erratic play

The long-anticipated (at least by me) Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming has been published! I wrote a couple of entries (on biomechanics and gestural interfaces), and I am delighted to be included with friends and colleagues in what is sure to become an essential reference in the field. As the PR copy for the two-volume set attests, “Video games are far more significant to society than they may seem. They were the first form of interactive audiovisual multimedia, introduced consumers to computer technology, and were one of the main selling points for early home computers, launching the digital age for the general public.” Also: video games are fun. A special thanks to editor Mark J. P. Wolf for undertaking such a massive endeavor, and to John Underkoffler at Oblong for image permission.

I’ve been playing the video game Saints Row: The Third (Volition/THQ, 2011), which hits the screen like a whippet-huffed version of Grand Theft Auto IV. To articulate this comparison in more technical terms: although the core mechanics and urban milieus of the games are similar, the aesthetics of SRTT and GTAIV engender different psychological affects in the player. GTAIV pairs the ludic struggle with a deadly serious protagonist (Niko Bellic), who metes out justice in the gritty alleys of Liberty City. SRTT, however, turns your gangsta loose in the neon, urban jungle of Steelport, stuffed in a bunny suit (if so inclined—this game has big closets) and wielding a giant, lethal phallus like a sword. It’s a Freudian field day.

SRTT gleefully wallows in brash, crass, and absurd storylines and gameplay. And this is all for the good. Perhaps more games could juxtapose—as SRTT does with wild abandon—the ridiculous and the sublime, offering players the very excesses of hilariously bad taste and neck-snapping contradictions we (sensibly) would otherwise reject, and (hopefully) would never encounter in daily life in the first place.

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The “spoiler” claim has emerged in recent years as a curious symptom of modern-day media ubiquity. We want our iPhones, our digital clouds, and our on-demand instant access to everything. We want to be “first!” (a phrase some web-site readers go so far as to vapidly append to stories and blog posts). Except, of course, when we don’t.

The Olympics flap over NBC’s premature promo-ing (and the ensuing network apology) underscores the tension between two cultural expectations media must satisfy: the fastness of information reporting (media as ends), the slowness of mediated experience (media as means). Which is why NBC affiliates are trying to split the difference, encouraging people to watch their televisions as if they were radios: Just look away while the latest results about Michael Phelps display onscreen. One wonders how many people actually follow through on the medium’s startlingly bizarre (and metaphorically suicidal) directive to “stop looking at me.”

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Extrapolating from the current intersection of Hollywood’s aversion to risk and its reliance on computer-generated effects, the future-fiction novel Remake (1995) dramatizes a film industry in which new live-action films are exclusively CGI-generated pastiches of old movies. Want to put yourself in a film and then change the ending? Just visit a video booth at Hollywood and Highland, and you can be the Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca who ditches Claude Raines and strolls into the mist with Ingrid Bergman instead. Such cinema revisionism—by fans and studios alike—is a juicy conceit, which Remake, at a brisk 176 pages, only begins to extract.

Tom, the novel’s protagonist, re-edits old films for a living, removing their references to “AS’s”—addictive substances, such as alcohol and cigarettes—a task reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s gun/walkie-talkie swap in the DVD release of E.T. Rather than recapitulate the plot of Remake, I want to examine a scene in which Tom goes to an industry party and runs into a computer graphics tech named Vincent, who is demonstrating his latest breakthrough: a “weeper simulator” that digitally applies tears to any actor.

As Vincent explains, “Tears are the most difficult form of water simulation to do…. It’s because tears aren’t really water. They’ve got mucoproteins and lysozymes and a high salt content. It affects the index of refraction and makes them hard to reproduce.”

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The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) wasn’t made for you; it was made for me. I mean two things by this overly possessive and hyperbolic assertion: first, hardly anyone seems to appreciate the film. This is one of the great film-reception tragedies of the past decade—a perplexing case that may take a lifetime to redress. Second, the film altered the trajectory of my life. This is another hyperbole within the first one—a recursion of exaggerations—but it rings true as tidy autobiography. To wit: my first analysis of the film helped me earn admission to UCLA’s Cinema and Media Studies program, for which I am eternally grateful.

So it’s no surprise that I’m taking the publication of an academic article I wrote on the film—and the release of Anderson’s latest effort, Moonrise Kingdom—as occasion to inaugurate this blog (if that’s what this is). My analysis of The Life Aquatic draws on my abiding interest in how Anderson appropriates the aesthetics of other media forms (e.g., live theater in Rushmore, the novel in The Royal Tenenbaums) and puts them on the screen, motivating his forays into stylized, artificial art direction narratively through a series of creator-protagonists. At the level of story, I’m drawn to The Life Aquatic for the tension between Zissou’s soured idealism and the colorful, idiosyncratic world of his imagination—a world that lingers only by inertia. At the level of media production and reception, I’m fascinated by what the fiction of The Life Aquatic has to say about reception of the “real” documentary film in general, and the nature/explorer film in particular. Hence, the following article:

‘This is an adventure’: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and the spectacle of nature documentary, New Review of Film and Television Studies (March 2012)

From my abstract: Director Wes Anderson’s film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004) appropriates the life and work of ocean explorer and documentary filmmaker Jacques-Yves Cousteau to fashion the story of an adventure filmmaker adrift in his life and art. In drawing on a real, external referent in Cousteau’s documentary legacy, Anderson’s reflexivity reaches out of its normally hermetic shell to dramatize – and problematize – the production and reception of the nature documentary. The Life Aquatic’s fiction can productively be read as a literal and metaphorical exploration of issues related to documentary as co-constituted by viewer consciousness, and as a commentary on our own expectations and desires in looking at animals through nature documentary.

A special thank you to editor Warren Buckland for publishing the article, and to Michelle, my personal editor (without whom life would be a bad movie).