My dreams have a false but recognizable geography to them. The street I grew up on figures heavily in many of them and the surrounding neighborhood, skewed by dream logic repeats from dream to dream. Some three blocks down the street from my own block, my dreams consistently feature a dark wood paneled restaurant with hotel rooms above them. No such place existed near my house nor ever did but it is consistently there. So too is a house near the end of the cul-de-sac, always abandoned, always dusty and furnitureless with naked wooden beams, worn and pocked by termites. I mention this because my dream last night featured this stable but non existent neighborhood--a shadow of the Walnut Acres in which I grew up. And the feeling of the unheimlische, not just within the dream, but outside it, is important.
I'm in a minivan, driving north on Topanga Canyon blvd and I hit Ventura. I park behind a gas station and get out on foot. As I walk east, way from my little piece of dream childhood, there is a street faire going on. It is night and people are dining al fresco, strings of light illuminating their laughing faces. People are waiting in line to get into bars and there are little dyed silk tents set up from which people are hawking their wares. I can hear this man I'm about to meet for blocks before I see him. He's no one specific, a douchey frat boy who reminds me of no one so much as Topher Grace though his features are indistinct. He's talking about some girl he intends to seduce to his friend. I'm his friend sometimes. Sometimes it's a third person standing near us.
A woman approaches us. She's a short, brunette with a bob--pretty but features are full of anger. She's wearing a tube top and has a deep red scar across her clavicle. The douchebag points at her, "Hey! Look who it is!" He leans in conspiratorially and says "The last time I saw you, you were all tied up." He gives us a sidelong glance and winks. She leaves in a huff. His friend (not me at this point) gives him a fist bump. I go cold. In my head I have a clear vision of that last encounter. She is naked. Bound at her wrists, ankles, throat and waist by heavy iron manacles. They are in some sort of cave and she is seething. This whole experience walks the very edge of consent and I am seething, somehow enraged with an undercurrent of jealousy. Feeling at all desirous in this situation makes me deeply unhappy and fills me with self loathing. The douchebag pulls a butterfly knife from his white slacks and gives a sharp flick of his wrist. He opens up her flesh near the clavicle the source of the scar.
I come to and am back in my car. I'm filled with a blind rage at this man and his casual leer at the woman he disfigured. I'm driving, white knuckled, my face contorted by anger. I've called the police about this man, I know. He won't hurt anyone else but I have to do something myself. I'm fuming, hyperventilating as I drive around. I start running errands to distract myself. I go to a grocery store to buy a palate of soda. I drop the soda off at the McMansion of a girl I went to high school with. She's having a party and I listlessly shuffle by them. All this time a clinical, detached voice is narrating, as though on a handheld tape recorder "The condition is marked by paranoid delusions. It predicates itself on the desire to take revenge, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence of their folly. In this condition they are doomed to play out their fantasies, disconsolate and immune to all help."
I am looking down on all this. Hearing the psychologist describe my confusion, seeing myself seethe and plot action, despairing as the police tell me I have no evidence. I saw him cut her, I think to myself. I can't bring myself to admit it might all be imagined. I wake up.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Monday, February 18, 2013
The Somnambulist's Diary #3
I dreamt, last night, that I was on a snowy promontory, surrounded by men dressed in furs and patchwork armor. We are fending off something horrible that is lurking in the surrounding woods. There are horrid footprints with three toes all around the promontory and I see three of them dragging a sledge on which is the forward half of a bear, frozen intestines dragging behind it. We check its feet but the bear has four toes, not three.
I'm with a woman I love, a woman who doesn't love me. She's pregnant and it's not mine and she shouldn't be here. Not with the things out in the woods, not the with chaos of these men who are getting ready to run from whatever might emerge. We go to her tent and she tells me that I need to help her deliver the baby. I have no idea what I'm doing but she is urgent about it. As I lift up blood-stained furs she's dressed in she begs me not to look at her genitals. I do the best I can, to look away while delivering the baby. As she struggles, I can see shadows on the walls of the tent. Men are shouting and running outside, the thing or things in the woods have arrived and the promontory is unsafe.
When the baby does come it's tiny, misshapen, of indeterminate gender. It's covered in my friend's entrails. Soft, bloody tissues that are seeping into the fur lined floor of the tent. My friend grabs me by the throat, she's pale, her hair has gone white and there are deep bags under her eyes. She tells me I have to take care of her child, to get both of them to safety.
So we leave the tent. There are men torn in half, bleeding out in the snow. I've swaddled her baby in a burlap sack, it disappears among the folds.She's leaning on me, stumbling, leaving a trail of thick, dark blood in the snow behind us as we move forward.
We make it to the woods. the danger is real but we haven't seen it. There are men running past us with torches mad with terror. We come to a village of rope bridges high in the trees. A man is guiding us forward now, telling us to head north for safety. As we move through the village, we can hear an awful keening sound, something like a child's scream or a peacock's wail but shriller and louder. It's the sound of whatever is out there in woods.
It feels like days that we're out there. The sun sets and rises again. My friend is not even walking any more: I'm having to drag her through the snow. Her baby is eerily quiet. We come to a mountain summit and a deep cave yawns in its center. A man in a horned helmet tells us that the only safe passage is down into the caves. It's populated by degenerate troglodytes, things that were once-men, but now see us as enemies. It's horrible, a terrifying trip down into the icy darkness, but it's better than the keening thing slaughtering men up in the woods.
My friend awakens and we stumble down into the dark. One of the once-men finds us sixty paces in. It's face is twisted deformed, blue and black from frostbite. It leads us deeper in, glancing back nervously, chittering and grumbling in its incomprehensible speech. My friend is terrified now, crying, still bleeding, i haven't heard anything from the bundle of burlap in which her newborn child is wrapped. She is wailing and crying and more of the once-men are gathering around us.
As we pass by icy, still ponds deep in the caves, I can see the once-men's reflections. They reflect who they were before the degeneration or perhaps their ancestors. It's unclear. They are men of noble bearing, dressed in green, etched armor, with long moustachios and kind, sad eyes. They speak in high-minded nasal tones and pleasantries, but the words are only echoes, the chittering and slavering of their degenerate selves is what's real.
My friend collapses and I drop the silent burlap bundle to catch her. It lands with a wet noise on the hoarfrost crusted stone. She looks at it, screaning, sobbing, reaching out for it. I wake up.
I'm with a woman I love, a woman who doesn't love me. She's pregnant and it's not mine and she shouldn't be here. Not with the things out in the woods, not the with chaos of these men who are getting ready to run from whatever might emerge. We go to her tent and she tells me that I need to help her deliver the baby. I have no idea what I'm doing but she is urgent about it. As I lift up blood-stained furs she's dressed in she begs me not to look at her genitals. I do the best I can, to look away while delivering the baby. As she struggles, I can see shadows on the walls of the tent. Men are shouting and running outside, the thing or things in the woods have arrived and the promontory is unsafe.
When the baby does come it's tiny, misshapen, of indeterminate gender. It's covered in my friend's entrails. Soft, bloody tissues that are seeping into the fur lined floor of the tent. My friend grabs me by the throat, she's pale, her hair has gone white and there are deep bags under her eyes. She tells me I have to take care of her child, to get both of them to safety.
So we leave the tent. There are men torn in half, bleeding out in the snow. I've swaddled her baby in a burlap sack, it disappears among the folds.She's leaning on me, stumbling, leaving a trail of thick, dark blood in the snow behind us as we move forward.
We make it to the woods. the danger is real but we haven't seen it. There are men running past us with torches mad with terror. We come to a village of rope bridges high in the trees. A man is guiding us forward now, telling us to head north for safety. As we move through the village, we can hear an awful keening sound, something like a child's scream or a peacock's wail but shriller and louder. It's the sound of whatever is out there in woods.
It feels like days that we're out there. The sun sets and rises again. My friend is not even walking any more: I'm having to drag her through the snow. Her baby is eerily quiet. We come to a mountain summit and a deep cave yawns in its center. A man in a horned helmet tells us that the only safe passage is down into the caves. It's populated by degenerate troglodytes, things that were once-men, but now see us as enemies. It's horrible, a terrifying trip down into the icy darkness, but it's better than the keening thing slaughtering men up in the woods.
My friend awakens and we stumble down into the dark. One of the once-men finds us sixty paces in. It's face is twisted deformed, blue and black from frostbite. It leads us deeper in, glancing back nervously, chittering and grumbling in its incomprehensible speech. My friend is terrified now, crying, still bleeding, i haven't heard anything from the bundle of burlap in which her newborn child is wrapped. She is wailing and crying and more of the once-men are gathering around us.
As we pass by icy, still ponds deep in the caves, I can see the once-men's reflections. They reflect who they were before the degeneration or perhaps their ancestors. It's unclear. They are men of noble bearing, dressed in green, etched armor, with long moustachios and kind, sad eyes. They speak in high-minded nasal tones and pleasantries, but the words are only echoes, the chittering and slavering of their degenerate selves is what's real.
My friend collapses and I drop the silent burlap bundle to catch her. It lands with a wet noise on the hoarfrost crusted stone. She looks at it, screaning, sobbing, reaching out for it. I wake up.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
So this is Christmas?
I should be clear upfront: I hate that John Lennon song. In fact, I hate the vast majority of Christmas Carols written after 1950, and most genre covers of the ones written before (read: an R&B version of Baby it's Cold Outside, cough cough, Vanessa Williams, cough cough). In fact it was my dismay at the idea that my hatred for most Christmas music that inspired this blog.
I should also be clear: I am not one of those people that hates (or even merely tolerates) Christmas music generally. I love it. During December, my radio station is tuned to KOST, Los Angeles' own easy listening drivel factory which goes all out with Christmas jungles from Thanksgiving to New Years. I will defend the importance of Christmas music to the death. But it is in increasingly narrow band of it that I bother to listen to and it got me thinking about Christmas and it's personal meaning and whether or not I had tapped into something larger or was just recapitulating every meaning of Christmas cliche blah blah blah.
All Christmases are pastoral: mis-remembered, idealized versions of some distant, indistinct childhood Christmas, now longed for but unrepeatable. My own unachievable Christmas is a conglomeration of the celebrations between four and seven: old enough for me to remember my parents together, young enough to believe in Santa Claus, consistent enough to seem like an immutable tradition.
It is probably all related to my dad's attachment to Santa Claus. My family is not at all religious (my sister and I were raised as secular humanists by ex-Catholic parents) and Santa was one of the few nods to any kind of spiritual understanding of the world. My father and mother went all out with the tradition of his visits: thethank you note for cookies and milk written in flowery script, jingling sleigh bells on our roof, presents from Santa wrapped exquisitely in rich, velvety paper with pine nettles and holly sprigs. This was supplemented by an obsession with Alden Perkes' The Santa Claus Book, a kids primer on Santa that included daily routines, floor plans for his North Pole Compound and (my personal favorite) a slightly terrifying anthropological record of the various sub-species of elves (the ancient Egyptian Cyclops Elf was particularly frightening to me).
We did not have a specific family mythology of Santa Claus. The Alden Perkes book made for a good foundation, but it did not map directly on to anything I knew from other media sources. Santa Claus was not St. Nicholas, nor was he the Archbishop of Spain, or even the Clement Clark Moore Santa who rode in a red sleigh, finger on his nose etc. He was, if anything, closest the Santa Claus envisioned by L. Frank Baum in his 1902 novella, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. I never read the novella but I was enraptured by Rankin and Bass' 1985 claymation version. In it, Santa is raised by fictional pagan gods and faeries and sent into the world with the desire to improve the lot of his fellow mortals. He is rewarded by the gods with the mantle of immortality that transforms him into a woodland spirit who can deliver toys to children through the ages of eternity.
I haven't really ever settled on what vision of this Santa is. He is vaguely Germanic or Scandanavian, not un-related to Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Present, a feral spirit, living in the deep snowy woods, dressed in green, swaddled in furs, sometimes adorned with antlers or a wreath of candles and holly. He is not a fearful figure, but he is not entirely of this world. The toy-delivery thing often gets lost in the shuffle. He is a manifestation of my fantasy of woodland winters: of the space of light and homely hearths that is nestled in a cabin, snowed in by monstrous drifts. I suppose, in that way, it parallels the christian spirit of Christmas out of dark times comes the brightest light etc etc. It's really an antler based thing for me, however.
Psychologically, I am sure that this somehow is a need for the safety of my family, unbroken by divorce. I transplant the wholeness of the house to the image of a space of comfort holding out against the cold, snowy darkness without. But it exists, in a very real way, outside of that need. My parents, after all, spend Christmas together now. The need to create a fantasy space is gone. But the fantasy is too powerful not to endure.
Perhaps that is why I throw a yearly "Victorian Gothic Christmas." It's an attempt to aesthetically reconcile that childhood Christmas with an adult, non-saccharin celebration of the holiday. In bringing out the holiday's intrinsic darkness, perhaps we can summon an evening of light, even light phrased as drunken debauch.
My dad and I recently, independently heard a story on This American Life wherein a family takes this kind of care and concern for perpetuating the Santa myth to a somewhat distressing extreme. My dad apologized to me after listening, fearing he had done the same to me. I listened to it thinking "there is no way I won't turn into that father."
I haven't really ever settled on what vision of this Santa is. He is vaguely Germanic or Scandanavian, not un-related to Dickens' Ghost of Christmas Present, a feral spirit, living in the deep snowy woods, dressed in green, swaddled in furs, sometimes adorned with antlers or a wreath of candles and holly. He is not a fearful figure, but he is not entirely of this world. The toy-delivery thing often gets lost in the shuffle. He is a manifestation of my fantasy of woodland winters: of the space of light and homely hearths that is nestled in a cabin, snowed in by monstrous drifts. I suppose, in that way, it parallels the christian spirit of Christmas out of dark times comes the brightest light etc etc. It's really an antler based thing for me, however.
Psychologically, I am sure that this somehow is a need for the safety of my family, unbroken by divorce. I transplant the wholeness of the house to the image of a space of comfort holding out against the cold, snowy darkness without. But it exists, in a very real way, outside of that need. My parents, after all, spend Christmas together now. The need to create a fantasy space is gone. But the fantasy is too powerful not to endure.
Perhaps that is why I throw a yearly "Victorian Gothic Christmas." It's an attempt to aesthetically reconcile that childhood Christmas with an adult, non-saccharin celebration of the holiday. In bringing out the holiday's intrinsic darkness, perhaps we can summon an evening of light, even light phrased as drunken debauch.
My dad and I recently, independently heard a story on This American Life wherein a family takes this kind of care and concern for perpetuating the Santa myth to a somewhat distressing extreme. My dad apologized to me after listening, fearing he had done the same to me. I listened to it thinking "there is no way I won't turn into that father."
Christmas isn't a religious conviction. It is not a space to reconnect with family. It is a set of aesthetic imperatives, to stand against the oncoming dark and live.
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Oh What a Shame
It's been a while. I've been thinking a lot about Ke$ha lately. Actually for years.
Anyone who knows me knows that I have a completely unabashed love of pop music. Over the years I have tried to make it into some grandiose statement about engagement with the cultural zeitgeist: oh Pop music is like Kundera's definition of kitsch, oh pop music is the end point of a vast alchemy that transmute incoherent emotion into something tangible--an anthem of consistent, relatable feeling. It's likely that all of it is bullshit and I mostly like listening to easy, un-challenging music. But with Ke$ha (whose spelling of choice is such an elegant solution to the Prince problem) I feel some kind of uber-connection. I should explain, first of all, that I am kind of a prude. Not in terms of my behavior which has occasionally detoured pretty heavily into vice-alley. But those behaviors are marked with a huge amount of self-loathing and a too-perceptible judgement of others. I am my own worst slut-shamer. I'm not proud of it. Consider this blog an apology.
But with Ke$ha... there is something in her complete indulgence in trash that transports me. She's not adjectivally trashy, she is trashiness: primally trashy. Ur-trash. And I admit, I get a guilty buzz out of it. But I also think it's more than that. So, without further ado, here is my analysis, for better or for worse of her newest single: "Die Young." Here is the youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCTfZUEUNxA
We are a culture of binaries and the club party / loser square binary usually associates the former with wild hedonism, abandon, freedom, and meaninglessness. It's a passionate defense of nihilism, usually. We're doing this because we can, because it's fun and because none of it matters. Monogamy is tyranny. Fidelity is a curse. Sobriety is a fiction. As a result, I am surprised to find that "Die Young" is, essentially, a desperate search for connection in a world of uncertain signifiers and painful brevity.
Let's start with the opening lines (which happen to be the chorus):
"I hear your heart beat to the beat of the drums./
Oh what a shame that you came here with someone./
So while you're hear in my arms,/
Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young."
It's not, on the surface, such a strange message. She is hardly the first artist to make the point that dying young is preferable to growing old. Alphaville did quite a good job of that twenty-five or so years previously. What is worth paying attention to here is the recognition of the club being a liminal space. In previous songs, Ke$ha expresses her hedonism not as a patronage but as a lifestyle. Who can forget that she "brushed her teeth with a bottle of Jack" in her first big hit. Here however there are some spatial and temporal limitations. She recognizes that her would-be lover "came here with someone" and, even more importantly, she characterizes it as "a shame." The narrative turns on the idea that their time is limited. Those limitations have everything to do with the world outside the club. The "someone" that the object of the narrator's affection came with is never defined. Perhaps it is a girlfriend, or a wife or just a date. She spells doom for the narrator's ambitions. Whatever moment of connection is being posited must, by necessity, end--maybe even at the end of the song. Rather than being a lament for the things that cannot last, Ke$ha proposes that they exist fully within the limited venue provided them by fate. "So while you're hear in my arms, let' make the most of the night like we're gonna die young," she says. The listener must be most struck by the desperation in the line (the crux of my argument here). Given that the exploration of their attraction must entirely exist within the confines of the dance, Ke$ha imagines that only death waits on the other side of that embrace. To imagine a life where her would-be lover returns to the person he arrived with is to imagine an abyss. Unlike most songs touting the virtues of youth and dying before one ages, this is a plea enjoying that which is limited and unsustainable.
The cynics among us may want to characterize these lines as a reinforcement of the easy-hedonism that characterizes most of the Ke$ha canon. Reading the "while you're here in my arms" line as something more akin to "Let's grope before your girlfriend gets mad." There is certainly some evidence for this reading. The first verse states, quite clearly:
"Young hearts, out our minds,/
Runnin' like we outta time./
Wild childs lookin' good./
Livin' hard just like we should./
Don't care who's watching when we tearing it up. (You Know)/
That magic that we got nobody can touch. (For sure!)"
Essentially, this relationship, because it occurs in a public space, must be shameless and, in it's shamelessness meaningless. The cynic wants to read "don't care who's watching" as a lurid, voyeuristic invitation. They are wild children whose mid-club coupling is only the basest expression of a feral lust.
As I said, validity in the above-reading and certainly in-line with Ke$ha's previous expressions of a world of endless hedonism. I would like to focus in on the second and final verse, however.
"Young hunks taking shots,/
Stripping down to dirty socks./
Music up, gettin' hot,/
Kiss me, give me all you've got./
It's pretty obvious that you've got a crush. (you know)/
That magic in your pants is making me blush. (for sure)"
It's a rather stark denial of expectations. Ke$ha gives us a world of typical club sexuality: free-flowing alcohol, removal of clothing (note the double entendre in the use of the word "dirty"), a crescendo of libidinous music and actual physical contact. When we get to the final couplet, however, we see a hint of something unexpected. Though the couplet primarily treats on her lover's erection, she ends the line with the assertion that his physical arousal is "making [her] blush." Despite the claustrophobic sexuality all around them and her previous assertion of the public nature of their coupling, the most intimate moment of possibility--the recognition of his actual sexual capability, transforming desire into action--is rendered as innocent. The narrator blushes at his arousal. She is caught off guard by the revelation that their desire could be made manifest. Though the entire tableau is Dionysiac and debauched, at its core is a kernel of un-jaded, unexpressed erotic exploration that can still cause the "wild child" to "blush."
This moment is quickly drowned out by another stanza in which she asserts:
"Looking for some trouble tonight. (Yeah?)/
Take my hand i'll show you the wild side,/
Like it's the last night of our lives. (Uh huh)/
We'll keep dancing till we die."
The narrator goes back to playing the role of half-feral seductress, perhaps as an overcompensation for the discomfort experienced in realizing she still had the capacity to experience sexuality in a way that wasn't constructed by the jaundiced eye of the club environs. She describes her lover as a source of "trouble" and her purview as being "the wild side." I see it as Ke$ha's attempt to defend against the critic that is made uncomfortable by her expressed discomfort. Again, death becomes the only viable way out of the situation. Though she employs a simile at first, "Like it's the last night of our lives," she quickly turns it into metaphoric call to action, "we'll keep dancing 'till we die." The line is repeated in ghostly echoes several times "die young, die young." By the end, it is not even a request, it is a command. Dying young is not, like Alphaville professes, the answer to the indignities of ageing, it is the only way make the impermanent eternal.
We then return to the chorus which is repeated, sometimes even layering over itself in the lines' desire to be spoken. It is a shame. A shame that a world outside the club even exists. The music will stop and the narrator and her lover will have to part ways, he must go back to the "someone" he came with. She must accept that this return to blissful, erotic innocence must end. She will again become one of the jaded, shot-taking dancers, stripped "down to dirty socks" and unable to blush at the "magic" in the pants of her next partner. In a situation like this, clearly death begins to look attractive.
The genre of trashy club songs relies upon the amorality (but not the immortality) of it's protagonists. They are lost in a world of drink and drug-addled hedonism that removes any culpability for the impulsive actions of a moment. Ke$ha has presented her heroines as mindlessly cruel pleasure seekers who cannot be blamed for their fickle affections because they are unable to be any different than their environs demand. But in this song, there is a profound vulnerability. It is not only the cuckold and his/her partner that suffers. The temptress/cad is shown to exist in a world of impermanent objects and desires that do not change because they are hollow. Rather, these desires change because they must--because they are acted on by outside forces. Ke$ha is the abandoned, even in the center of her own comfortably careless milieu. Those things that cannot last, despite their erotic intensity and exploratory innocence, take their toll. Better to die before the music stops than to continue in such an endlessly ephemeral vein.
Brava, Ke$ha! You seemlessly blend the ribald with the poignant and yes: it is a shame that you came here with someone.
Anyone who knows me knows that I have a completely unabashed love of pop music. Over the years I have tried to make it into some grandiose statement about engagement with the cultural zeitgeist: oh Pop music is like Kundera's definition of kitsch, oh pop music is the end point of a vast alchemy that transmute incoherent emotion into something tangible--an anthem of consistent, relatable feeling. It's likely that all of it is bullshit and I mostly like listening to easy, un-challenging music. But with Ke$ha (whose spelling of choice is such an elegant solution to the Prince problem) I feel some kind of uber-connection. I should explain, first of all, that I am kind of a prude. Not in terms of my behavior which has occasionally detoured pretty heavily into vice-alley. But those behaviors are marked with a huge amount of self-loathing and a too-perceptible judgement of others. I am my own worst slut-shamer. I'm not proud of it. Consider this blog an apology.
But with Ke$ha... there is something in her complete indulgence in trash that transports me. She's not adjectivally trashy, she is trashiness: primally trashy. Ur-trash. And I admit, I get a guilty buzz out of it. But I also think it's more than that. So, without further ado, here is my analysis, for better or for worse of her newest single: "Die Young." Here is the youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCTfZUEUNxA
Let's start with the opening lines (which happen to be the chorus):
"I hear your heart beat to the beat of the drums./
Oh what a shame that you came here with someone./
So while you're hear in my arms,/
Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young."
It's not, on the surface, such a strange message. She is hardly the first artist to make the point that dying young is preferable to growing old. Alphaville did quite a good job of that twenty-five or so years previously. What is worth paying attention to here is the recognition of the club being a liminal space. In previous songs, Ke$ha expresses her hedonism not as a patronage but as a lifestyle. Who can forget that she "brushed her teeth with a bottle of Jack" in her first big hit. Here however there are some spatial and temporal limitations. She recognizes that her would-be lover "came here with someone" and, even more importantly, she characterizes it as "a shame." The narrative turns on the idea that their time is limited. Those limitations have everything to do with the world outside the club. The "someone" that the object of the narrator's affection came with is never defined. Perhaps it is a girlfriend, or a wife or just a date. She spells doom for the narrator's ambitions. Whatever moment of connection is being posited must, by necessity, end--maybe even at the end of the song. Rather than being a lament for the things that cannot last, Ke$ha proposes that they exist fully within the limited venue provided them by fate. "So while you're hear in my arms, let' make the most of the night like we're gonna die young," she says. The listener must be most struck by the desperation in the line (the crux of my argument here). Given that the exploration of their attraction must entirely exist within the confines of the dance, Ke$ha imagines that only death waits on the other side of that embrace. To imagine a life where her would-be lover returns to the person he arrived with is to imagine an abyss. Unlike most songs touting the virtues of youth and dying before one ages, this is a plea enjoying that which is limited and unsustainable.
The cynics among us may want to characterize these lines as a reinforcement of the easy-hedonism that characterizes most of the Ke$ha canon. Reading the "while you're here in my arms" line as something more akin to "Let's grope before your girlfriend gets mad." There is certainly some evidence for this reading. The first verse states, quite clearly:
"Young hearts, out our minds,/
Runnin' like we outta time./
Wild childs lookin' good./
Livin' hard just like we should./
Don't care who's watching when we tearing it up. (You Know)/
That magic that we got nobody can touch. (For sure!)"
Essentially, this relationship, because it occurs in a public space, must be shameless and, in it's shamelessness meaningless. The cynic wants to read "don't care who's watching" as a lurid, voyeuristic invitation. They are wild children whose mid-club coupling is only the basest expression of a feral lust.
As I said, validity in the above-reading and certainly in-line with Ke$ha's previous expressions of a world of endless hedonism. I would like to focus in on the second and final verse, however.
"Young hunks taking shots,/
Stripping down to dirty socks./
Music up, gettin' hot,/
Kiss me, give me all you've got./
It's pretty obvious that you've got a crush. (you know)/
That magic in your pants is making me blush. (for sure)"
It's a rather stark denial of expectations. Ke$ha gives us a world of typical club sexuality: free-flowing alcohol, removal of clothing (note the double entendre in the use of the word "dirty"), a crescendo of libidinous music and actual physical contact. When we get to the final couplet, however, we see a hint of something unexpected. Though the couplet primarily treats on her lover's erection, she ends the line with the assertion that his physical arousal is "making [her] blush." Despite the claustrophobic sexuality all around them and her previous assertion of the public nature of their coupling, the most intimate moment of possibility--the recognition of his actual sexual capability, transforming desire into action--is rendered as innocent. The narrator blushes at his arousal. She is caught off guard by the revelation that their desire could be made manifest. Though the entire tableau is Dionysiac and debauched, at its core is a kernel of un-jaded, unexpressed erotic exploration that can still cause the "wild child" to "blush."
This moment is quickly drowned out by another stanza in which she asserts:
"Looking for some trouble tonight. (Yeah?)/
Take my hand i'll show you the wild side,/
Like it's the last night of our lives. (Uh huh)/
We'll keep dancing till we die."
The narrator goes back to playing the role of half-feral seductress, perhaps as an overcompensation for the discomfort experienced in realizing she still had the capacity to experience sexuality in a way that wasn't constructed by the jaundiced eye of the club environs. She describes her lover as a source of "trouble" and her purview as being "the wild side." I see it as Ke$ha's attempt to defend against the critic that is made uncomfortable by her expressed discomfort. Again, death becomes the only viable way out of the situation. Though she employs a simile at first, "Like it's the last night of our lives," she quickly turns it into metaphoric call to action, "we'll keep dancing 'till we die." The line is repeated in ghostly echoes several times "die young, die young." By the end, it is not even a request, it is a command. Dying young is not, like Alphaville professes, the answer to the indignities of ageing, it is the only way make the impermanent eternal.
We then return to the chorus which is repeated, sometimes even layering over itself in the lines' desire to be spoken. It is a shame. A shame that a world outside the club even exists. The music will stop and the narrator and her lover will have to part ways, he must go back to the "someone" he came with. She must accept that this return to blissful, erotic innocence must end. She will again become one of the jaded, shot-taking dancers, stripped "down to dirty socks" and unable to blush at the "magic" in the pants of her next partner. In a situation like this, clearly death begins to look attractive.
The genre of trashy club songs relies upon the amorality (but not the immortality) of it's protagonists. They are lost in a world of drink and drug-addled hedonism that removes any culpability for the impulsive actions of a moment. Ke$ha has presented her heroines as mindlessly cruel pleasure seekers who cannot be blamed for their fickle affections because they are unable to be any different than their environs demand. But in this song, there is a profound vulnerability. It is not only the cuckold and his/her partner that suffers. The temptress/cad is shown to exist in a world of impermanent objects and desires that do not change because they are hollow. Rather, these desires change because they must--because they are acted on by outside forces. Ke$ha is the abandoned, even in the center of her own comfortably careless milieu. Those things that cannot last, despite their erotic intensity and exploratory innocence, take their toll. Better to die before the music stops than to continue in such an endlessly ephemeral vein.
Brava, Ke$ha! You seemlessly blend the ribald with the poignant and yes: it is a shame that you came here with someone.
Monday, April 2, 2012
A Clash of Kings
I just got finished watching the first episode of Game of Thrones season 2 for the third time. This is nothing new for me; I am the type who likes to watch TV episodes multiple times. I figure that this season I owe it to myself to organize my thoughts better via blogging. I mean, after all, Game of Thrones is my favorite television show and, I think, one of the best on television period.
In terms of spoilers, I don’t intend to spoil anything. I make some reference to the existence of later books, and hint at some differences in motivation, but I do not explicitly discuss anything that has not occurred thus far on the TV show.
I should preface this by saying that I grew up reading George RR Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” books, upon which the show is based. I started reading when I was seventeen (just after the 3rd book came out) and in the intervening years I have re-read them about five times (though, of course I have only read the 5th one, which came out this summer once). I am something of an odd bird, I take it, among diehard fans of any sort of genre fiction in that I do not have a desperate need for accuracy in adaptations. In fact, I find that a slavish fettishization of detail is one of the most annoying things about most fans. Between Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and, now, the Hunger Games, I have had an earful from irate fans who don’t understand a simple truth about film and television: every act of adaptation is an interpretation. It’s not merely a matter of budgetary concerns and hubris (though the writers, producers and directors of films and shows can certainly be hubristic when it comes to putting their stamp on a property). At it’s core, any story has to be taken on the terms that work best for it. Those will never be the same across media. I remember way back in 2000, fans on theonering.net complaining that the Lord of the Rings films didn’t need to even be written because the dialog was perfectly transportable as is. Obviously they are wrong. Obviously I am delighted by the way that Benioff and Weiss have enhanced, adapted and interpreted Martin’s prose to work on television, but I trust them to tell a parallel story to the one I grew up with and so dearly love.
And parallel it is. The second season asserted it’s movement away from slavish interpretation. Events have been jumbled around. The timeline has been altered slightly and characters have been substituted. But all of it seems in service of covering necessary ground while leaving time for character moments. My favorite scenes from the first season of Game of Thrones were those that did not explicitly occur in the novel but could have. Martin’s close 3rd person with its multiple point-of-view characters creates a fantastic sense of occultation in the prose. Major events are often simply rumors. Characters are unable to tell truth from fiction and we get descriptions of the same occurance from four or five different unreliable sources. That doesn’t work for TV of course, and Benioff and Weiss wisely fill in those gaps with small, telling character moments. Those are employed liberally and to great effect here in season 2’s opening.
This brings us to the controversial Littlefinger-Cersei scene which many fans have complained about. I will admit that Littlefinger’s brashness in dealing with Cersei, his bold assertions seem a little out of character for the master of subtlety but I didn’t mind that small inconsistency in character for the effect it produced. Martin’s novels are complicated and feature characters with conflicted goals and motivations, but there is an aspect of it that can always be boiled down to the House Maxim’s. Morality is never balck and white and the characters are never simple, but the world he writes seems to believe in the wisdom of simple phrases which litter his page. Littlefinger’s assertion that “Knowledge is Power” is not a stand-in for the whole of his character but it helps distill him, in part, for an audience who is trying to grasp at his methods and motivations. Cersei’s awesome retort that “power is power” is not merely a distillation of her character, it is a stand-in for the show as a whole. GoT’s characters believe in the methodologies and values that comfort them but it is power alone that rules everyone at the end of the day. I may not have liked Littlefinger’s unsubtlety in that moment, but showing us the fragility of his position was excellent. Spies and secrets may help you protect yourself but everyone is fragile in the end and a knife kills a spymaster as easily as a peasant.
I also felt like the scene helped to highlight the ways in which the costumers have done an excellent job. Lannister household guards are used as faceless spooks throughout the books. Their loyalty to the lions is rarely questioned and their anonymity makes them scary. It’s a tried and true device—Nazi foot soldiers in gasmasks, hideously uniform orks, killer robot legions—but an effective one. The way in which the Lannister helmet hides the eyes of its wearer makes them much more effective at standing in for that faceless, terrifying horde. It’s the same with the Gold Cloaks and their chainmail veils. Though, as Sean Collins expertly points out in his review over at Rolling Stone, the eyes are left obscured but visible so that we can see the look of disgust on the faces of a couple tasked with murdering children.
Compared with the novels, the show seems to be making a good faith attempt at giving us a reason to be sympathetic towards Cersei. Not that Martin utterly discounts any sympathy we as audience members might have for her, but the show gives us moments of vulnerability that the Cersei of the books is determined to ignore. In a lot of ways I feel like Cersei is Ned Stark’s shadow in this incarnation. Both are characters who fanatically believe that the world ought to be a certain way (Ned believes it should be honorable and merciful, Cersei believes it should be free from gender inequality) and the blind spot for both is the idea that others wont accept their world view. Cersei may play more underhandedly and dishonorably than Ned but she seems to have this painful lack of self awareness when it comes to others perceiving her as no different from a male ruler. She may be out for her children’s best interests but when Joffrey accuses her of treason for slapping him, you can see it written across her face that she did not anticipate his discounting her as a mere woman.
And that, I think is the key to making Cersei so compelling in this telling. Unlike Catelyn Stark and, to a certain extent, Sansa, she cannot accept her role as second class citizen. She is as smart and capable as her brothers and certainly more invested in ruling than either of them, but she will never be Queen in the way she wants and, as a result, she can only live vicariously through her monstrous son. Tyrion’s crack about her being the disappointing child may have elicited a chuckle from me at first, but it drove home the sad truth of the matter, neither can really ever be Jaime in their father’s eyes. And Jaime, ironically, has no interest in power.
I have never felt this way but it has come to my attention that many fans really hate Sansa and Catelyn, preferring Danaerys, Arya and Brienne for their female paragons in the novel. I always suspected that part of it had to do with the lack of a desire to coopt masculine power in the case of the former two. Arya, Danaerys and Brienne all break gender boundaries and succeed where men fail. In the patriarchal rape culture of Martin’s Westeros, that kind of success story makes for some compelling moments of ass-kicking. But for me, Catelyn and Sansa represent a kind of quiet strength that often goes overlooked. They are the 3rd wave feminists of the bunch, getting power and influence without trailblazing or co-opting an identity that the society they live in abhors. Now, of course, you need both to make a decent point about strong women in a world dominated by men and in no way would I argue that Sansa and Cat are the superior characters, but I think for fans of fantasy, who read novels predicated on exceptionalism, it can be hard to see the merits in women who break no boundaries but still stay true to their goals, values and loved ones.
Cersei, as she is written in the television show seems to be an interesting commentary on that problem. She is, arguably, the most powerful woman in Westeros and she came by that power through the means traditionally open to women in severe patriarchies: marriage, motherhood, sex appeal. But within that schema, she is seeking to be something more. She is not wielding the sword herself, but in that moment, it’s the blunt force of her martial might that decides whether or not Littlefinger lives and she makes sure that he knows it. I am really excited to see where they take her this season and in the coming years. Cersei has always been reviled, but I think her humanity is really well represented by Heady, Benioff and Weiss.
I also am really delighted by Jack Gleeson’s Joffrey. I remember during the 2000 Oscar season, having a long conversation about the difference between Benicio del Toro’s performance in Traffic and Joaquin Phoenix’s in Gladiator. Del Toro took home the Oscar that year but a friend pointed out to me that the role was written for Oscar Gold. He plays a conflicted cop trying to walk the line between a love for small town Mexico that leads him into drug trafficking and a respect for the law that would keep his neighborhood poor. It’s a role that was all about conflict, pained expressions and internal conflict playing out on one’s face. And, credit where credit is due, Del Toro played it well. Joaquin Phoenix on the other hand, had a far more difficult job and produced, what I thought was a far more interesting performance. In the hands of a Christpher Walken or Jeremy Irons, Phoenix’s Commodus might have been transmuted into a snarling, foaming supervillain. As the unrelentingly petty emperor of Rome it was a thankless and bland role as written and yet, we pitied him. In Phoenix’s hands, we never liked Commodus but we understood why he was the way he was. Not a flat villain, he was tortured, sad, relatable, if only for a moment, before throwing away our sympathy by doing something even more cruel.
Both the Joffrey of the show and, last year, Harry Lloyd’s Viserys, have had this similarly difficult role. Both are thoroughly monstrous. Gleefully, palpably cruel and insane. Both inspired so much loathing from fans. And yet, both have their moments of, if not relatability then at least sympathy. Viserys’ bathtub sex scene with Doreah and confrontation with Jorah Mormont last season made that clear. For a single moment, he comes across as a human being, remembering his childhood, realizing his own inability to do things the right way, before he threw it all away again in a storm of attempted rape and infanticide. This season we get some of the same with Joffrey. There is just the slightest hint of real teenage angst and rebellion underneath all that insanity. We see it when he confronts his mother about his own parentage the slightest flicker of awareness that he is trapped in his own body, a body born of incest, saddled with a dyspeptic, inbred madness. In the novel, we only ever get the story of the purge of Baratheon bastards second hand from Tyrion. Being so predisposed against his sister and nephew it is described only in broadly condemnatory terms. But here, in this first episode there is a real sense of sadness that precedes even the horrifying slaughter of children. Cersei calls Joffrey’s rule a claim to the throne and he retorts that he is the king, it’s not a claim. I felt the slightest twinge of pity for Joff, lied to all his life, trying to come to terms with the fact that the power he was bred to believe he was born to, might in fact be a complete fabrication. That said, I hate Joffrey all the more this season and that must be handed to Jack Gleeson as well. There aren’t many fourteen year olds who can elicit such rage from so many millions of people and that kid is doing an awesome job of it. Hopefully, he won’t be saddled with Maragret Hamilton syndrome later in life, reviled by people on the street for being confused with a role he nailed.
That gap, between Cersei and Joff’s conversation and the slaughter of innocents is an important one. I do not know if Benioff and Weiss plan to let us know whether the idea was Joff’s as a way of protecting himself from the truth of the matter: all his alleged half siblings look nothing like him, or Cersei, in an act of bloody atonement for having led her son astray as to how safe he was on the throne, but both answers work for me. Those last scenes, of gold cloaks storming private homes and whorehouses and murdering teenagers, children and babies all to protect one insane king from further slander and libel, really stuck with me in a way it did not in the novels. The episode ends with a reprise of King Robert’s theme from the first season, which he first heard as the entire court arrives in Winterfell. In that first season its stentorian tones and relentless beat helped us understand the majesty and power the king commanded. It was theater and bluster and bravado, the awe-inspiring sight of the king, the essence of divine right—essentially the core of the show, for without some kind of exceptionality, why follow a bad king in the first place. Here, eleven episodes later, and replayed in a minor key, it is the dark underside of that majesty. The power to command is also the power to destroy. Joffrey (as an inverse of Jon Snow) is still a Baratheon (you may not have my blood, but you have my name) and in the name of Baratheon legitimacy, all the other traces of that awe inspiring house are gutted, drowned and beaten. The sublimity that characterizes kingship is as much fear as it is wonder.
The familiar faces and new ones of Season 2 were all great, but, for my money, the episode belonged to Joff and Cersei, two painfully self-deluded characters, hideously cruel but, in the show at least, strangely sympathetic.
In terms of spoilers, I don’t intend to spoil anything. I make some reference to the existence of later books, and hint at some differences in motivation, but I do not explicitly discuss anything that has not occurred thus far on the TV show.
I should preface this by saying that I grew up reading George RR Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” books, upon which the show is based. I started reading when I was seventeen (just after the 3rd book came out) and in the intervening years I have re-read them about five times (though, of course I have only read the 5th one, which came out this summer once). I am something of an odd bird, I take it, among diehard fans of any sort of genre fiction in that I do not have a desperate need for accuracy in adaptations. In fact, I find that a slavish fettishization of detail is one of the most annoying things about most fans. Between Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and, now, the Hunger Games, I have had an earful from irate fans who don’t understand a simple truth about film and television: every act of adaptation is an interpretation. It’s not merely a matter of budgetary concerns and hubris (though the writers, producers and directors of films and shows can certainly be hubristic when it comes to putting their stamp on a property). At it’s core, any story has to be taken on the terms that work best for it. Those will never be the same across media. I remember way back in 2000, fans on theonering.net complaining that the Lord of the Rings films didn’t need to even be written because the dialog was perfectly transportable as is. Obviously they are wrong. Obviously I am delighted by the way that Benioff and Weiss have enhanced, adapted and interpreted Martin’s prose to work on television, but I trust them to tell a parallel story to the one I grew up with and so dearly love.
And parallel it is. The second season asserted it’s movement away from slavish interpretation. Events have been jumbled around. The timeline has been altered slightly and characters have been substituted. But all of it seems in service of covering necessary ground while leaving time for character moments. My favorite scenes from the first season of Game of Thrones were those that did not explicitly occur in the novel but could have. Martin’s close 3rd person with its multiple point-of-view characters creates a fantastic sense of occultation in the prose. Major events are often simply rumors. Characters are unable to tell truth from fiction and we get descriptions of the same occurance from four or five different unreliable sources. That doesn’t work for TV of course, and Benioff and Weiss wisely fill in those gaps with small, telling character moments. Those are employed liberally and to great effect here in season 2’s opening.
This brings us to the controversial Littlefinger-Cersei scene which many fans have complained about. I will admit that Littlefinger’s brashness in dealing with Cersei, his bold assertions seem a little out of character for the master of subtlety but I didn’t mind that small inconsistency in character for the effect it produced. Martin’s novels are complicated and feature characters with conflicted goals and motivations, but there is an aspect of it that can always be boiled down to the House Maxim’s. Morality is never balck and white and the characters are never simple, but the world he writes seems to believe in the wisdom of simple phrases which litter his page. Littlefinger’s assertion that “Knowledge is Power” is not a stand-in for the whole of his character but it helps distill him, in part, for an audience who is trying to grasp at his methods and motivations. Cersei’s awesome retort that “power is power” is not merely a distillation of her character, it is a stand-in for the show as a whole. GoT’s characters believe in the methodologies and values that comfort them but it is power alone that rules everyone at the end of the day. I may not have liked Littlefinger’s unsubtlety in that moment, but showing us the fragility of his position was excellent. Spies and secrets may help you protect yourself but everyone is fragile in the end and a knife kills a spymaster as easily as a peasant.
I also felt like the scene helped to highlight the ways in which the costumers have done an excellent job. Lannister household guards are used as faceless spooks throughout the books. Their loyalty to the lions is rarely questioned and their anonymity makes them scary. It’s a tried and true device—Nazi foot soldiers in gasmasks, hideously uniform orks, killer robot legions—but an effective one. The way in which the Lannister helmet hides the eyes of its wearer makes them much more effective at standing in for that faceless, terrifying horde. It’s the same with the Gold Cloaks and their chainmail veils. Though, as Sean Collins expertly points out in his review over at Rolling Stone, the eyes are left obscured but visible so that we can see the look of disgust on the faces of a couple tasked with murdering children.
Compared with the novels, the show seems to be making a good faith attempt at giving us a reason to be sympathetic towards Cersei. Not that Martin utterly discounts any sympathy we as audience members might have for her, but the show gives us moments of vulnerability that the Cersei of the books is determined to ignore. In a lot of ways I feel like Cersei is Ned Stark’s shadow in this incarnation. Both are characters who fanatically believe that the world ought to be a certain way (Ned believes it should be honorable and merciful, Cersei believes it should be free from gender inequality) and the blind spot for both is the idea that others wont accept their world view. Cersei may play more underhandedly and dishonorably than Ned but she seems to have this painful lack of self awareness when it comes to others perceiving her as no different from a male ruler. She may be out for her children’s best interests but when Joffrey accuses her of treason for slapping him, you can see it written across her face that she did not anticipate his discounting her as a mere woman.
And that, I think is the key to making Cersei so compelling in this telling. Unlike Catelyn Stark and, to a certain extent, Sansa, she cannot accept her role as second class citizen. She is as smart and capable as her brothers and certainly more invested in ruling than either of them, but she will never be Queen in the way she wants and, as a result, she can only live vicariously through her monstrous son. Tyrion’s crack about her being the disappointing child may have elicited a chuckle from me at first, but it drove home the sad truth of the matter, neither can really ever be Jaime in their father’s eyes. And Jaime, ironically, has no interest in power.
I have never felt this way but it has come to my attention that many fans really hate Sansa and Catelyn, preferring Danaerys, Arya and Brienne for their female paragons in the novel. I always suspected that part of it had to do with the lack of a desire to coopt masculine power in the case of the former two. Arya, Danaerys and Brienne all break gender boundaries and succeed where men fail. In the patriarchal rape culture of Martin’s Westeros, that kind of success story makes for some compelling moments of ass-kicking. But for me, Catelyn and Sansa represent a kind of quiet strength that often goes overlooked. They are the 3rd wave feminists of the bunch, getting power and influence without trailblazing or co-opting an identity that the society they live in abhors. Now, of course, you need both to make a decent point about strong women in a world dominated by men and in no way would I argue that Sansa and Cat are the superior characters, but I think for fans of fantasy, who read novels predicated on exceptionalism, it can be hard to see the merits in women who break no boundaries but still stay true to their goals, values and loved ones.
Cersei, as she is written in the television show seems to be an interesting commentary on that problem. She is, arguably, the most powerful woman in Westeros and she came by that power through the means traditionally open to women in severe patriarchies: marriage, motherhood, sex appeal. But within that schema, she is seeking to be something more. She is not wielding the sword herself, but in that moment, it’s the blunt force of her martial might that decides whether or not Littlefinger lives and she makes sure that he knows it. I am really excited to see where they take her this season and in the coming years. Cersei has always been reviled, but I think her humanity is really well represented by Heady, Benioff and Weiss.
I also am really delighted by Jack Gleeson’s Joffrey. I remember during the 2000 Oscar season, having a long conversation about the difference between Benicio del Toro’s performance in Traffic and Joaquin Phoenix’s in Gladiator. Del Toro took home the Oscar that year but a friend pointed out to me that the role was written for Oscar Gold. He plays a conflicted cop trying to walk the line between a love for small town Mexico that leads him into drug trafficking and a respect for the law that would keep his neighborhood poor. It’s a role that was all about conflict, pained expressions and internal conflict playing out on one’s face. And, credit where credit is due, Del Toro played it well. Joaquin Phoenix on the other hand, had a far more difficult job and produced, what I thought was a far more interesting performance. In the hands of a Christpher Walken or Jeremy Irons, Phoenix’s Commodus might have been transmuted into a snarling, foaming supervillain. As the unrelentingly petty emperor of Rome it was a thankless and bland role as written and yet, we pitied him. In Phoenix’s hands, we never liked Commodus but we understood why he was the way he was. Not a flat villain, he was tortured, sad, relatable, if only for a moment, before throwing away our sympathy by doing something even more cruel.
Both the Joffrey of the show and, last year, Harry Lloyd’s Viserys, have had this similarly difficult role. Both are thoroughly monstrous. Gleefully, palpably cruel and insane. Both inspired so much loathing from fans. And yet, both have their moments of, if not relatability then at least sympathy. Viserys’ bathtub sex scene with Doreah and confrontation with Jorah Mormont last season made that clear. For a single moment, he comes across as a human being, remembering his childhood, realizing his own inability to do things the right way, before he threw it all away again in a storm of attempted rape and infanticide. This season we get some of the same with Joffrey. There is just the slightest hint of real teenage angst and rebellion underneath all that insanity. We see it when he confronts his mother about his own parentage the slightest flicker of awareness that he is trapped in his own body, a body born of incest, saddled with a dyspeptic, inbred madness. In the novel, we only ever get the story of the purge of Baratheon bastards second hand from Tyrion. Being so predisposed against his sister and nephew it is described only in broadly condemnatory terms. But here, in this first episode there is a real sense of sadness that precedes even the horrifying slaughter of children. Cersei calls Joffrey’s rule a claim to the throne and he retorts that he is the king, it’s not a claim. I felt the slightest twinge of pity for Joff, lied to all his life, trying to come to terms with the fact that the power he was bred to believe he was born to, might in fact be a complete fabrication. That said, I hate Joffrey all the more this season and that must be handed to Jack Gleeson as well. There aren’t many fourteen year olds who can elicit such rage from so many millions of people and that kid is doing an awesome job of it. Hopefully, he won’t be saddled with Maragret Hamilton syndrome later in life, reviled by people on the street for being confused with a role he nailed.
That gap, between Cersei and Joff’s conversation and the slaughter of innocents is an important one. I do not know if Benioff and Weiss plan to let us know whether the idea was Joff’s as a way of protecting himself from the truth of the matter: all his alleged half siblings look nothing like him, or Cersei, in an act of bloody atonement for having led her son astray as to how safe he was on the throne, but both answers work for me. Those last scenes, of gold cloaks storming private homes and whorehouses and murdering teenagers, children and babies all to protect one insane king from further slander and libel, really stuck with me in a way it did not in the novels. The episode ends with a reprise of King Robert’s theme from the first season, which he first heard as the entire court arrives in Winterfell. In that first season its stentorian tones and relentless beat helped us understand the majesty and power the king commanded. It was theater and bluster and bravado, the awe-inspiring sight of the king, the essence of divine right—essentially the core of the show, for without some kind of exceptionality, why follow a bad king in the first place. Here, eleven episodes later, and replayed in a minor key, it is the dark underside of that majesty. The power to command is also the power to destroy. Joffrey (as an inverse of Jon Snow) is still a Baratheon (you may not have my blood, but you have my name) and in the name of Baratheon legitimacy, all the other traces of that awe inspiring house are gutted, drowned and beaten. The sublimity that characterizes kingship is as much fear as it is wonder.
The familiar faces and new ones of Season 2 were all great, but, for my money, the episode belonged to Joff and Cersei, two painfully self-deluded characters, hideously cruel but, in the show at least, strangely sympathetic.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Mass Effect 3: Stories and the Fans who Ruin Them
So I’ve just heard about the Bioware decision to alter the ending of their wildly popular Mass Effect series after a sustained outcry by fans. As someone who himself recently finished the game and was haunted, but certainly not outraged, by the ending I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I think revision makes everything better and Bioware gets an opportunity here to build upon the concepts of their initial ending in order to (perhaps) make something that is, in the long run more satisfying. On the other hand, and this is the more dominant hand for what it’s worth, I do not, in any way, believe that the precedent set by this kind of fan pressure speaks well for the future of artistic integrity in games.
First and foremost, I think it is worth remarking upon the ending of Mass Effect 3 in order to contextualize and categorize the fan outrage, as near as I can figure it. This will contain lots of spoilers if you haven’t already played the game through the end so be forewarned. Essentially, I think the problem with the ending comes down to its abrupt shift in tone, given the third game in the series. It’s a dark shift. Your character, some iteration of Commander Shepherd (in my case the middle-aged, openly gay, morally ambivalent Hippolyta Shepherd), hero(ine) of the galaxy and uniter of various races jumps from Malkuth (earth) to Yessod (the dues ex machine) quite literally. (S)he sees the inner workings of the god machine that powers the galactic extinction event against which (s)he rails and is forced to make a choice. (S)he can A, destroy the Reapers, those diabolic machines that threaten civilization, but in doing so (s)he will kill off an entire race of sentient machines whose rights (s)he has fought for and kill her/his own AI buddy, the spirit of her/his ship with whom her/his pilot has a relationship (it’s not as hokey in the game). (S)he can B, sacrifice her/his life to control the Reapers and force them to abandon their mindful killing but leaving the fate of organic/synthetic life uncertain. Lastly (s)he can also C, use her/his life energy to power a galactic wide synthesis of organic and synthetic life in the hopes of creating a new order that bypasses the cycle of uncertain chaos and cruel order that has defined the entirety of the galaxy’s history.
All three endings are about sacrifice and uncertainty: whether it’s personal sacrifice or the sacrifice of one race to ensure the survival of others, or the sacrifice of all history and all the natural order in an attempt to create something better. None of the choices sit well, especially when most of the game has been spent uniting organic races (and one synthetic race) to fight off their own extinction and put aside old hatreds. Even more, all these revelations come in the last 5 or 6 minutes of the game, the information being delivered by a spectral, artificial intelligence, implied to be a ghostly echo of some unnamed god-like race of individual. So, yeah I suppose I get it. No ending is purely happy. The information is overwhelming and abruptly delivered and, even if it makes sense in the context of the game (all of this is revealed once Shepherd enters the inner sanctum of an alien space station that, for three games, has always been built up as mysterious and full of secrets), seems to be something of a literal dues ex machine. It’s a concern that the player did not know about or understand until seconds before and though thematically congruent with the rest of the series, had virtually no set up.
I personally chose the “synthesis” ending; it made sense with the long narrative of Hippolyta Shepherd’s struggle for redemption. She made many questionable snap judgments over her long career, and giving the galaxy a chance to start over, sacrificing herself in the process seemed fitting. This ending also seems to be the one that the developers prefer, seeing as one had to be particularly thorough and attentive throughout the game in order to “unlock” it. I was surprised in trolling youtube that numerous people refer to the “destroy” ending as the “best” one. To my mind it’s the least heroic. It allows Shepherd to live—barely scrape by—but at the cost of many other individuals. Granted, that may be the value system you play with. One of the best parts of the whole franchise is the ability to make decisions that dynamically alter the plot. It’s not by any means user generated, but it’s very involving. Still, even given the difference in play style I was dismayed by the use of the word “best.” There is this niggling thought that I can’t shake that it’s the best ending solely because the main character survives. That somehow, the outrage of fans is, in part, because there is no way to live and also do the right thing for the galaxy.
Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe, at the end of the day, the other complaints (more legitimate to my mind) about the abrupt shift in tone are what really get under the skins of fans, and not just the inability to live with honor. But there is this part of me that suspects that its about not being able to perpetuate and not being able to end the game entirely on their own terms. And that strikes at the heart of the problem for me. The ending of Mass Effect may be good or bad or somewhere in between, but it does not merit the response from fans. I’ve read a few articles from legitimate and less legitimate news sites trying to encapsulate the debate for the non gamer audience. Invariably, the irate gamers are described as “passionate fans” and though it may technically be correct, I think that characterization speaks to part of the problem. Somehow, being dissatisfied enough with the ending of a story to mount a campaign to get the authors to change it and, in one shameful case, attempt to report Bioware to the Federal Trade Commission for “false advertising,” makes you “passionate,” more involved with the game—more invested in its outcome. I say, it makes you whiny, it makes you misunderstand what storytelling is about, and it sets a very, very bad precedent for how creative endeavors are handled.
I’m a Victorian literature scholar by trade and, as luck would have it, my field has two examples of this kind of fan outrage having an effect. The first is the ending of Charles Dickens’ 1861 Great Expectations which was altered, at the suggestion of monumental hack, Edward Bulwer Lytton, to be happier. The second, an example more similar to our current, Mass Effect, situation, is Arthur Conan Doyle’s capitulation to fan pressure to resurrect Sherlock Holmes after having killed the character off in the short story “The Final Problem.” In both cases artistic intent was subverted by the will of the reader, forcing the author to compromise their original vision. As a literary scholar, both of these instances produce a lot of fascinating scholarship. In the case of Dickens, the two endings can now be compared for endlessly fascinating permutations of theories of novelhood. In the case of Conan Doyle, it produced many, many more Sherlock Holmes stories to write on and enjoy, even if the artistic integrity went over Reichenbach Falls alongside the great detective.
The downside of both of these instances, however, is the laying bare of the power of the fan-base to interfere with the works they purport to love. Much like the 19th century, we are again, living in an age of serialized fictions. They may not come out in monthly papers, but they are broadcast weekly on television and are released yearly in endless sequels to both movies and games. This 20th and 21st century serialized form differs from its 19th century predecessor in one critical way: the stories often do not have endings. We’ve built all kinds of terms into our lexicon for this. “Jumping the shark” for instance, refers to the moment when a story has outlived its usefulness and believability, when we realize that it’s just stalling for time. Furthermore, in the age of outdated Nielson’s ratings, and cruel, artistically bankrupt networks and cable channels pulling the plug on shows before they can even start eyeing their water-skis, fans feel as though they must flex their Jacobin muscles in order to save those stories they think are worth finishing. And lately, they’ve been winning. Arrested Development is set to return. Firefly got its big screen dénouement. Community looks more and more likely to be renewed for a fourth season after a weirdly amorphous hiatus.
But as I said before, there is a downside here. Fans feel like they own the properties they fight to save. And it’s true, in this free market, consumer society where women’s rights advocates can vote with their checkbook and get obnoxious right wing radio show hosts to tremble as sponsors drop like dominoes, we do all “own” a bit of the stories we support. I bought Mass Effect 3 (and 1 and 2) and I watch Community (and bought the season 1 and 2 DVDs) and went to see Serenity and will continue my Netflix subscription, in part, so that I can see the new season of Arrested Development. I’ve paid my money and I’ll be entertained for doing so. But leaving behind this depressing capitalist model, I don’t own any of these stories. They are stories that someone else told and that I happen to enjoy. Just because I invested time in Firefly, doesn’t mean I get to have any effect on its narrative outcome, and, honestly I shouldn’t. I’m not Joss Whedon or any of the writers of the show, or any of the cast and crew members who contributed to its ethos. I’m just someone who liked that ethos and even when I didn’t like where they took it, I have no right to be outraged that I didn’t like it.
The same holds true for Mass Effect. The situation is confusing. Mass Effect 3 is the third in a series of games where the decisions of the players have dramatically altered the story being told. I chose not to kill the insectoid queen of a forgotten alien race in the first game and, as a result, I am rewarded with her support in the third game. I own the decisions but not the outcomes. Bioware wrote a game where both possibilities existed and I just chose what I wanted most. The vast spread of different stories that are possible in the Mass Effect series is not, as I said before user-generated. I didn’t come up with the situations and Bioware owes me nothing as to what choices are offered. Their decision, to rewrite the ending and release it for their fans, is theirs to make, but I am disappointed that they made it under duress. The ending good or bad, was the ending Bioware originally wanted—the ending the story was supposed to have. That people are unsatisfied with that ending is fine, but it’s not okay to demand it be changed. We aren’t storytellers in our role as gamers. We are involved in enjoying the story, but not in producing it.
Gaming is a young industry, much like the novel was when Dickens wrote Great Expectations. It has barely had thirty odd years to establish its story telling conventions and figure out how the bounds of its artistic integrity. What Bioware fans who railed against this ending have done, essentially, is bullied the storytellers into taking back what was intended. I don’t blame fans alone for this. After all, it was Bioware’s decision to change the ending. But it only got to that point because fans demanded that the story be compromised. It will not fix Mass Effect 3 when the new ending is released. A hundred and fifty years from now, we will look back (as we do with Dickens now) and say, look, here are two endings to one game. How do they play off against one another? Mass Effect 3 will never, as a result, have a real ending now. Just a long discussion about why the ending was changed.
I’ll play the new ending. I may even like it more. But why it exists will never sit right with me. I don’t believe I know what a better ending is. And that’s not really the point is it. These aren’t angry fans writing fan fiction to satisfy their need for closure. That would be a creative endeavor and a therapeutic one. Instead, these are fans expressing their dislike for the end of a story and demanding that they be given a better one. The end result of that is Glee. Ryan Murphy takes fan input seriously. As a result, his show has gone from being interesting and intricate and important, to a naratological mess: its characters are wildly inconsistent, its plotlines end too quickly, its excessive desire to please is its own undoing. In the end, the public is fickle, and you really can’t always please everyone. I’ve respected the storytellers at Bioware for years. I really hope this move isn’t the beginning of a long descent into fan service at the cost of well told stories.
First and foremost, I think it is worth remarking upon the ending of Mass Effect 3 in order to contextualize and categorize the fan outrage, as near as I can figure it. This will contain lots of spoilers if you haven’t already played the game through the end so be forewarned. Essentially, I think the problem with the ending comes down to its abrupt shift in tone, given the third game in the series. It’s a dark shift. Your character, some iteration of Commander Shepherd (in my case the middle-aged, openly gay, morally ambivalent Hippolyta Shepherd), hero(ine) of the galaxy and uniter of various races jumps from Malkuth (earth) to Yessod (the dues ex machine) quite literally. (S)he sees the inner workings of the god machine that powers the galactic extinction event against which (s)he rails and is forced to make a choice. (S)he can A, destroy the Reapers, those diabolic machines that threaten civilization, but in doing so (s)he will kill off an entire race of sentient machines whose rights (s)he has fought for and kill her/his own AI buddy, the spirit of her/his ship with whom her/his pilot has a relationship (it’s not as hokey in the game). (S)he can B, sacrifice her/his life to control the Reapers and force them to abandon their mindful killing but leaving the fate of organic/synthetic life uncertain. Lastly (s)he can also C, use her/his life energy to power a galactic wide synthesis of organic and synthetic life in the hopes of creating a new order that bypasses the cycle of uncertain chaos and cruel order that has defined the entirety of the galaxy’s history.
All three endings are about sacrifice and uncertainty: whether it’s personal sacrifice or the sacrifice of one race to ensure the survival of others, or the sacrifice of all history and all the natural order in an attempt to create something better. None of the choices sit well, especially when most of the game has been spent uniting organic races (and one synthetic race) to fight off their own extinction and put aside old hatreds. Even more, all these revelations come in the last 5 or 6 minutes of the game, the information being delivered by a spectral, artificial intelligence, implied to be a ghostly echo of some unnamed god-like race of individual. So, yeah I suppose I get it. No ending is purely happy. The information is overwhelming and abruptly delivered and, even if it makes sense in the context of the game (all of this is revealed once Shepherd enters the inner sanctum of an alien space station that, for three games, has always been built up as mysterious and full of secrets), seems to be something of a literal dues ex machine. It’s a concern that the player did not know about or understand until seconds before and though thematically congruent with the rest of the series, had virtually no set up.
I personally chose the “synthesis” ending; it made sense with the long narrative of Hippolyta Shepherd’s struggle for redemption. She made many questionable snap judgments over her long career, and giving the galaxy a chance to start over, sacrificing herself in the process seemed fitting. This ending also seems to be the one that the developers prefer, seeing as one had to be particularly thorough and attentive throughout the game in order to “unlock” it. I was surprised in trolling youtube that numerous people refer to the “destroy” ending as the “best” one. To my mind it’s the least heroic. It allows Shepherd to live—barely scrape by—but at the cost of many other individuals. Granted, that may be the value system you play with. One of the best parts of the whole franchise is the ability to make decisions that dynamically alter the plot. It’s not by any means user generated, but it’s very involving. Still, even given the difference in play style I was dismayed by the use of the word “best.” There is this niggling thought that I can’t shake that it’s the best ending solely because the main character survives. That somehow, the outrage of fans is, in part, because there is no way to live and also do the right thing for the galaxy.
Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe, at the end of the day, the other complaints (more legitimate to my mind) about the abrupt shift in tone are what really get under the skins of fans, and not just the inability to live with honor. But there is this part of me that suspects that its about not being able to perpetuate and not being able to end the game entirely on their own terms. And that strikes at the heart of the problem for me. The ending of Mass Effect may be good or bad or somewhere in between, but it does not merit the response from fans. I’ve read a few articles from legitimate and less legitimate news sites trying to encapsulate the debate for the non gamer audience. Invariably, the irate gamers are described as “passionate fans” and though it may technically be correct, I think that characterization speaks to part of the problem. Somehow, being dissatisfied enough with the ending of a story to mount a campaign to get the authors to change it and, in one shameful case, attempt to report Bioware to the Federal Trade Commission for “false advertising,” makes you “passionate,” more involved with the game—more invested in its outcome. I say, it makes you whiny, it makes you misunderstand what storytelling is about, and it sets a very, very bad precedent for how creative endeavors are handled.
I’m a Victorian literature scholar by trade and, as luck would have it, my field has two examples of this kind of fan outrage having an effect. The first is the ending of Charles Dickens’ 1861 Great Expectations which was altered, at the suggestion of monumental hack, Edward Bulwer Lytton, to be happier. The second, an example more similar to our current, Mass Effect, situation, is Arthur Conan Doyle’s capitulation to fan pressure to resurrect Sherlock Holmes after having killed the character off in the short story “The Final Problem.” In both cases artistic intent was subverted by the will of the reader, forcing the author to compromise their original vision. As a literary scholar, both of these instances produce a lot of fascinating scholarship. In the case of Dickens, the two endings can now be compared for endlessly fascinating permutations of theories of novelhood. In the case of Conan Doyle, it produced many, many more Sherlock Holmes stories to write on and enjoy, even if the artistic integrity went over Reichenbach Falls alongside the great detective.
The downside of both of these instances, however, is the laying bare of the power of the fan-base to interfere with the works they purport to love. Much like the 19th century, we are again, living in an age of serialized fictions. They may not come out in monthly papers, but they are broadcast weekly on television and are released yearly in endless sequels to both movies and games. This 20th and 21st century serialized form differs from its 19th century predecessor in one critical way: the stories often do not have endings. We’ve built all kinds of terms into our lexicon for this. “Jumping the shark” for instance, refers to the moment when a story has outlived its usefulness and believability, when we realize that it’s just stalling for time. Furthermore, in the age of outdated Nielson’s ratings, and cruel, artistically bankrupt networks and cable channels pulling the plug on shows before they can even start eyeing their water-skis, fans feel as though they must flex their Jacobin muscles in order to save those stories they think are worth finishing. And lately, they’ve been winning. Arrested Development is set to return. Firefly got its big screen dénouement. Community looks more and more likely to be renewed for a fourth season after a weirdly amorphous hiatus.
But as I said before, there is a downside here. Fans feel like they own the properties they fight to save. And it’s true, in this free market, consumer society where women’s rights advocates can vote with their checkbook and get obnoxious right wing radio show hosts to tremble as sponsors drop like dominoes, we do all “own” a bit of the stories we support. I bought Mass Effect 3 (and 1 and 2) and I watch Community (and bought the season 1 and 2 DVDs) and went to see Serenity and will continue my Netflix subscription, in part, so that I can see the new season of Arrested Development. I’ve paid my money and I’ll be entertained for doing so. But leaving behind this depressing capitalist model, I don’t own any of these stories. They are stories that someone else told and that I happen to enjoy. Just because I invested time in Firefly, doesn’t mean I get to have any effect on its narrative outcome, and, honestly I shouldn’t. I’m not Joss Whedon or any of the writers of the show, or any of the cast and crew members who contributed to its ethos. I’m just someone who liked that ethos and even when I didn’t like where they took it, I have no right to be outraged that I didn’t like it.
The same holds true for Mass Effect. The situation is confusing. Mass Effect 3 is the third in a series of games where the decisions of the players have dramatically altered the story being told. I chose not to kill the insectoid queen of a forgotten alien race in the first game and, as a result, I am rewarded with her support in the third game. I own the decisions but not the outcomes. Bioware wrote a game where both possibilities existed and I just chose what I wanted most. The vast spread of different stories that are possible in the Mass Effect series is not, as I said before user-generated. I didn’t come up with the situations and Bioware owes me nothing as to what choices are offered. Their decision, to rewrite the ending and release it for their fans, is theirs to make, but I am disappointed that they made it under duress. The ending good or bad, was the ending Bioware originally wanted—the ending the story was supposed to have. That people are unsatisfied with that ending is fine, but it’s not okay to demand it be changed. We aren’t storytellers in our role as gamers. We are involved in enjoying the story, but not in producing it.
Gaming is a young industry, much like the novel was when Dickens wrote Great Expectations. It has barely had thirty odd years to establish its story telling conventions and figure out how the bounds of its artistic integrity. What Bioware fans who railed against this ending have done, essentially, is bullied the storytellers into taking back what was intended. I don’t blame fans alone for this. After all, it was Bioware’s decision to change the ending. But it only got to that point because fans demanded that the story be compromised. It will not fix Mass Effect 3 when the new ending is released. A hundred and fifty years from now, we will look back (as we do with Dickens now) and say, look, here are two endings to one game. How do they play off against one another? Mass Effect 3 will never, as a result, have a real ending now. Just a long discussion about why the ending was changed.
I’ll play the new ending. I may even like it more. But why it exists will never sit right with me. I don’t believe I know what a better ending is. And that’s not really the point is it. These aren’t angry fans writing fan fiction to satisfy their need for closure. That would be a creative endeavor and a therapeutic one. Instead, these are fans expressing their dislike for the end of a story and demanding that they be given a better one. The end result of that is Glee. Ryan Murphy takes fan input seriously. As a result, his show has gone from being interesting and intricate and important, to a naratological mess: its characters are wildly inconsistent, its plotlines end too quickly, its excessive desire to please is its own undoing. In the end, the public is fickle, and you really can’t always please everyone. I’ve respected the storytellers at Bioware for years. I really hope this move isn’t the beginning of a long descent into fan service at the cost of well told stories.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Gaming Gaming Everywhere
This is reposted from a little facebook survey that was going around about fifteen video-games that stuck with me. I normally disdain such things but it got me thinking and I ended up with some nice fodder for my trash blog.
1. Final Fantasy IV- Perhaps my all time favorite game (or at leas the one I have the nost nostalgic connection to). Final Fantasy IV (or Final Fantasy II as it was called at the time of it's original US Release, was a point of origin for my understanding of fantasy and my involvement with involving narrative. There were many important books I read as a kid, but this ranks up there with any of them for sheer engrossing pleasure of narrative. It's story, now from the perspective of an English PhD candidate with more than a few loose and baggy monsters under his belt, is simple and laughably poorly translated. But I think it was the simplicity that incited my imagination. Later final fantasies were played and enjoyed (VI, VII and IX especially were beloved) but in becoming more graphically advanced they lost a lot of their charm. Something about seeing a vaguely amorphous outline of a little girl with green hair and a daisy tucked behind her ear, excited my imagination so much more than if she had been fully rendered and spectacularly realized. These characters were much more real to me, because they were so crudely drawn and narrated. Their tawdry demises chilled me to the bone. A game full of wanton self-sacrifice.
2. Actraiser- Very few games can I call my own. I remember that Duck Tales was the first game I ever beat, but Actraiser will always be my game. A charming side-scrolling platformer checkered with a building Sim, Actraiser was, for me, the ultimate antidote to my insatiable lust for mythology. I think what I liked most about it (other than it's truly epic soundtrack-- think: a poorly synthesized Gustav Horst) was it's clear inspiration from readable mythology but divorced from any of its real tropes. Fighting the so-called Arctic Wyvern atop the world tree, was very clearly somehow inspired by Norse Mythology but it was hard to pin down how precisely. Covering a wide variety of world mythological tropes (Greco-Roman, Medieval Catholic, Egyptian, Japanese, Hindu and Norse) and weaving them effortlessly into a pseudo-Christian narrative about bringing light and order back to a world plagued by chaos, was the best thing a bookish 10 year old dreamer could hope for. Incidentally, the game took me precisely one year to beat. I received it for my 10th birthday, and beat it one day shy of my 11th.
3. Super Castlevania IV- I distinctly remember making up silly names for each of the bosses in this game, with my step-sister, Kristen: Dr. Dominatrix, Mr. Nickels, Sir Reads-a-lot. I was recently informed that I was not alone in this process. The writer of the English game manual presented some obvious silliness (the dancing spectres are referred to as Paula Abghoul and Fed Ascare), along with jokes I only got in the last week: Puwexil, the long tongued skull boss of level four, is merely Lixewup (Licks You Up) backwards. Similarly, Koranot, the stone golem, is a phonetic anagram for Ton o' Rock. A great, operatic metal soundtrack alongside traditional gothic horror tropes and ridiculously charming videogame conventions (whipping repeatedly at a stariwell to receive a roast chicken dinner) made Super Castlevania IV a constant source of amusement.
4. Dragon Age: Origins- DA:O, Bioware's recent masterpiece, more than any other game of my adulthood, seems to be in sync with my desires as a writer. It is a sweeping historical epic that integrates historical notes (Just post-crusades Christendom and Byzantium) with traditional, Dungeons and Dragons-esque fantasy tropes. In the case of this latter obsession, it seeks to play an interesting twist on well-worn fantasy conventions. It's elves live as second class citizens (fulfilling the role of European Jews), sticking tightly to their lost and fragmentary culture. Dwarves live underground but have built a fascinating proto-Objectivist meritocracy out of a rigid caste system. Dark and evil powers gather beneath the surface of the earth, but are treated as a real race with actual political designs and ambitions. All this is a fantastic spin on the typical fantasy epic, but I especially laud it's treatment of homosexual relationships. It manages to not pull any punches in allowing your avatar to be gay, bisexual or otherwise questioning heteronormative identity. It does so flawlessly, not only offering the complete freedom to make those choices but slotting it in to a world that is not always accepting. In a dialogue with pan-sexual, ethical slu/elven assassin, Zevran Arianai about my avatar's choice to ultimately pursue a heteronormative relationship, he sighs sadly, saying that, when it comes down to it, people usually choose the less difficult path. Hooray for frank and honest assessments of interpersonal relations, even in the most highly wrought and intricate fantasies.
5. Mass Effect 2- Arguably, Bioware's best game to date. I don't go in for shooters. I don't go in for sci-fi. But I unabashedly love this game. I love it for the reasons that most people cite: it's open-ended plot based off of impossible moral decisions, it's extremely well-written and voice acted characters, it's adherence to a grim plot about Lovecraftian horror. But the standout thing to me was its ability to integrate a very traditional set of quest-based tropes into a plot that made sense. The main thrust of the game revolves around recruiting a team of top operatives, outlaws and oracles to combat impossible odds, outside the strictly legal domain of civilized space. In securing the loyalty of your companions you must perform a variety of mundane tasks to resolve their own psychological issues. Presented to you by a shipboard psychiatric evaluator, who knows that with a team as unstable and self-involved as yours, distraction and unresolved issues could mean the difference between success and failure. This all comes together in a final mission where each and every relationship forged is tested and utilized in the achievement of a greater goal. The game rewards not just your strength and agility, but your interpersonal acumen and understanding as well. As a final note, Jack, the hard-living, batshit crazy, cyberpunk heroine, might be one of the greatest characetrs ever created.
6. Musya: The Classic Tale of Japanese Horror- I played this game over a weekend when I rented it for the SNES from the now defunct Blockbuster. It's a repetitive, little platformer with a really lousy interface and control system. But it was the first time I had any experience with the Japanese Gothic. The new exposure to giant, badger-like monstrosities in conical, rice padyd hats, tortoises with the face of infants, and living, bronze-age figures, possessed by ectoplasmic organs, oozing from its eyes was so startlingly frightening that I couldn't sleep for weeks afterward. As a Gothic scholar, I think I will always consider Japanese Horror to be several steps beyond me, unfathomably strange and far far more creepy than the western tropes I am used to.
7. Super Metroid- This was the game I played with my dad and sister. Years earlier we played Super Mario Brothers III (after being literally awe-struck by its pressence in The Wizard, a film we went to see because it starred one of my mom's ex-students). While the trials of the angry sun and the novelty of Hammer Brothers Suits held our attention for many weeks, it was Super Metroid (a gift for my 13th birthday) that really brought us together as a family. I won't easily forget the moment we came home from Junior High to find my dad triumphantly declaring his victory over the Mother Brain then watching eagerly as we beat it for ourselves. More than it being a family experience, we really fell in love with the aesthetics of the game as well as its novel gameplay. I marveled at seeing the suggested, flooded ruins of Meridia, or the Alien-esque gothic terror of a Wrecked Ship, while my dad meticulously used the X-ray Scope to hunt down each and every missile upgrade, increasing our overall completion record to 96% (never could find that last Super Missile pack). A game of shocking moments, and clever tricks, based upon an intriguing system of opening up new places by finding upgrades to physically power yourself there, Super Metroid might be (for my money) the greatest platformer of its time, and one unequaled by modern attempts.
8. Secret of Evermore- One of the first American games I ever played, Secret of Evermore was a strange, aiming-for-funny mishmash of 50's B-movie sci-fi tropes and classic, sword and sandal epics, wherein a Boy and his Dog explore the temporally replete world of Evermore in an attempt to get back to Podunk, USA. With a dog companion that transforms with your environs (from hulking Cave-Dog to Egyptian Pharaoh Hound to Fluffy Pink Poodle, to Flying, Dog-faced Laser Toaster) and a variety of alchemical formula that require diligent resource management (Three Parts Water to One Part Ash gets you an acid-rain storm), the travails of toe-headed cinema buff Isaac (always named Isaac in my games--not sure why) was a staple of my young life. I predictably loved the Ancient and Medieval portions of the world, alive with gothic castles, temples full of minotaurs, and Stargate-esque alien invaders.
9. Donkey Kong Country II: Diddy's Kong Quest- Pirate themed with steampunk underpinnings, a surprisingly rocking soundtrack and demeaningly cute animal companions, DKC2 was everything I wanted in a light-hearted platformer. It struck the perfect tone and introduced me to thematic biomes. Sunken, ,muck covered pirate ships crashed in the bayou, oddly zen andscapes of twisted brambles, and intense sequences in which rhinos had to smash their way through the honeycomb labyrinths of malevolent bees. As anarchic and tongue-in-cheek as it was genuinely pretty, DKC2 really changed the way I looked at Apes and Crocodiles, and made me believe, if only for a moment, that Snakes could coil tightly into a spring and bounce to great heights.
10. Grim Fandango- Scott McCloud in his briefly lived Computer Game Blog Comic described Grim Fandango as the closest game to Art he had ever played. I have to agree. Video Games are moving towards high art, and the debate can rage on as to which have actually achieved that status or if it yet to be conquered, but for my money, Grim Fandango is already there. I grew up playing Tim Schaffer Lucas Arts adventure games (Monkey Island, Sam and Max, The Dig), but Grim Fandango seemed designed for me. A truly organic vision combining Aztec and Mayan mythology with Golden Age of Cinema Film Noir, Grim Fandango followed the exploits of spun-sugar skeleton, Manny Calavera, a hapless travel agent caught up in a twisting labyrinth of insurance fraud, beatnik poetry and blood-sacrifice. It got me in touch with my Mexican roots while reminding me of the greatness of Chandler-Bogart films. You really don't know what you are missing until a tiny, talking skull with Peter Lorre's voice tells you about his trek to the 9th Underworld.
11. 7th Saga- The Enix adventure game had the highest disparity between integrity of musical composition and quality of synthesizer I have ever seen. I still will get some of the music stuck in my head and any of my grad school friends can tell you that I obsessively play certain tracks on endless repeat while I write my papers. The game had an incredibly difficult learning curve and was plagued by a panoply of random encounters. It also had a fantastic central conceit of being able to play one of seven mercenary types competing for a set of seven ancient runes. Each of the seven played slightly differently (though I always played as Lejes Rimul, the magic-savvy demon prince) and allowed for a large number of strategic combinations by allowing you to team up with another one of the playable options.
12. Sanitarium- It's hard choosing one serious Adventure game for this list. Stephen Spielberg's sci-fi archeology epic, The Dig certainly was a close runner up. But there is something about Sanitarium's central conceit of a character trapped in his own paranoid fantasies that made me shiver. Very few games have given me literal nightmares but this was one of them. It was also one of the last games my step-dad and I played together, making it especially important. It's hazy dream-logic where nightmare sequences involving Midwestern children slowly rotting away into plant matter, unspeakable Aztec curses, terrifying circus sideshows and insectoid invaders from outer space, contained the seeds of a real life tale of corruption and betrayal. It was a game about horrifying mysteries where the mundane and bureaucratic turned out to be the most horrifying prospect of all.
13. Shining Force- My friend Casey first introduced me to Shining Force in the form of a pen and paper roleplaying game, meticulously based on the Turn Based Strategy game. There were certainly other games I enjoyed. But Shining Force was the reason I needed a Sega. The game, like Final Fantasy IV, was one of those situations where less was more. Casey and I not only played a few rounds of the pen and paper strategy game, we ended up making intricate back stories for its 30+ playable characters in the hopes of writing a novel. There was just enough personality in the portraits of each character to suggest a real history and a corresponding fondness for each of them. To this day I have a lot of trouble remembering what was fact and what was my own imagination.
14. Arcanum- My friends have labeled this game a triumph of style over substance. An amazingly story well-told, with pitch perfect Victorian social mores, in a frustratingly (and sometimes hilariously) buggy game engine whose learning curve was butterfly knife sharp. Alongside my step-dad's Victorian roleplaying game and Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Arcanum formed the trifecta that would lead me into Victorian Literature Scholarship. It's a little bit embarassing to admit that my career was inspired by comics, DnD and video games and not, say, by reading Middlemarch for the first time. Coming back years later though, its amazing how much of the 19th century they really capture: Poe, Dickens, Hawthorne, Gaskell-- with a healthy dose of Darwin and Faraday thrown in for good measure. Everything from a misguided faith in electro-magnetism to a supernatural recreation of the Jack the Ripper murders, Arcanum created a world that was essentialized Victorian. Obviously it copped to some Steampunk influences along the way, but unlike Steampunk, it first and foremost loved the society and aesthetic of the era it amulated, not just the technology. I wish the Steampunk movement were more like Arcanum. And whatever its bugs, Arcanum was, and is, my vision of my field and my life, in private, indulgent moments.
15. Sword of Vermillion- The first real role-playing game I ever played. Its instruction manual (a monstrous 100 page guide) served as a major source of inspiration, and I spent hours trying to illustrate the strangely named weapons and armor (graphite sword? carmine shield?). Monsters grunted with now-comical exuberance. The endless expanse of brightly colored yellow pillars that was apparently supposed to be mountainous terrain is still comforting to me. I still have the muscle memory of the difference in feel between cutting through a giant floating eyeball, and a serpentine Medusa-ling. Probably invented. Definitely affective.
1. Final Fantasy IV- Perhaps my all time favorite game (or at leas the one I have the nost nostalgic connection to). Final Fantasy IV (or Final Fantasy II as it was called at the time of it's original US Release, was a point of origin for my understanding of fantasy and my involvement with involving narrative. There were many important books I read as a kid, but this ranks up there with any of them for sheer engrossing pleasure of narrative. It's story, now from the perspective of an English PhD candidate with more than a few loose and baggy monsters under his belt, is simple and laughably poorly translated. But I think it was the simplicity that incited my imagination. Later final fantasies were played and enjoyed (VI, VII and IX especially were beloved) but in becoming more graphically advanced they lost a lot of their charm. Something about seeing a vaguely amorphous outline of a little girl with green hair and a daisy tucked behind her ear, excited my imagination so much more than if she had been fully rendered and spectacularly realized. These characters were much more real to me, because they were so crudely drawn and narrated. Their tawdry demises chilled me to the bone. A game full of wanton self-sacrifice.
2. Actraiser- Very few games can I call my own. I remember that Duck Tales was the first game I ever beat, but Actraiser will always be my game. A charming side-scrolling platformer checkered with a building Sim, Actraiser was, for me, the ultimate antidote to my insatiable lust for mythology. I think what I liked most about it (other than it's truly epic soundtrack-- think: a poorly synthesized Gustav Horst) was it's clear inspiration from readable mythology but divorced from any of its real tropes. Fighting the so-called Arctic Wyvern atop the world tree, was very clearly somehow inspired by Norse Mythology but it was hard to pin down how precisely. Covering a wide variety of world mythological tropes (Greco-Roman, Medieval Catholic, Egyptian, Japanese, Hindu and Norse) and weaving them effortlessly into a pseudo-Christian narrative about bringing light and order back to a world plagued by chaos, was the best thing a bookish 10 year old dreamer could hope for. Incidentally, the game took me precisely one year to beat. I received it for my 10th birthday, and beat it one day shy of my 11th.
3. Super Castlevania IV- I distinctly remember making up silly names for each of the bosses in this game, with my step-sister, Kristen: Dr. Dominatrix, Mr. Nickels, Sir Reads-a-lot. I was recently informed that I was not alone in this process. The writer of the English game manual presented some obvious silliness (the dancing spectres are referred to as Paula Abghoul and Fed Ascare), along with jokes I only got in the last week: Puwexil, the long tongued skull boss of level four, is merely Lixewup (Licks You Up) backwards. Similarly, Koranot, the stone golem, is a phonetic anagram for Ton o' Rock. A great, operatic metal soundtrack alongside traditional gothic horror tropes and ridiculously charming videogame conventions (whipping repeatedly at a stariwell to receive a roast chicken dinner) made Super Castlevania IV a constant source of amusement.
4. Dragon Age: Origins- DA:O, Bioware's recent masterpiece, more than any other game of my adulthood, seems to be in sync with my desires as a writer. It is a sweeping historical epic that integrates historical notes (Just post-crusades Christendom and Byzantium) with traditional, Dungeons and Dragons-esque fantasy tropes. In the case of this latter obsession, it seeks to play an interesting twist on well-worn fantasy conventions. It's elves live as second class citizens (fulfilling the role of European Jews), sticking tightly to their lost and fragmentary culture. Dwarves live underground but have built a fascinating proto-Objectivist meritocracy out of a rigid caste system. Dark and evil powers gather beneath the surface of the earth, but are treated as a real race with actual political designs and ambitions. All this is a fantastic spin on the typical fantasy epic, but I especially laud it's treatment of homosexual relationships. It manages to not pull any punches in allowing your avatar to be gay, bisexual or otherwise questioning heteronormative identity. It does so flawlessly, not only offering the complete freedom to make those choices but slotting it in to a world that is not always accepting. In a dialogue with pan-sexual, ethical slu/elven assassin, Zevran Arianai about my avatar's choice to ultimately pursue a heteronormative relationship, he sighs sadly, saying that, when it comes down to it, people usually choose the less difficult path. Hooray for frank and honest assessments of interpersonal relations, even in the most highly wrought and intricate fantasies.
5. Mass Effect 2- Arguably, Bioware's best game to date. I don't go in for shooters. I don't go in for sci-fi. But I unabashedly love this game. I love it for the reasons that most people cite: it's open-ended plot based off of impossible moral decisions, it's extremely well-written and voice acted characters, it's adherence to a grim plot about Lovecraftian horror. But the standout thing to me was its ability to integrate a very traditional set of quest-based tropes into a plot that made sense. The main thrust of the game revolves around recruiting a team of top operatives, outlaws and oracles to combat impossible odds, outside the strictly legal domain of civilized space. In securing the loyalty of your companions you must perform a variety of mundane tasks to resolve their own psychological issues. Presented to you by a shipboard psychiatric evaluator, who knows that with a team as unstable and self-involved as yours, distraction and unresolved issues could mean the difference between success and failure. This all comes together in a final mission where each and every relationship forged is tested and utilized in the achievement of a greater goal. The game rewards not just your strength and agility, but your interpersonal acumen and understanding as well. As a final note, Jack, the hard-living, batshit crazy, cyberpunk heroine, might be one of the greatest characetrs ever created.
6. Musya: The Classic Tale of Japanese Horror- I played this game over a weekend when I rented it for the SNES from the now defunct Blockbuster. It's a repetitive, little platformer with a really lousy interface and control system. But it was the first time I had any experience with the Japanese Gothic. The new exposure to giant, badger-like monstrosities in conical, rice padyd hats, tortoises with the face of infants, and living, bronze-age figures, possessed by ectoplasmic organs, oozing from its eyes was so startlingly frightening that I couldn't sleep for weeks afterward. As a Gothic scholar, I think I will always consider Japanese Horror to be several steps beyond me, unfathomably strange and far far more creepy than the western tropes I am used to.
7. Super Metroid- This was the game I played with my dad and sister. Years earlier we played Super Mario Brothers III (after being literally awe-struck by its pressence in The Wizard, a film we went to see because it starred one of my mom's ex-students). While the trials of the angry sun and the novelty of Hammer Brothers Suits held our attention for many weeks, it was Super Metroid (a gift for my 13th birthday) that really brought us together as a family. I won't easily forget the moment we came home from Junior High to find my dad triumphantly declaring his victory over the Mother Brain then watching eagerly as we beat it for ourselves. More than it being a family experience, we really fell in love with the aesthetics of the game as well as its novel gameplay. I marveled at seeing the suggested, flooded ruins of Meridia, or the Alien-esque gothic terror of a Wrecked Ship, while my dad meticulously used the X-ray Scope to hunt down each and every missile upgrade, increasing our overall completion record to 96% (never could find that last Super Missile pack). A game of shocking moments, and clever tricks, based upon an intriguing system of opening up new places by finding upgrades to physically power yourself there, Super Metroid might be (for my money) the greatest platformer of its time, and one unequaled by modern attempts.
8. Secret of Evermore- One of the first American games I ever played, Secret of Evermore was a strange, aiming-for-funny mishmash of 50's B-movie sci-fi tropes and classic, sword and sandal epics, wherein a Boy and his Dog explore the temporally replete world of Evermore in an attempt to get back to Podunk, USA. With a dog companion that transforms with your environs (from hulking Cave-Dog to Egyptian Pharaoh Hound to Fluffy Pink Poodle, to Flying, Dog-faced Laser Toaster) and a variety of alchemical formula that require diligent resource management (Three Parts Water to One Part Ash gets you an acid-rain storm), the travails of toe-headed cinema buff Isaac (always named Isaac in my games--not sure why) was a staple of my young life. I predictably loved the Ancient and Medieval portions of the world, alive with gothic castles, temples full of minotaurs, and Stargate-esque alien invaders.
9. Donkey Kong Country II: Diddy's Kong Quest- Pirate themed with steampunk underpinnings, a surprisingly rocking soundtrack and demeaningly cute animal companions, DKC2 was everything I wanted in a light-hearted platformer. It struck the perfect tone and introduced me to thematic biomes. Sunken, ,muck covered pirate ships crashed in the bayou, oddly zen andscapes of twisted brambles, and intense sequences in which rhinos had to smash their way through the honeycomb labyrinths of malevolent bees. As anarchic and tongue-in-cheek as it was genuinely pretty, DKC2 really changed the way I looked at Apes and Crocodiles, and made me believe, if only for a moment, that Snakes could coil tightly into a spring and bounce to great heights.
10. Grim Fandango- Scott McCloud in his briefly lived Computer Game Blog Comic described Grim Fandango as the closest game to Art he had ever played. I have to agree. Video Games are moving towards high art, and the debate can rage on as to which have actually achieved that status or if it yet to be conquered, but for my money, Grim Fandango is already there. I grew up playing Tim Schaffer Lucas Arts adventure games (Monkey Island, Sam and Max, The Dig), but Grim Fandango seemed designed for me. A truly organic vision combining Aztec and Mayan mythology with Golden Age of Cinema Film Noir, Grim Fandango followed the exploits of spun-sugar skeleton, Manny Calavera, a hapless travel agent caught up in a twisting labyrinth of insurance fraud, beatnik poetry and blood-sacrifice. It got me in touch with my Mexican roots while reminding me of the greatness of Chandler-Bogart films. You really don't know what you are missing until a tiny, talking skull with Peter Lorre's voice tells you about his trek to the 9th Underworld.
11. 7th Saga- The Enix adventure game had the highest disparity between integrity of musical composition and quality of synthesizer I have ever seen. I still will get some of the music stuck in my head and any of my grad school friends can tell you that I obsessively play certain tracks on endless repeat while I write my papers. The game had an incredibly difficult learning curve and was plagued by a panoply of random encounters. It also had a fantastic central conceit of being able to play one of seven mercenary types competing for a set of seven ancient runes. Each of the seven played slightly differently (though I always played as Lejes Rimul, the magic-savvy demon prince) and allowed for a large number of strategic combinations by allowing you to team up with another one of the playable options.
12. Sanitarium- It's hard choosing one serious Adventure game for this list. Stephen Spielberg's sci-fi archeology epic, The Dig certainly was a close runner up. But there is something about Sanitarium's central conceit of a character trapped in his own paranoid fantasies that made me shiver. Very few games have given me literal nightmares but this was one of them. It was also one of the last games my step-dad and I played together, making it especially important. It's hazy dream-logic where nightmare sequences involving Midwestern children slowly rotting away into plant matter, unspeakable Aztec curses, terrifying circus sideshows and insectoid invaders from outer space, contained the seeds of a real life tale of corruption and betrayal. It was a game about horrifying mysteries where the mundane and bureaucratic turned out to be the most horrifying prospect of all.
13. Shining Force- My friend Casey first introduced me to Shining Force in the form of a pen and paper roleplaying game, meticulously based on the Turn Based Strategy game. There were certainly other games I enjoyed. But Shining Force was the reason I needed a Sega. The game, like Final Fantasy IV, was one of those situations where less was more. Casey and I not only played a few rounds of the pen and paper strategy game, we ended up making intricate back stories for its 30+ playable characters in the hopes of writing a novel. There was just enough personality in the portraits of each character to suggest a real history and a corresponding fondness for each of them. To this day I have a lot of trouble remembering what was fact and what was my own imagination.
14. Arcanum- My friends have labeled this game a triumph of style over substance. An amazingly story well-told, with pitch perfect Victorian social mores, in a frustratingly (and sometimes hilariously) buggy game engine whose learning curve was butterfly knife sharp. Alongside my step-dad's Victorian roleplaying game and Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Arcanum formed the trifecta that would lead me into Victorian Literature Scholarship. It's a little bit embarassing to admit that my career was inspired by comics, DnD and video games and not, say, by reading Middlemarch for the first time. Coming back years later though, its amazing how much of the 19th century they really capture: Poe, Dickens, Hawthorne, Gaskell-- with a healthy dose of Darwin and Faraday thrown in for good measure. Everything from a misguided faith in electro-magnetism to a supernatural recreation of the Jack the Ripper murders, Arcanum created a world that was essentialized Victorian. Obviously it copped to some Steampunk influences along the way, but unlike Steampunk, it first and foremost loved the society and aesthetic of the era it amulated, not just the technology. I wish the Steampunk movement were more like Arcanum. And whatever its bugs, Arcanum was, and is, my vision of my field and my life, in private, indulgent moments.
15. Sword of Vermillion- The first real role-playing game I ever played. Its instruction manual (a monstrous 100 page guide) served as a major source of inspiration, and I spent hours trying to illustrate the strangely named weapons and armor (graphite sword? carmine shield?). Monsters grunted with now-comical exuberance. The endless expanse of brightly colored yellow pillars that was apparently supposed to be mountainous terrain is still comforting to me. I still have the muscle memory of the difference in feel between cutting through a giant floating eyeball, and a serpentine Medusa-ling. Probably invented. Definitely affective.
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