This being the multi-media future and all, I would like to begin this column by asking you to consider a video taken from Charlie Brooker’s BBC 4 TV series Screenwipe :
Now, I consider this to be one of the most enjoyable rants I have ever seen on television. Aside from a few minor quibbles (“kick to the nuts spiritually speaking”? Redundant “low self-esteem engine”? Pointless pun, far too on-the-nose) I think it is exquisitely written and paced. It takes us from a sedate and happy place and slowly builds into a frenzy of anger and frustration before collapsing into an abyss of sorrow, alienation and resignation – a rise and fall exquisitely supported by Clint Mansell’s score from Darren Aaronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000). It is everything that a rant should be. But is it right? Does the media really ask us to identify with an endless procession of impossibly glamorous and accomplished caricatures? In some cases, yes. Continue reading Fantasies of mere competence: Football Manager 2010→
“Welcome to the Desert of The Real” announces Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus as he introduces The Matrix’s (1999) Neo to images of the charred remains of what was once human civilisation. A civilisation that has since been digitised and placed online while the real world crumbles beneath an ash grey sky. Morpheus’ drily ironic line would later be re-invented by the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek in an essay prompted by the September 11th attack upon the World Trade Center. Žižek’s point is a simple one : The 9/11 attacks destroyed not only some buildings, but also America’s conception of what the real world was really like. Since the end of the Cold War, the West had fallen into a cocoon of smugness created by the comforting belief that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, all opposition to liberal democracy had simply dried up and blown away; that, as the Berlin Wall came down, Humanity found itself united in the same set of desires for elected governments, human rights and consumer goods – desires for the kind of things that the American people had. It was, as Francis Fukuyama put it, The End of History. Continue reading The Changing Face of the American Apocalypse: Modern Warfare and Bad Company→
Genre is, to one extent or another, all about re-using old ideas. Ideas shared. Ideas reclaimed. Ideas reinvented. Ideas lost. Ideas rediscovered. Encounter enough works of genre over a long enough time period and you will see ideas rise and fall like the tides. You will also see patterns emerging in the way that certain ideas are used. For example, it is no accident that the rain slicked streets of 1930s noir fiction would pop up in the works of Raymond Chandler before re-appearing in the films of the 1960s French Nouvelle Vague, and appearing again in the novels and stories of Cyberpunk in the 1980s. The long shadows and bad weather of noir were an expressionistic manifestation of a sense of unease, a feeling that society was somehow broken. That same intuition has stayed with us over time, summoning noir’s set dressing again and again as new generations of authors deploy the same ideas and techniques to express ideas of their own time and place.
Genres are collections of these kinds of ideas. Ideas that form a shared vocabulary that gets used and re-used to tell new stories. But sometimes a good genre idea or trope will become detached from its metaphorical roots and take on a substance and a physicality of its own. The idea will develop freely as generations of authors engage with it but, because the idea has been separated from its original metaphorical purpose, the idea will forever remain wedded to the time and place in which it was forged. Like mitochondrial DNA, or a forgotten time capsule. A window into a different time and a different place. Continue reading Mass Effect II and Racial Essentialism→
I say this without having actually seen it, but James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) is an interesting film. This is because its success has had the same effect upon film critics and cultural commentators as pissing on an electric fence… people are sore, jittery and annoyed at pretty much everyone, themselves included. Continue reading We are all sheep: Avatar, Bayonetta and the hypnosis of low-brow culture→
“The Antiques Roadshow” – For an entire generation of people who grew up [in the UK – Ed.] in the 1980s, those three little words herald a wave of unease and bitterness. Like a Renaissance magus, they conjure forth memories of Sunday evenings dominated by the looming return of school and the perversity of one’s parents’ taste in television. You see, younglings… prior to the internet, cable TV and the explosion of cheap consumer electronics, most young British people were trapped not only in a four channel world, but in a world where only one TV channel was ever really accessible to them : the one that their parents wanted to watch. Continue reading Redefining friendship: Facebook, MMORPGs and Dragon Age Origins→
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