Am Love and Far Cry 3 is that while I Am Love is all about the authentic emotional experience of love, transformation and happiness, Far Cry 3 is supposedly about questioning the very emotions that the game evokes. Far Cry 3‘s problem is that while the aim of the game might have been to question white racial privilege, the style of the game celebrates white power fantasies in much the same way as I Am Love celebrates the transformative power of love. Melodrama is a tradition that allows the audience to experience what the characters are experiencing, it is not a tradition that encourages us to deconstruct our own emotional responses. On one level, it is tempting to simply dismiss Yohalem as a simpleton who doesn’t understand the concept of style but games like Far Cry 3 point to a far deeper problem, namely that AAA game designers are now so used to melodrama that they simply do not realise that there are other emotional registers that might better suit the stories they are attempting to tell.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Basket Case (1982)

BasketCaseTHE ZONE have my review of Frank Henenlotter’s low-budget cult Horror movie Basket Case.

Basket Case is an odd little film whose eccentricities are clearly the product of an era when directors and producers were happy to try anything in the hope that it might attract an audience. In this case, what the director tries is to enliven what is an otherwise unimpressive monster movie with a series of Freudian motifs about the savagery within and the dangerous of hidden trauma:

The connection between the boy and the monster is also made clear at the film’s climax when the boy is forced to literally wrestle with his desire and hatred in order to save the woman he loves. Though somewhat unevenly handled, the suggestion that the monster represents the boy’s hidden desires transforms Basket Case from a poorly made monster movie to a poorly made psychodrama.

However, as I sat down to write this it occurred to me that my attempt to place Basket Case in some sort of historical context was actually validating what can now be thought of as something of a baby boomer origin myth.  Indeed, consider films like Corman’s World, Midnight Movies and Not Quite Hollywood all share this image of 1970s exploitation film-making as a sort of Wild West where ambitious young film makers broke rules and made reputations. While this vision of the 1970s as The-Darwinian-Swamp-from-which-Modern-Hollywood-Did-Crawl is quite evocative it does occur to me that it has emerged at a time when many of those ambitious kids are not only in positions of power but also nearing the end of their careers. After all, how better to lionise a fading Baby Boomer generation than to suggest that their rise to prominence came at a time when real talent was rewarded? Not like nowadays when it’s all about social connections and luck… ahem.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Floating Weeds (1959)

FWFilmJuice have my review of Yasujiro Ozu’s wonderful Floating Weeds.

A colour remake of Ozu’s 1934 film A Story of Floating Weeds, the film tells of a group of actors who arrive in a sea-side town.Initially, the actors present themselves as being in a different world from the residents and so work together to seduce local women. However, as the story unfolds, we soon learn that the head of the company has a pre-existing relationship with a local woman and that this relationship resulted in the birth of a child who has now grown-up.

This is a film all about the boundaries between worlds. The most obvious boundary is the one between the people on the stage and the people in the audience but a more important one is that between the world of the professional actor and the world of the respectable citizen. This perceived boundary serves both to draw the actors together and distance them from the world around them.

The plot revolves around a series of characters who struggle to keep these two worlds separate.  Some consider moving from one world to another, others are repulsed by a world and want to keep it separate from their world of choice and others choose one world only to change their minds and lose themselves in another.  The more the boundaries between worlds are tested, the less substantial the boundaries become and the less substantial the boundaries become, the more the characters come to realise the impact said boundaries have had on their lives.

There are always questions to ask when a widely respected and well-established director suddenly decides to remake one of his best known films (*ahem*). One particularly interesting question is the one posed by the fact that A Story of Floating Weeds was also remade one year earlier by Ozu’s one-time assistant director Shohei Imamura. As I said when I reviewed Stolen Desires back in 2011:

Imamura cut his cinematic teeth as Ozu’s assistant and, when the time came for him to make his own film, it was only natural that he should try to step out of Ozu’s shadow by making it clear how different his sensibilities were to those of his master and how better to make that difference apparent than by directing a vicious attack on one of Ozu’s best-loved films?

If we assume that Imamura’s chaotic and slovenly Stolen Desires was intended as an attempt at subverting the dignity and calm of Ozu’s films, might we also assume that the re-make was intended as something of a response to an uppity former underling? as I say in my review of Floating Weeds, there are moments of violence and melodrama in Floating Weeds that are quite unlike anything you usually find in a film by Yasukiro Ozu. Did Ozu film those scenes with Imamura in mind? Was Floating Weeds perhaps intended as proof that the old man still had it in him to make important films (as with Clouzot’s attempt tomake L’Enfer as a reply to the nouvelle vague directors)? That’s a question for scholars but looking at Floating Weeds and Stolen Desires, it is hard not to speculate about why this remake was made so soon after Stolen Desires.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Gate of Hell (1953)

GateofHellFilmJuice have my review of Teinosuke Kinugasa’s historically significant samurai drama Gate of Hell. I use the term ‘historical significance’ somewhat guardedly as it is one of those pieces of critical terminology which, though apparently quite bland and benign, actually contains a number of harsh judgements.

When people describe a film as being ‘historically significant’, what they generally mean is that watching it allows one to gain a better understanding of the evolution of a particular art form. For example, Jaws has enormous historical significance as Spielberg’s combination of accessibility and technical brilliance provided a blueprint for populist American cinema that continues to shape the films we see in cinemas today. To put it even more crude and reductive terms: You need to see Jaws in order to understand the transition from 1960s Hollywood to 1980s Hollywood.

While Jaws remains a great film, its greatness actually has very little to do with its historical significance. In fact, saying that a film is historically significant in no guarantees that it will make for enjoyable viewing now. Some works enchant with their timeless technical brilliance, others enchant by being of a particular cultural moment and while those cultural moments may linger in our cultural consciousness, it is often hard to experience a historically significant work in the way that made it historically significant to begin with.

Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell is a historically significant film in so far as it is not only a Palme D’Or winner and the first Japanese colour film to be seen outside of Japan, but also one of the first generation of Japanese films to find a European audience. In fact, Gate of Hell was considerably better received in Europe than it was in Japan for reasons that seem pretty obvious to me in hindsight. The main problem is that while the film opens as a visually striking ode to the chaos of war it soon changes into a rather underwhelming (and in some ways quite sexist) costume drama about the constraints of honour. As I put it in my review, this latter section is:

Underwritten, under-directed and spoiled by the concussive brilliance of its opening section, the film fizzles and fades when it should ring the bells and light the fires.

One for scholars and historians rather than modern film fans but the chaos and colour of the opening section does go a surprising way to redeeming it.