Writers kill a lot of women. I'm not an exception.
Well, I've killed fictional women. Actually, I've killed a lot more men. My women have a tendency to survive whatever nightmares I throw at them. Regardless, the traumas I've inflicted on my fictional women strike me as more memorable, because, hey, it turns out I didn't come out of the womb having a perfect understanding of culture and privilege and stuff.
Superhero comics, in which the line between death and not-death is more permeable, also follow the trend, and women are statistically a lot more likely to be burned up for drama than their male counterparts. People will occasionally refer to these doomed women as "disposable," which I think misses the point. Put on your Dworkin decoder glasses. Our stories don't kill women because they don't matter, because they serve no purpose. They kill women because their purpose is to be killed. We scream in cathedrals, and it ain't gonna be beautiful without a sacrifice.
Which is about what I knew about Breaking Dawn when I started the series, and the prospect was kind of exciting. Not because I'm a misogynistic sadist, although that is also almost certainly true. No, I was excited because Twilight had thus presented me with a world that could be easily enough enacted by Willingham's wooden soldiers. When Bella talks of Edward's beauty, she speaks first of light, but second of hardness. Bella and Edward kiss, and there's talk of breath, but there's no saliva. Edward is cold, Jacob is hot, but there are few references of sweat. And, lest we forget, Bella twists every which way to avoid thinking or saying the word "sex" if she can possibly avoid it. (Other words Bella avoids: cowgirl, blowjob, teabag, synecdoche, butch cock.)
There's also a fair deal of violence in the first three books, but those diamond-skinned vampires? They don't bleed. They break apart like goddamned statues. Werewolves theoretically break apart like the good ol' mammals they are, but we only see the post-triage form. Bella, of course, bleeds like a clumsy human, but she also tends to pass out whenever anything violent happens around her. Her main contribution in the big superhero battle royale that concludes Eclipse is to stab herself in the gut, leaving both of the male leads to kick themselves for not seeing it coming, because the chick is seriously a danger to herself. But that's just not a lot of moisture, really.
So, going into Breaking Dawn, I knew that a) Bella and Edward were going to fuck, despite the nominal chance that he might get excited and vibrate so fast Bella might explode like the bad guy in Death and Return of Superman, and b) Bella was going to get pregnant, and enjoy a birth that would sever her spine. It seemed impossible that either of these would be able to happen with the same plastic-action-figure detachment. Life, it turns out, is wet, gooey, and gross, and what fun is reading about vampire-fucking if we avoid that?
The sex, unsurprisingly, is glossed over. I suppose we, as readers, should be grateful our narrator doesn't simply pass out, considering the panic attack she has at the prospect of her husband--not boyfriend, not fiance, husband--seeing her in a bathing suit.
So, I invite you now to imagine a montage of trains going into tunnels and slow zooms into fireplaces. When you get back, briefly acknowledge a broken bedframe, piles of feathers, an ashamed Edward, and an ecstatic Bella who is surprised to find herself covered in bruises.
Read Holly Black's take here.
This is a point worth considering. There is no avoiding the abuse imagery here. Even Edward, I think, is a bit disturbed by it. (This is not the only incident of self-awareness on the part of the Twilight cast. Rosalie, for example, seems to be embarrassed to be in these books at all. I suspect, when Bella's not around, she re-reads John Steakley's Vampire$ and sighs wistfully.)
And it's ok to like this stuff. It's ok to want to perform it from time to time, with one or more consenting and informed partners. You need not compromise your politics if scary or dangerous things turn you on.
We make extraordinary excuses for individual rapists, but evince a disgust for rapists in the abstract that is entirely disproportionate to any other human sins or crimes. I'll not speculate on the whys and hows here, suffice to mumble idly about feedback loops and performative overcompensation. But rape in our culture is less an aberrant incident than it is a psi-field. Words and ideas replicate in minds, material patterns in material entities. And nothing appears ex nihilio, but has to be jury-rigged from what came before.
Our religious and military iconographies have not yet shed their feudal origins, so it shouldn't be so surprising that our sex iconography has also yet to catch up to factories, gunpowder, and individual rights. This idea of sex as consensual unless otherwise stated is not only unprecedented, it would appear as abject nonsense to the world from which many of our most enduring romantic images originate. Most of our romantic imagery is drenched in rape connotation. Low-level rape play is probably present in nearly all human sexual endeavors.
To quote another group of well-meaning crazy people, This is Who We Are.
So that's Twilight, folks. It's a whirlwind tour of the very worst parts of ourselves that we can't quite bring ourselves to get rid of. We rejigger the code with every new generation, every glowing fuck, every neatly formatted sentence. Dworkin, being crazy, saw the horror a bit more clearly than most of us do. Most of us have to strain a bit to see the nightmare she describes. It gets fainter over time. Hell, it's gotten fainter since Dworkin stopped writing about it.
Other highlights: the first mention of menstruation, when Bella experiences a classic teen drama late-period panic. (Spoiler alert: too late. No more periods for Bella, ever. Do her eggs turn shiny and diamond-like?)
The first (and only) mention of homosexuality, when one of Jacob's pals is teasing him. Said pal has imprinted on a child, which means he'll fall in love with her as soon as the creepiness of this concept drops below a certain level--and the girl, object of said imprinting, will obviously be in love with the (adult) man who's been her most persistent company since she was in kindergarten, from the sheer crushing weight of her gratitude and familial affection. Certainly the shared and unquestioned expectations of this among her entire community won't do her any harm.
The second mention of menstruation, when Leah--who, by the way, is the only female werewolf in the history of ever, not that this is a detail anyone is concerned about--notes that her cycle stopped when she started, erm, cycling. Her telepathic link to the boys in the pack grosses everyone out, and I assume she had to go sit in the hut for a week. There's something terribly amusing about werewolves blanching at the thought of a little blood.
A brief novelette in which Jacob gets to take over narrating duties for a while, and wastes our time with a bunch of bullshit. Like, wastes our time even by the standard of people who've read over a thousand pages of Twilight.
And finally, the big vampire battle royale, with a cast so big it requires a chart in the back of the book, culminating in the greatest anti-climax since that time I failed to climax. Think X-Men: The Last Stand meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Numerous media scholars have noted the great favor Rob Thomas did for Veronica Mars fans by easing the community into the show's inevitable cancellation by slowly making the show suck over the course of a season. Twilight finishes much the same way, unravelling its limited coherence strand by strand. It leaves us in the really real world to marvel at the mad journey we've finished, like the pursuit of Sunday.
As from a Nightmare, we awake.
And we promise to write something substantive about videogames soon. Seriously.
Undisciplined
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Utterances
And now for a completely dated point that I've always felt deserved some attention. During my Exile on Netflix, I caught up on Sarah Connor Chronicles, a middling sci-fi show created for the purpose of hurting Joss Whedon by making Summer Glau unavailable for S1 of Dollhouse.
With no particular summary of the larger plot, lobotomized T-800 unit John Henry, wired into a large mainframe, has killed an employee while diverting power to his own system during a power outage. His keeper, played by the delightful Shirley Manson, has asked our favorite badass FBI agent to consult on creating a moral code for the pleasantly amoral ex-Terminator.
"You want to give it commands," he says. "Start with ten."
As a viewer, I always thought the decalogue was a strange place to go with this. FBI agent is, presumably, a Christian, and Jesus' One Commandment would frankly make a lot more sense here. But instead, he suggests ten. To interpret, I've gone to the KJV, because it seems likely enough to be the source he's thinking of:
1) Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Who is "me"? In this scenario? The corporation? Shirley Manson? It's unclear why a machine would benefit from an allegiance to the God of Israel, or how he'd be able to infer such an obligation.
2) Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, etc.
Humans, frankly, haven't been entirely consistent with this one. I'm not sure what we should be worried John Henry might do. Does anyone else have nightmarish sci-fi plotlines about robots making graven images?
3) Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
Humans have interpreted this one quite oddly, but again, I'm very unclear how John Henry COULD break it, or what might happen if he did.
4) Keep the Sabbath day to sanctify it, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee.
If this is interpreted the way Orthodox Judaism did, it could present a real problem when John Henry has to commit suicide on Friday evening.
5) Honor thy father and thy mother.
John Henry has neither of these. He'd probably find the idea confusing.
6) Thou shalt not kill.
This is the only one anyone's actually worried about. Good call to include it.
7) Neither shalt thou commit adultery.
Scratch that, this is also a major concern.
With no particular summary of the larger plot, lobotomized T-800 unit John Henry, wired into a large mainframe, has killed an employee while diverting power to his own system during a power outage. His keeper, played by the delightful Shirley Manson, has asked our favorite badass FBI agent to consult on creating a moral code for the pleasantly amoral ex-Terminator.
"You want to give it commands," he says. "Start with ten."
As a viewer, I always thought the decalogue was a strange place to go with this. FBI agent is, presumably, a Christian, and Jesus' One Commandment would frankly make a lot more sense here. But instead, he suggests ten. To interpret, I've gone to the KJV, because it seems likely enough to be the source he's thinking of:
1) Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Who is "me"? In this scenario? The corporation? Shirley Manson? It's unclear why a machine would benefit from an allegiance to the God of Israel, or how he'd be able to infer such an obligation.
2) Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, etc.
Humans, frankly, haven't been entirely consistent with this one. I'm not sure what we should be worried John Henry might do. Does anyone else have nightmarish sci-fi plotlines about robots making graven images?
3) Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.
Humans have interpreted this one quite oddly, but again, I'm very unclear how John Henry COULD break it, or what might happen if he did.
4) Keep the Sabbath day to sanctify it, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee.
If this is interpreted the way Orthodox Judaism did, it could present a real problem when John Henry has to commit suicide on Friday evening.
5) Honor thy father and thy mother.
John Henry has neither of these. He'd probably find the idea confusing.
6) Thou shalt not kill.
This is the only one anyone's actually worried about. Good call to include it.
7) Neither shalt thou commit adultery.
Scratch that, this is also a major concern.
8) Neither shalt thou steal.
I suppose this represents a concern, to the extent that John Henry is more or less impossible to intimidate with violence, and therefore largely immune to human law enforcement efforts. It's just unclear what we might worry about him stealing. He's attached to a building, for fuck's sake.
9) Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbour.
No neighbors. Well, maybe Shirley Manson, but come on. Her own kid doesn't trust her.
No neighbors. Well, maybe Shirley Manson, but come on. Her own kid doesn't trust her.
10) Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbour's wife, neither shalt thou covet thy neighbour's house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or any thing that is thy neighbour's.
I'm not sure John Henry can even do this. It requires a fairly complex grasp of human psychology to understand how we can do this.
In conclusion, we have two, maybe three commandments that matter, and a lot of filler. Not a good program there, Mr. Decalogue.
Still, at least we don't have to worry about the robot killing machines cheating on their wives. That's a load off my mind.
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Fear and Loathing in Shibuya
Wow, two months since the last post. It's embarrassing, what with my readership having exploded into the mid-single digits. But it happens. There've been posts in the works, and writing on other fora, but mostly I think I just couldn't bear for my first post of 2012 to be about Twilight.
On the social media, a lot of my friends are game designers on one side of the academic divide or the other. I get a lot of posts about the process of development, upcoming projects, relevant press, etc. From the academics, I get a lot of links to things I should read, things I have read and should write about, etc. It's always a bit disarming, as I become aware to what extent I've fallen out of the loop on gaming culture.
I still game, of course, and often do so obsessively. But between the mono crisis and the fibro crisis, there's been a definite bias towards games I can play with the sound off while keeping one eye on Netflix on Demand. My long, futile war against multitasking has taken some ignominious defeats, and I can't imagine that my attention span--never quite as strong as that of my book-readin' counterparts--has entirely avoided the attrition. Depression makes it hard to do new things, and my late preference for comfort-food gaming is probably a manifestation of that as well.
Still, I am more fortunate than most. There are worse unhealthy preoccupations than the Nintendo DS, to my mind the most perfect game console yet devised. Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes... Professor Layton, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, Dawn of Discovery...not a bad deal for a perpetually novice strategy gamer with an affinity for narrative and extensive replay.
The World Ends With You, a game that stands in the very narrow group of games whose titles refer to profound philosophical assertions (cf. Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ), is a game I've spent years trying to find something significant to write about. Don't get me wrong: I love WEWY. Not in the way I love, say, G.K. Chesterton, or Lady Gaga. It's the kind of love one can only acquire from a Blockbuster Video employee ten minutes before midnight.
The trouble with writing about WEWY is that anything meaningful I could think of to say about the game would be read, heard, and felt by a player more beautifully than any mediated translation I could throw together. The plot, if you go in fresh, is thick with twists, and spoilers would abound in even the most perfunctory summary. Think Pokemon meets Job.
The best I can do, in terms of commentary, is to note that I am terrified of a sequel, not merely for fear of fucking up a really great story, but because I really can't imagine the game working on any apparatus without two vertically stacked screens. The conceit that there is no such thing as a shared reality ought to be challenged, at least for the player, by battles that ask her to control (and therefore, "be") two characters at once. Happens all the time in strategy games, after all. But usually the controls themselves are optimized for this purpose. In WEWY, you play Neku with the stylus and a guest with the d-pad, and like so many things in this game, it should be an unplayable mess, but somehow, it works. Even though it's not strictly possible to actively watch both screens at once, you learn to slip from one to the other as needed, and gradually, your attention becomes more fluid, the slippage less binary. You're not playing as both characters simultaneously, and you're not exactly playing as each in sequence; you're a thing between the screens, between the characters, responding to stimuli and moving on.
The tendency to refer to the character on screen as "me" seems to be endemic as gaming, so it's oddly profound to be reminded that Neku is only Neku, and Shiki is only Shiki, and I...I am only me, chronically unemployed, dangerously unhealthy, and still capable of enjoying the moment.
If you like beans, buy a coffee shop. If you like ideas, I suppose blogging have to do.
On the social media, a lot of my friends are game designers on one side of the academic divide or the other. I get a lot of posts about the process of development, upcoming projects, relevant press, etc. From the academics, I get a lot of links to things I should read, things I have read and should write about, etc. It's always a bit disarming, as I become aware to what extent I've fallen out of the loop on gaming culture.
I still game, of course, and often do so obsessively. But between the mono crisis and the fibro crisis, there's been a definite bias towards games I can play with the sound off while keeping one eye on Netflix on Demand. My long, futile war against multitasking has taken some ignominious defeats, and I can't imagine that my attention span--never quite as strong as that of my book-readin' counterparts--has entirely avoided the attrition. Depression makes it hard to do new things, and my late preference for comfort-food gaming is probably a manifestation of that as well.
Still, I am more fortunate than most. There are worse unhealthy preoccupations than the Nintendo DS, to my mind the most perfect game console yet devised. Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes..
The World Ends With You, a game that stands in the very narrow group of games whose titles refer to profound philosophical assertions (cf. Little Red Riding Hood's Zombie BBQ), is a game I've spent years trying to find something significant to write about. Don't get me wrong: I love WEWY. Not in the way I love, say, G.K. Chesterton, or Lady Gaga. It's the kind of love one can only acquire from a Blockbuster Video employee ten minutes before midnight.
The trouble with writing about WEWY is that anything meaningful I could think of to say about the game would be read, heard, and felt by a player more beautifully than any mediated translation I could throw together. The plot, if you go in fresh, is thick with twists, and spoilers would abound in even the most perfunctory summary. Think Pokemon meets Job.
The best I can do, in terms of commentary, is to note that I am terrified of a sequel, not merely for fear of fucking up a really great story, but because I really can't imagine the game working on any apparatus without two vertically stacked screens. The conceit that there is no such thing as a shared reality ought to be challenged, at least for the player, by battles that ask her to control (and therefore, "be") two characters at once. Happens all the time in strategy games, after all. But usually the controls themselves are optimized for this purpose. In WEWY, you play Neku with the stylus and a guest with the d-pad, and like so many things in this game, it should be an unplayable mess, but somehow, it works. Even though it's not strictly possible to actively watch both screens at once, you learn to slip from one to the other as needed, and gradually, your attention becomes more fluid, the slippage less binary. You're not playing as both characters simultaneously, and you're not exactly playing as each in sequence; you're a thing between the screens, between the characters, responding to stimuli and moving on.
The tendency to refer to the character on screen as "me" seems to be endemic as gaming, so it's oddly profound to be reminded that Neku is only Neku, and Shiki is only Shiki, and I...I am only me, chronically unemployed, dangerously unhealthy, and still capable of enjoying the moment.
If you like beans, buy a coffee shop. If you like ideas, I suppose blogging have to do.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Like a Trash Can Fire in a Prison Cell: Twilight Continued
Finished Twilight? Good. Now, get on with your life.
If you insist on continuing to read, I suggest you put on your theory glasses. Because Twilightas series is a much darker and funnier story. Not for the writing, or the plot, but because of the ideas of a woman named Andrea Dworkin, who made it all clear to me.
Dworkin is not a popular name in feminist circles these days. Truthfully, she wasn't a terribly popular name even during the wave for which she's often cited as an icon. Which is the first thing to notice about Dworkin these days: she's hugely popular with people trying to discredit things. Right-wing authors cite her to discredit feminism, third-wave-or-better feminists cite her to discredit second-wavers/white women/the 80s. I, personally, have once cited her to discredit the writing on True Blood. Dworkin is versatile that way.
But the defining moment in my travels with Dworkin came in the post-script to Woman-Hating, in which she railed against the tyranny of punctuation, and claimed that punctuation was the difference between an essay read in a book, and a conversation had between people. I so rarely get to use my media studies cred to pull rank, but this was one such opportunity: paper and ink is the difference between an essay read in a book and a conversation. And if it's not good enough for you, I've got bad news for you, because Andrea Dworkin is fucking dead and not conversing with anybody.
But, like mt feelings on Twilight, this should not be read as a condemnation of Dworkin. I'm a fan. I just feel she needs to be approached as something of a mad hierophant. Living writers can do a fine job writing about what patriarchy is, how it works, and even how it feels. Dworkin writes the way patriarchy smells, the way it tastes. Because our present is only an ongoing escape from our past, and our past is darker, sicker, and scarier than most of us can imagine. We can never be so far from it that its horror won't leak through when we aren't watching.
Lunatics, like Fools, are useful to have around now and then.
In Woman-Hating, Dworkin looks at fairy tales and pornography, two rather disparate ends of the media spectrum, and essentially comes to the same conclusion about them. For the patriarchy's purposes, man exists, and is good, in a pleasantly Augustinian sort of way. Woman is the opposite of that. So, since it is good for man to be active, it is good for a woman to be passive; since it is good for a man to be bold, it is good for a woman to be timid; since it is good for a man to be awake, it is good for a woman to be unconscious. And, of course, since it's good for a man to be alive, it's good for a woman to be dead.
There are, of course, active women, who seek to gain and wield power, and go about their value-defining way. The evil queens, the evil stepmothers, witches and paganae galore. Their counterparts, to be heralded as right and true and noble, are the sleeping ones, the poisoned ones, and the dead. Men exist to fuck, kill, and eat; women exist to be raped, killed, and eaten.
Which brings us to Bella Swann.
Aside from being a whiny little shit, as is to be expected from an early-21st-century American teen, Bella seems to have quite a bit going for her when we meet her. We are told that she is, diegetically, quite smart. She is well-read, although it doesn't seem to affect her conversations very much, and we never see much of her writing. Her parents appear to be semi-literate morons, and her success is even more impressive in that light.
At school, she is presented with an established clique of people dying to be her friend. She plays it down, preferring to complain to us about her physical awkwardness. In fact, the only thing that interrupts her internal monologue of complaint is that there's a boy who doesn't seem to like her. She obsesses about this for weeks.
And we've covered that one, and it's past, and past is prologue. So let's jump ahead to the payoff: he dumps her, and she goes into a depression of horrifying mopiness, too bleak even for an emo montage. Out on the town, in an attempt to look normal again, she encounters a shady group of men she believes to be the ones who assaulted her the previous year, and, operating on instinct, walks toward them. It isn't clear why, at first; she's not trying to reclaim her violated sense of autonomy, she's not daring them to offer a repeat performance in front of witnesses. What stops her--and what inspires her to continue--is discovering that, as she intentionally walks forward into the vital prospect of pain, humiliation, and possibly death, Edward's voice pops into her head.
Clearer than in her memories.
Because the feeling of imminent destruction, especially self-destruction, reminds her of her ex-boyfriend more than all the My Morning Jacket songs in the world. She follows up this performance by buying a motorbike, which are diegetically considered to be dangerous even for people with nominal control of their arms and legs, a group that excludes Bella. Finally, Bella inaugurates New Moon's third act by throwing herself off a goddamn cliff. Alice, our friendly neighborhood psychic with pretty hair, thinks it's a suicide attempt, and is in all likelihood half-right.
New Moon opens with a discussion of Romeo and Juliet, so it's appropriate that the interaction between Bella and Edward consists of a kind of competitive suicidal ideation. Following Meyer's tradition of having about one chapter of better-than-mediocre material, there's an iteresting mediation about settling for Paris, and what that means for love, death, and superficial readings of canonical literature. Jacob, whose abs are certainly not described with the breathtaking narrative force Taylor Lautner would later give them, is basically just a trailer for Eclipse, in terms of Bella's world, but it's nice to acknowledge that it wouldn't have been impossible for him to have been a meaningful player in the present.
We move on. Edward and the Cullens are, predictably, horrified that Bella has been hanging out with werewolves. The Quileuttes are predictably horrified that Bella has been hanging out with vampires. It's too dangerous, they remind her in unison.
And the hell of it is, they're right. Even in this friendly diegetic world, vampires and werewolves are both incredibly dangerous. When Bella cuts herself at her birthday party, Jasper loses control and tries to eat her. Sam, Jacob's pack leader, is married to a woman who is missing half of her face, because he lost his temper with her once. One of Jacob's bros accidentally transforms in her presence, and only Jacob following suit seems to keep her safe.
I think all of us, at some time or another, have done things we aren't proud of in the heat of the moment. All of us have found ourselves staying a little too late at that party, having a bit too many rum-and-cokes, and saying things we don't really mean, like "I love you," or "I never want to see you again," or "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." But I don't know anyone who has ever torn anyone's face off in a fit of pique. Everyone I know who's torn someone's face off has done so with careful, sober deliberation.
Even with all the self-control that only twue wuv can bring, Bella stays physically intact--literature majors, please hold your comments until the end of the post--only be ensuring that the barely controlled supernatural forces around her are consistently in even numbers.
Bella just isn't interested unless she's got a reasonable chance of dying. And it seems she has standards as to what constitutes a good death. She's not going for some weak-ass chick-suicide like an overdose, and she's not going to butch up and borrow her father's handgun, either. No, the kind of death Bella wants, the kind of death she draws hearts around in her diary, is one in which she is beaten and broken, her soft, soft will spent against an unstoppable, relentless force of power and will and hardness. One that's both brutally fast and agonizingly slow. Bent limbs akimbo, her innermost fluids flowing out into the open air, under the watchful eyes of an impenetrable, invulnerable predator.
Conclusion to follow, in which, over a thousand pages into the series, something wet finally happens. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, I think I need a cigarette.
If you insist on continuing to read, I suggest you put on your theory glasses. Because Twilightas series is a much darker and funnier story. Not for the writing, or the plot, but because of the ideas of a woman named Andrea Dworkin, who made it all clear to me.
Dworkin is not a popular name in feminist circles these days. Truthfully, she wasn't a terribly popular name even during the wave for which she's often cited as an icon. Which is the first thing to notice about Dworkin these days: she's hugely popular with people trying to discredit things. Right-wing authors cite her to discredit feminism, third-wave-or-better feminists cite her to discredit second-wavers/white women/the 80s. I, personally, have once cited her to discredit the writing on True Blood. Dworkin is versatile that way.
But the defining moment in my travels with Dworkin came in the post-script to Woman-Hating, in which she railed against the tyranny of punctuation, and claimed that punctuation was the difference between an essay read in a book, and a conversation had between people. I so rarely get to use my media studies cred to pull rank, but this was one such opportunity: paper and ink is the difference between an essay read in a book and a conversation. And if it's not good enough for you, I've got bad news for you, because Andrea Dworkin is fucking dead and not conversing with anybody.
But, like mt feelings on Twilight, this should not be read as a condemnation of Dworkin. I'm a fan. I just feel she needs to be approached as something of a mad hierophant. Living writers can do a fine job writing about what patriarchy is, how it works, and even how it feels. Dworkin writes the way patriarchy smells, the way it tastes. Because our present is only an ongoing escape from our past, and our past is darker, sicker, and scarier than most of us can imagine. We can never be so far from it that its horror won't leak through when we aren't watching.
Lunatics, like Fools, are useful to have around now and then.
In Woman-Hating, Dworkin looks at fairy tales and pornography, two rather disparate ends of the media spectrum, and essentially comes to the same conclusion about them. For the patriarchy's purposes, man exists, and is good, in a pleasantly Augustinian sort of way. Woman is the opposite of that. So, since it is good for man to be active, it is good for a woman to be passive; since it is good for a man to be bold, it is good for a woman to be timid; since it is good for a man to be awake, it is good for a woman to be unconscious. And, of course, since it's good for a man to be alive, it's good for a woman to be dead.
There are, of course, active women, who seek to gain and wield power, and go about their value-defining way. The evil queens, the evil stepmothers, witches and paganae galore. Their counterparts, to be heralded as right and true and noble, are the sleeping ones, the poisoned ones, and the dead. Men exist to fuck, kill, and eat; women exist to be raped, killed, and eaten.
Which brings us to Bella Swann.
Aside from being a whiny little shit, as is to be expected from an early-21st-century American teen, Bella seems to have quite a bit going for her when we meet her. We are told that she is, diegetically, quite smart. She is well-read, although it doesn't seem to affect her conversations very much, and we never see much of her writing. Her parents appear to be semi-literate morons, and her success is even more impressive in that light.
At school, she is presented with an established clique of people dying to be her friend. She plays it down, preferring to complain to us about her physical awkwardness. In fact, the only thing that interrupts her internal monologue of complaint is that there's a boy who doesn't seem to like her. She obsesses about this for weeks.
And we've covered that one, and it's past, and past is prologue. So let's jump ahead to the payoff: he dumps her, and she goes into a depression of horrifying mopiness, too bleak even for an emo montage. Out on the town, in an attempt to look normal again, she encounters a shady group of men she believes to be the ones who assaulted her the previous year, and, operating on instinct, walks toward them. It isn't clear why, at first; she's not trying to reclaim her violated sense of autonomy, she's not daring them to offer a repeat performance in front of witnesses. What stops her--and what inspires her to continue--is discovering that, as she intentionally walks forward into the vital prospect of pain, humiliation, and possibly death, Edward's voice pops into her head.
Clearer than in her memories.
Because the feeling of imminent destruction, especially self-destruction, reminds her of her ex-boyfriend more than all the My Morning Jacket songs in the world. She follows up this performance by buying a motorbike, which are diegetically considered to be dangerous even for people with nominal control of their arms and legs, a group that excludes Bella. Finally, Bella inaugurates New Moon's third act by throwing herself off a goddamn cliff. Alice, our friendly neighborhood psychic with pretty hair, thinks it's a suicide attempt, and is in all likelihood half-right.
New Moon opens with a discussion of Romeo and Juliet, so it's appropriate that the interaction between Bella and Edward consists of a kind of competitive suicidal ideation. Following Meyer's tradition of having about one chapter of better-than-mediocre material, there's an iteresting mediation about settling for Paris, and what that means for love, death, and superficial readings of canonical literature. Jacob, whose abs are certainly not described with the breathtaking narrative force Taylor Lautner would later give them, is basically just a trailer for Eclipse, in terms of Bella's world, but it's nice to acknowledge that it wouldn't have been impossible for him to have been a meaningful player in the present.
We move on. Edward and the Cullens are, predictably, horrified that Bella has been hanging out with werewolves. The Quileuttes are predictably horrified that Bella has been hanging out with vampires. It's too dangerous, they remind her in unison.
And the hell of it is, they're right. Even in this friendly diegetic world, vampires and werewolves are both incredibly dangerous. When Bella cuts herself at her birthday party, Jasper loses control and tries to eat her. Sam, Jacob's pack leader, is married to a woman who is missing half of her face, because he lost his temper with her once. One of Jacob's bros accidentally transforms in her presence, and only Jacob following suit seems to keep her safe.
I think all of us, at some time or another, have done things we aren't proud of in the heat of the moment. All of us have found ourselves staying a little too late at that party, having a bit too many rum-and-cokes, and saying things we don't really mean, like "I love you," or "I never want to see you again," or "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." But I don't know anyone who has ever torn anyone's face off in a fit of pique. Everyone I know who's torn someone's face off has done so with careful, sober deliberation.
Even with all the self-control that only twue wuv can bring, Bella stays physically intact--literature majors, please hold your comments until the end of the post--only be ensuring that the barely controlled supernatural forces around her are consistently in even numbers.
Bella just isn't interested unless she's got a reasonable chance of dying. And it seems she has standards as to what constitutes a good death. She's not going for some weak-ass chick-suicide like an overdose, and she's not going to butch up and borrow her father's handgun, either. No, the kind of death Bella wants, the kind of death she draws hearts around in her diary, is one in which she is beaten and broken, her soft, soft will spent against an unstoppable, relentless force of power and will and hardness. One that's both brutally fast and agonizingly slow. Bent limbs akimbo, her innermost fluids flowing out into the open air, under the watchful eyes of an impenetrable, invulnerable predator.
Conclusion to follow, in which, over a thousand pages into the series, something wet finally happens. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, I think I need a cigarette.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
The Weak Last Gasp of the Evening's Dying Light: the fucking Twilight Post Begins
As I have probably written here before, I like bad things. So it should probably surprise nobody that I've read the entire Twilight series, and enjoyed it very much. The most difficult part, in fact, was the terror that somebody would see me reading it. To that end, I prepared a short speech explaining that, after having spent the past month immersed in Andrea Dworkin, Ayn Rand, and Graham Greene, I was entitled to read whatever silly thing I wanted, to celebrate the fact that I hadn't yet blinded myself from the sheer horror of it all.
I shall acknowledge and move past what all Twipologists claim: they're light, they're fun, they're guilty pleasures. "Guilty pleasure" is a particularly useful phrase, because at times our beloved narrators manage to evoke authentic feelings of guilt and shame. Usually these are phantom travellers carried by nostalgia. I shall 'splain.
Think, for a moment, about your adolescence. Think about the very dumbest thing you ever did. The thing you are most embarrassed about, that you can laugh at when it comes up in conversation, but that you know better than to spend a lot of time thinking about. Remember how sensible you thought you were being? Remember how noble, how strong, how brave you were? Remember how utterly apocalyptic every (saner) alternative seemed to be? Think about that frame of mind, your brain pan filling up with water, an odd yellow-filter placed over your third-person memories. Think about what a stupid, self-indulgent little shit you were.
The people in Twilight live in that place all the time.
(I assume that anyone reading this is an alien researching human civilization. If that is, in fact, the case...man, did you ever go to the wrong place. Seriously. Go ask your thesis advisor if there's still time to pick a new topic. If you are a human who doesn't have this kind of memory of their adolescence, I wish you congratulations, and ask to subscribe to your newsletter. Finally, if you are currently an adolescent...shit, just try not to commit and violent crimes or die, ok? Good fucking luck.)
I didn't go to high school, so the dominant narratives presented to me by American popular culture are enacted by actors in their late 20s pretending to be teenagers having an experience I missed. Nonetheless, these high school narratives reliably provide some of that guilty nostalgia. Twilight is a concentrated form. If Buffy is weed and My So-Called Life is alcohol, Twilight is black tar heroin.
So, the shittier it is, the more embarrassed you are to be reading it as a more-or-less literate adult, the more fun it becomes. I don't think this qualifies as reading it ironically. I had a blast reading these books. It's just that it's the kind of blast I had watching James MacAvoy pushing a gun barrel through a man's face in Wanted.
And most of the time, the writing is sufficient to take you where you need to go. Generally, it ranges from competent to slightly-less-than, with one notable exception: the authentically interesting chase scenario that comprises the first book's third act. The trouble is, well, it's a chase. And you know what medium does chases really, really well? Film. A 2-hour film of the last third of Twilight would be one of the more interesting and ambitious vampire stories we've seen in a while. But in prose, it blurs in with the rest of the story, saddled as it is by a narrator who can't see most of the action and spends the climax unconscious. And in the film--yes, I have seen the first three, and in my defense I cite the existence of Rifftrax--it's completely wasted.
That said, Twilight could have been a lovely sprite of a novel had it ended with Edward losing control and tearing apart his one true love in a shower of blood, bone, and sinew. There's some humor in that ending, and some justice, and a sick kind of romance. Because vampires can certainly be effective stand-ins for superheroes, but their defining characteristic is that they will fucking kill you.
So ends the first post, because I'm pretty sure I should make some dinner. Stay tuned, imaginary readers, because if you share my disappointment that Edward jerked his story off its moral rails, the sequels will make your eyes bleed.
I shall acknowledge and move past what all Twipologists claim: they're light, they're fun, they're guilty pleasures. "Guilty pleasure" is a particularly useful phrase, because at times our beloved narrators manage to evoke authentic feelings of guilt and shame. Usually these are phantom travellers carried by nostalgia. I shall 'splain.
Think, for a moment, about your adolescence. Think about the very dumbest thing you ever did. The thing you are most embarrassed about, that you can laugh at when it comes up in conversation, but that you know better than to spend a lot of time thinking about. Remember how sensible you thought you were being? Remember how noble, how strong, how brave you were? Remember how utterly apocalyptic every (saner) alternative seemed to be? Think about that frame of mind, your brain pan filling up with water, an odd yellow-filter placed over your third-person memories. Think about what a stupid, self-indulgent little shit you were.
The people in Twilight live in that place all the time.
(I assume that anyone reading this is an alien researching human civilization. If that is, in fact, the case...man, did you ever go to the wrong place. Seriously. Go ask your thesis advisor if there's still time to pick a new topic. If you are a human who doesn't have this kind of memory of their adolescence, I wish you congratulations, and ask to subscribe to your newsletter. Finally, if you are currently an adolescent...shit, just try not to commit and violent crimes or die, ok? Good fucking luck.)
I didn't go to high school, so the dominant narratives presented to me by American popular culture are enacted by actors in their late 20s pretending to be teenagers having an experience I missed. Nonetheless, these high school narratives reliably provide some of that guilty nostalgia. Twilight is a concentrated form. If Buffy is weed and My So-Called Life is alcohol, Twilight is black tar heroin.
So, the shittier it is, the more embarrassed you are to be reading it as a more-or-less literate adult, the more fun it becomes. I don't think this qualifies as reading it ironically. I had a blast reading these books. It's just that it's the kind of blast I had watching James MacAvoy pushing a gun barrel through a man's face in Wanted.
And most of the time, the writing is sufficient to take you where you need to go. Generally, it ranges from competent to slightly-less-than, with one notable exception: the authentically interesting chase scenario that comprises the first book's third act. The trouble is, well, it's a chase. And you know what medium does chases really, really well? Film. A 2-hour film of the last third of Twilight would be one of the more interesting and ambitious vampire stories we've seen in a while. But in prose, it blurs in with the rest of the story, saddled as it is by a narrator who can't see most of the action and spends the climax unconscious. And in the film--yes, I have seen the first three, and in my defense I cite the existence of Rifftrax--it's completely wasted.
That said, Twilight could have been a lovely sprite of a novel had it ended with Edward losing control and tearing apart his one true love in a shower of blood, bone, and sinew. There's some humor in that ending, and some justice, and a sick kind of romance. Because vampires can certainly be effective stand-ins for superheroes, but their defining characteristic is that they will fucking kill you.
So ends the first post, because I'm pretty sure I should make some dinner. Stay tuned, imaginary readers, because if you share my disappointment that Edward jerked his story off its moral rails, the sequels will make your eyes bleed.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Not a game you can win.
When you write almost nothing, knowing what to write about can be a tricky biscuit. Most of my daily, procrastination-assisting reading these days arrives via political blogs by liberals, feminists, and the odd liberal feminist. Media and ethics come up frequently on these blogs, because it turns out that liberals and feminists have a thing about media and ethics. Who knew?
Yet, very often, I have little of substance to say about any of these posts, beyond the occasional comment. Occasionally, the blogosphere will go into a tizzy over an issue which, on paper, seems to be exactly my area of interest, and in these cases it's usually something rather dull and obvious that inspires me to write out of a kind of spiritual vindictiveness. I generally don't get far on those topics, and try not to make the attempt.
I have worked hard, very hard, to avoid blogging about Penny Arcade. For serious.
So now I'm feeling compelled to write about the Pick-Up Artist...thing? What is it, anyway? Motivational lecture series? LARP scenario? The ads I see on filesharing sites suggest it's a practical, monetized application of CIA's MKULTRA project, but I assume this to be bullshit. Not only because, to paraphrase Morbo, HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY, but because if it were true, I'd be reading about guys raising zombie armies of girlfriend-samurai.
For some reason--by which I mean apparently offensive and poorly thought-out comments on Penny Arcade--whenever videogames come up on my daily blog roundup, PUAs usually follow; certainly, whenever PUAs come up, videogames make a quick appearance. It's part of the bouquet of the New Male thing we're working out, somewhere on the spectrum alongside Asperger's and Nice Guys. (I am too lazy to post the appropriate trademark symbol. If you want it there, get a permanent marker and apply it directly to your screen. If you're using a screen-reader, you can save time by just marking up your fingers.) Nice Guys, affable ensigns of the rape apology Federation, are a topic dear to my heart, in a "there but for the grace of God go I" sort of way, and deserve a prose exploration significantly longer than I intend this one to be. Suffice to say there a lot of young dudes out there who don't seem to be very good at dealing with people, and since mandatory military conscription is no longer in vogue, they find themselves ignoring the problem until it interferes with what we are collectively told is a God-given right to get laid.
Yes, flirting is tricky. I, personally, am utterly insensate to it: even in my seven annual minutes of being friendly and communicative, if a woman attempts to flirt or flirt back, the romantic intentions bend around me, like light around the Predator, and quietly raise the self-esteem of the guy standing behind me.
What pricks my academic ears up--my academic ears, incidentally, are smaller, more muscular appendages located near the base of my neck--is the persistent use of "game."
We have lots of games. We have the spy game, the fame game, the political game. Anything in which multiple parties with differing, potentially mutually exclusive interests has likely been likened to a game in some dusty corner of the common parlance.
(Note to self: write book of poetry, title it "some dusty corner of the common parlance.")
And let's take a look at that. As any self-respecting American knows, the CIA doesn't train spies, per se, but rather trains operatives to recruit spies on the ground. What an operative primarily does is convince people to help them. Money, patriotism, ideology, blackmail, and good old-fashioned cash payoffs: the tools of the trade when you want to convince someone to do something that is certainly in your interest, but probably a disastrous, life-ending mistake for them.
Politics, by definition, means making strategic alliances with people you don't like, because people you like even less are making strategic alliances with people they like only slightly more than you.
Fame...fuck it, I dunno. Lady Gaga seems to have a good handle on it, ask her.
So games are tricky. Games might involve compromise or deception. But the most salient thing about the pick-up game, to my reading, is Bernard Suits' claim that the defining characteristic of a game, often as opposed to "free" play, is a layer of unnecessary complication or difficulty.
To wit, a game requires an opponent of sorts. And what is the difficulty involved in...whatever the hell the PUAs are selling cheat codes for?
You want to have sex with women, right? So why all the training? Why the hilarious Soviet mind control techniques? Why the carefully employed scripts? Because they want to have sex with you, right?
Oh, wait. They don't?
Well, shit. You do have a problem then. Because, as we've currently configured the sexy sex-language landscape, if they don't want you, it's not sex. It's a sin, and a crime, and (if you're a conservative) a persistent metaphor for everything bad that happens to you ever.
And the thing is, at no point in human history is it as easy as it is now to find people who want to have sex with you. We have the internet, we have craigslist, we have (out of pocket) birth control and (sort of) legal abortion. We have fetish forums and online dating and Chat Roulette. We have speed dating and Facebook and, well, dormitories. In the Western world, young adult men and women are allowed to hang out together, in a wide variety of ways, with the most minimal outside supervision.
Working these various social affordances can be complex, of course, not the least for their sheer variety. If you want to have sex--and, being male, you're more than allowed to be open about it--finding someone who wants to have sex with you can, in fact, be rather gamelike. There's not really a problem with that. Trying to alter or conceal your personality or intentions to gain sex from someone who'd run screaming the other way if you presented yourself honestly, well, that's sort of a game too. It's just that the win condition is a valorization of the skill it took to get there, not a thing freely joined, to be appreciated in and of itself. The story of this kind of hook-up is one of triumph over adversity, and reduces the hunted to a disposable, replaceable entity.
Which is why we refer to this sort of thing as rape culture.
Yet, very often, I have little of substance to say about any of these posts, beyond the occasional comment. Occasionally, the blogosphere will go into a tizzy over an issue which, on paper, seems to be exactly my area of interest, and in these cases it's usually something rather dull and obvious that inspires me to write out of a kind of spiritual vindictiveness. I generally don't get far on those topics, and try not to make the attempt.
I have worked hard, very hard, to avoid blogging about Penny Arcade. For serious.
So now I'm feeling compelled to write about the Pick-Up Artist...thing? What is it, anyway? Motivational lecture series? LARP scenario? The ads I see on filesharing sites suggest it's a practical, monetized application of CIA's MKULTRA project, but I assume this to be bullshit. Not only because, to paraphrase Morbo, HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY, but because if it were true, I'd be reading about guys raising zombie armies of girlfriend-samurai.
For some reason--by which I mean apparently offensive and poorly thought-out comments on Penny Arcade--whenever videogames come up on my daily blog roundup, PUAs usually follow; certainly, whenever PUAs come up, videogames make a quick appearance. It's part of the bouquet of the New Male thing we're working out, somewhere on the spectrum alongside Asperger's and Nice Guys. (I am too lazy to post the appropriate trademark symbol. If you want it there, get a permanent marker and apply it directly to your screen. If you're using a screen-reader, you can save time by just marking up your fingers.) Nice Guys, affable ensigns of the rape apology Federation, are a topic dear to my heart, in a "there but for the grace of God go I" sort of way, and deserve a prose exploration significantly longer than I intend this one to be. Suffice to say there a lot of young dudes out there who don't seem to be very good at dealing with people, and since mandatory military conscription is no longer in vogue, they find themselves ignoring the problem until it interferes with what we are collectively told is a God-given right to get laid.
Yes, flirting is tricky. I, personally, am utterly insensate to it: even in my seven annual minutes of being friendly and communicative, if a woman attempts to flirt or flirt back, the romantic intentions bend around me, like light around the Predator, and quietly raise the self-esteem of the guy standing behind me.
What pricks my academic ears up--my academic ears, incidentally, are smaller, more muscular appendages located near the base of my neck--is the persistent use of "game."
We have lots of games. We have the spy game, the fame game, the political game. Anything in which multiple parties with differing, potentially mutually exclusive interests has likely been likened to a game in some dusty corner of the common parlance.
(Note to self: write book of poetry, title it "some dusty corner of the common parlance.")
And let's take a look at that. As any self-respecting American knows, the CIA doesn't train spies, per se, but rather trains operatives to recruit spies on the ground. What an operative primarily does is convince people to help them. Money, patriotism, ideology, blackmail, and good old-fashioned cash payoffs: the tools of the trade when you want to convince someone to do something that is certainly in your interest, but probably a disastrous, life-ending mistake for them.
Politics, by definition, means making strategic alliances with people you don't like, because people you like even less are making strategic alliances with people they like only slightly more than you.
Fame...fuck it, I dunno. Lady Gaga seems to have a good handle on it, ask her.
So games are tricky. Games might involve compromise or deception. But the most salient thing about the pick-up game, to my reading, is Bernard Suits' claim that the defining characteristic of a game, often as opposed to "free" play, is a layer of unnecessary complication or difficulty.
To wit, a game requires an opponent of sorts. And what is the difficulty involved in...whatever the hell the PUAs are selling cheat codes for?
You want to have sex with women, right? So why all the training? Why the hilarious Soviet mind control techniques? Why the carefully employed scripts? Because they want to have sex with you, right?
Oh, wait. They don't?
Well, shit. You do have a problem then. Because, as we've currently configured the sexy sex-language landscape, if they don't want you, it's not sex. It's a sin, and a crime, and (if you're a conservative) a persistent metaphor for everything bad that happens to you ever.
And the thing is, at no point in human history is it as easy as it is now to find people who want to have sex with you. We have the internet, we have craigslist, we have (out of pocket) birth control and (sort of) legal abortion. We have fetish forums and online dating and Chat Roulette. We have speed dating and Facebook and, well, dormitories. In the Western world, young adult men and women are allowed to hang out together, in a wide variety of ways, with the most minimal outside supervision.
Working these various social affordances can be complex, of course, not the least for their sheer variety. If you want to have sex--and, being male, you're more than allowed to be open about it--finding someone who wants to have sex with you can, in fact, be rather gamelike. There's not really a problem with that. Trying to alter or conceal your personality or intentions to gain sex from someone who'd run screaming the other way if you presented yourself honestly, well, that's sort of a game too. It's just that the win condition is a valorization of the skill it took to get there, not a thing freely joined, to be appreciated in and of itself. The story of this kind of hook-up is one of triumph over adversity, and reduces the hunted to a disposable, replaceable entity.
Which is why we refer to this sort of thing as rape culture.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Surviving the Winter
Hey, kids. It's winter in the Greater Boston Area, and if you're depressed and taking care of a chronically ill person, that means you're stuck in a time loop, revisiting the narratively compelling artifacts of your more rockin' years, and, appropriately, watching a lot of Doctor Who.
(We will not, in this previously-on-Undisciplined entry, deal with Torchwood. Because, come fucking on, Davies. Scrap it, try again with Crowd Hoot or Hot Rod Cow.)
The piece de resistance, or "piece of resistance," of my current domicile is my first-run PlayStation 3. The wood-burning model. It weighs seventy pounds, gives off 5,000 BTUs, it can theoretically run Linux, and it's completely fucking irreplaceable, since Sony has apparently blinded or executed everyone who worked on it. This means that I have hardware emulation of previous PS games, in the sense of having a PS2 emulator that contains a PS1 emulator. This represents the holy grail of gaming, because now I can play games that are a decade and a half old. Because I am an idiot. (For further research, check every other entry.)
When life is stressful and the sun itself has abandoned you, the logical thing to do is to hunker down and do a Silent Hill marathon. The first game weathers the ravages of time quite competently; the resolution drop is jarring at first, especially on an HDTV, but not seeing shit is kind of the sine qua non of Silent Hill's visuals, so you get used to it pretty quickly. What does stand out is the ear-splitting, high-pitched squeal the game will occasionally emit when you use the handgun too often. Since the handgun is the only firearm with which the player is provided adequate ammo, this does change the gameplay experience significantly. Apparently this flaw is also in the PSone classic download from PSN, because Sony hates us and wants us to suffer.
The internet is less than specific about the pervasiveness of the glitch; I don't much remember it, but some people seem to have reported it while playing in PS2 emulation. It's possible the only way to play Silent Hill correctly is with an out-of-production console, in the dark, while high on mescaline.
Which raises a curious problem for games studies. Obviously, access to earlier texts is something you're going to need in any serious (or comical!) study of a medium. Literature students have libraries, the bastards, and an adorable print industry that pretends to keep the medium relevant. Film schools tend to have extensive archives, and film archiving in general is an ongoing and respected cultural project. And I hear now and then about university libraries stockpiling videogames for the apocalypse.
A problem occurs. One, are we really going to need to keep all this fucking hardware on hand forever? Does the future need GameCubes? PC emulation solves some of this, I suppose, but leaves the purists grumbling. More to the point, not everyone has the opportunity to see Othello performed between two of their English classes. We developed a workaround, providing students with the "text" of the text, and asking them to "read" the play. This is a pet peeve of mine, and I intend to be entirely unreasonable about it for the remainder of my life. The screenplay for Casablanca is not fucking Casablanca.
But what if it were? It's good enough for a citation. Similarly, if you just need to swipe some plot elements from Metal Gear Solid 2, a transcript will do nicely. But if you need mechanics, architecture, ethics...you need the original game, on the original platform. In the dark. High on mescaline.
Except you don't. If we're to drop our narrative infatuations, it seems appropriate to ask where we draw the line between the text and a given performance of the text. If dialogue isn't key, spice it up or lose it. If graphics don't matter, spruce 'em up or trim 'em down. Does Silent Hill actually need low-res redraw to be Silent Hill? Can we get a better translation of the Japanese text? Can Konami hire people to write better Japanese dialogue? (The answer to this last question, as evidenced by MGS Twin Snakes, is: no.)
Preservation is obviously going to be a concern down the line, and every medium struggles with it at some level. I don't really know whether it's important to see The Great Dictator on film, or whether a digital copy is sufficient. But I also don't know where the line between "remake" and "restoration" lies for videogames.
(We will not, in this previously-on-Undisciplined entry, deal with Torchwood. Because, come fucking on, Davies. Scrap it, try again with Crowd Hoot or Hot Rod Cow.)
The piece de resistance, or "piece of resistance," of my current domicile is my first-run PlayStation 3. The wood-burning model. It weighs seventy pounds, gives off 5,000 BTUs, it can theoretically run Linux, and it's completely fucking irreplaceable, since Sony has apparently blinded or executed everyone who worked on it. This means that I have hardware emulation of previous PS games, in the sense of having a PS2 emulator that contains a PS1 emulator. This represents the holy grail of gaming, because now I can play games that are a decade and a half old. Because I am an idiot. (For further research, check every other entry.)
When life is stressful and the sun itself has abandoned you, the logical thing to do is to hunker down and do a Silent Hill marathon. The first game weathers the ravages of time quite competently; the resolution drop is jarring at first, especially on an HDTV, but not seeing shit is kind of the sine qua non of Silent Hill's visuals, so you get used to it pretty quickly. What does stand out is the ear-splitting, high-pitched squeal the game will occasionally emit when you use the handgun too often. Since the handgun is the only firearm with which the player is provided adequate ammo, this does change the gameplay experience significantly. Apparently this flaw is also in the PSone classic download from PSN, because Sony hates us and wants us to suffer.
The internet is less than specific about the pervasiveness of the glitch; I don't much remember it, but some people seem to have reported it while playing in PS2 emulation. It's possible the only way to play Silent Hill correctly is with an out-of-production console, in the dark, while high on mescaline.
Which raises a curious problem for games studies. Obviously, access to earlier texts is something you're going to need in any serious (or comical!) study of a medium. Literature students have libraries, the bastards, and an adorable print industry that pretends to keep the medium relevant. Film schools tend to have extensive archives, and film archiving in general is an ongoing and respected cultural project. And I hear now and then about university libraries stockpiling videogames for the apocalypse.
A problem occurs. One, are we really going to need to keep all this fucking hardware on hand forever? Does the future need GameCubes? PC emulation solves some of this, I suppose, but leaves the purists grumbling. More to the point, not everyone has the opportunity to see Othello performed between two of their English classes. We developed a workaround, providing students with the "text" of the text, and asking them to "read" the play. This is a pet peeve of mine, and I intend to be entirely unreasonable about it for the remainder of my life. The screenplay for Casablanca is not fucking Casablanca.
But what if it were? It's good enough for a citation. Similarly, if you just need to swipe some plot elements from Metal Gear Solid 2, a transcript will do nicely. But if you need mechanics, architecture, ethics...you need the original game, on the original platform. In the dark. High on mescaline.
Except you don't. If we're to drop our narrative infatuations, it seems appropriate to ask where we draw the line between the text and a given performance of the text. If dialogue isn't key, spice it up or lose it. If graphics don't matter, spruce 'em up or trim 'em down. Does Silent Hill actually need low-res redraw to be Silent Hill? Can we get a better translation of the Japanese text? Can Konami hire people to write better Japanese dialogue? (The answer to this last question, as evidenced by MGS Twin Snakes, is: no.)
Preservation is obviously going to be a concern down the line, and every medium struggles with it at some level. I don't really know whether it's important to see The Great Dictator on film, or whether a digital copy is sufficient. But I also don't know where the line between "remake" and "restoration" lies for videogames.
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