Tag Archives: cinema

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Neurocinematics

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popcorn?Spare a thought for poor old Hollywood; it seems that no matter how much they spuff away on CGI budgets and celebrity actor’s fees, they just can’t keep us as at a perpetual peak of emotional engagement. They could spend more money on better writers, of course… but what do they know about audience engagement and emotional response, eh? [image by serendipitys]

No, no – far better to use a technological fix to replace the flawed human responses of the traditional focus group. So how’s about we wire test viewers up to an fMRI unit and watch how their brains respond to the latest batch of daily rushes? That way we can learn how to keep the grey matter revving at the red line for 120 minutes at a time…

MindSign has already helped advertisers dial in their commercials’ second-by-second noggin delight and has even assisted studios in refining movie trailers and TV spots […] Now the company wants to replace that ancient analog heuristic, the dreaded focus group. Carlsen claims that focus group members not only misrepresent the likes and dislikes of the broader population — they can’t even articulate their own preferences. Often, they’ll tell a human researcher one thing while the fMRI reveals they’re feeling the opposite.

See, it’s all our fault – if we didn’t lie to Hollywood executives, they’d make better movies! They’re only trying to help!

Neurocinema helpfully speeds up a process Hollywood began years ago, namely the elimination of all subjectivity in favor of sheer push-button sensation. By quantifying which set pieces, character moments, and other modular film packets really lather up my gray matter, the adfotainment-industrial complex can quickly and efficiently deliver what I actually want. Movies won’t be “made,” they’ll be generated. Michael Bay, with access to my innermost circuitry, can really get in there and noogie the ol’ pleasure center. And here’s the best part: Once the biz knows what I want, it can give me more of the same. I’ll soon be reporting levels of consumer satisfaction previously known only to drug abusers. My moviegoing life will, literally and figuratively, be all about the next hit.

You see? You can’t ask for what you really want, because you don’t actually know what you want!

“But now movies will be more formulaic than ever!” purists whine. Au contraire, aesthete scum. “Formula” is for suckers. It implies narrative — peaks and valleys. What MindSign seems to be offering is a new model — not formulaic, but fractal. Forget ups and downs, suspense and release. What if every moment were a spike, every scene “trailer-able”? In fact, movies will become essentially a series of trailers, which, incidentally, are far better-loved than the oft-crummy features they encapsulate. Movie houses will become crack dens with cup holders, and I’ll lie there mainlining pure viewing pleasure for hours. Why not? I can’t decide what I want to watch anyway. Luckily, Hollywood is there to make those tough choices for me. And to show me the zombie shark I never even knew I was dying to see.

Looks like I have a closing argument for that debate I had last night with my girlfriend over whether we should invest in annual cinema passes. I’ve got more story stashed on a three inch stretch of my bookcases than Hollywood has strained out in the last few years… and if I stay home, I don’t need to take out a mortgage in order to get myself a soft drink.

Sarcasm aside, the prospect of neurally-optimised cinema is kind of intriguing, even though it does foreshadow a final forking of the road between spectacle and storytelling. Rather than going to see a simple tale of boy-meets-girl (or airhead-becomes-trial-lawyer, or blue-elves-get-saved-by-compassionate-corporatism), why not just go and plug your eyeballs into two hours of refined emotional sugar… or amphetamines, or sedatives, a blend of all three, whatever’s your poison. (I guess the Saw franchise really is ahead of the curve after all, having exchanged the last vestiges of plot for visceral button-pushing that caters explicitly to the intensely desensitised.)

Step on a bit further, and the interactive movie concept that’s been batted around for years becomes not just possible but necessary – once you’ve optimised for a whole demographic, the only route forward is to optimise on a per-viewer basis, spooling out selected scenes and vignettes in direct response to the brainspikes of the individual, who could also nudge the flow of spectacle in the direction of whatever emotional response they feel they want from moment to moment. That’d be tricky to do on a big screen for a few hundred people at once, of course (though there’s probably some sort of augmented-reality cyberspex solution to that problem, if you can be bothered to look), but by the time it’s a viable commercial technology, “going to the cinema” will sound as old-fashioned as waltzing to a Wurlitzer at a tea-dance.

I honestly can’t bring myself to mourn that much.

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Are zombies a proxy for the American Zeitgeist?

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If this isn't a sign that the undead are a dead meme, I don't know what is...Via SlashDot, here’s a brief piece at Forbes that wonders whether the zombie is Americas equivalent of Godzilla – a symbol of technology run amok, but one that can be dealt with in hand-to-hand mano a mano combat rather than by the deployment of the state’s military resources:

[…] there’s one major difference between Godzilla and the attack of the zombies: Godzilla fought scientists and the military (and maybe the occasional band of adorable children), but zombie battles usually are a person-to-ex-person struggle. While Godzilla swatted at planes and crushed tanks underfoot, zombies are done in by weapons such as shotguns, hand grenades and the ever-handy chainsaw.

Americans must like the idea that, as out of control as our hubristic science might become, a good machete and a 12 gauge in the hands of a competent man or woman can always save the day.

[…]

To be sure, it’s easy to read more into the popularity of zombies than might actually be there. Film-goers have always loved a good scare, and a shambling collection of neuron-challenged corpses make a pretty terrifying story. And if my zombie-obsessed 14-year-old son is a representative sample, blowing the undead away with heavy weaponry has a solid adolescent demographic appeal. But there’s no question, at least in my mind, that zombies (and Godzilla) are an allegorical representation of our fear that science and the technologies it spawn will lead to our destruction.

It’s a plausible reading, I think, though I’d hesitate to claim it as anywhere near definitive. It does chime rather well with our very own Jonathan McCalmont’s theory that the modern iterations of the zombie trope reflect a fear of transhumanism. I also seem to remember reading a recent critique that pegged the zombie as representing our subliminal fears of population expansion due to increased lifespans for the “unproductive elderly” (and/or immigration), but I’m damned if I can find the link or remember the source – anyone else catch that one, at all? [image by ella_marie]

One thing I can say for certain about zombies, though, is that I’m sick to the gills of hearing about them. As far as shark-jumping in the genre blogosphere goes, the only meme that comes close to the tedious prevailing ubiquity of zombies is steampunk… which is also starting to wear the welcome mat very thin indeed, at least in this household.

Blasphemous Geometries

Fear of a Transhuman Future – Zombies and Resident Evil

Much like the vampire, the zombie is a long-lived trope of the horror genre whose subtext has mutated alongside the contemporary fears of the audience. So what do current zombie movies and games say about our modern metaphysical boogie-men?

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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The Horror genre is a profoundly parasitical creature. Not only is it endlessly adaptable to cultural changes, but it also has a rare capacity to track sources of social anxiety and attach itself to them, mining our deepest fears and presenting them back to us in the shape of art – a cathartic form of art that helps us to overcome our fears by making us confront them in safe environments such as cinemas and comfy chairs [Cinemas are a safe environment? Not in this town, man. – Ed.]. Indeed, Joss Whedon owes much of his fame and following to the fact that Buffy the Vampire Slayer helped millions of TV viewers to overcome the traumas born of attending high school – traumas transformed by Whedon and his staff of writers into monsters physical enough to be defeated week in and week out by a small blonde woman and a gang of geeky side-kicks. Continue reading Fear of a Transhuman Future – Zombies and Resident Evil →

Blasphemous Geometries

The criticism of video games

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This month Blasphemous Geometries turns a conceptual corner, as Jonathan McCalmont decides to refocus the critical crosshairs on video games.

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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Back in the 1930s, a number of physicists (including Einstein) argued that our universe is oscillatory. What this meant was that after the Big Bang, the universe expands until it reaches a certain level of density and gravitational pull, at which point it begins to contract until it ends with a Big Crunch. This idea still has some devotees. However, what made the Oscillatory Theorists interesting was the belief that after the universe had contracted back to its original singularity, it would then bounce back again; expanding until its physical limits were met and another Big Crunch was initiated. This meant that, according to the Oscillatory Theorists, the universe was stuck in a cycle of eternal destruction and rebirth. This has always struck me as a rather useful analogy for certain internet debates. “Is Science Fiction Dying?” is one such debate but another is “Where is the Lester Bangs of Video Games?”. Continue reading The criticism of video games →

Blasphemous Geometries

The Alternative Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

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This month in Blasphemous Geometries, Jonathan McCalmont presents his second attempt to produce an alternative shortlist for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form that looks a little further afield for the best examples of genre cinema of the last year.

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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Every year, with merciless and unceasing regularity, hundreds of fans gather at Worldcon. After a few days of discussion, networking and having their pictures taken in beards and Hawaiian shirts for inclusion in Locus magazine, the fans attend the Hugo award ceremony. This award ceremony is the climax of a cycle of discussion during which science fiction fans across the globe begin handicapping, second-guessing and complaining about the Hugo awards with varying degrees of bitterness, enthusiasm, alienation and excitement. It is a cycle that starts with the announcement of the Hugo Awards shortlists. This year’s cycle began on the 19th of March.

Being the kind of person whose bitterness and alienation always outweigh his enthusiasm and excitement, I see one particular Hugo – that awarded for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – as a wasted opportunity. Every year, instead of celebrating the rich tapestry of cinematic genre, the Hugo shortlist is dominated by heavily-marketed American blockbusters, more frequently than not based upon already well known pre-existing works such as books or comics. In fact, last year, the nominees were so spectacularly weak that I felt obliged to come up with an Alternative Hugo shortlist made up of good films that somehow failed to capture the attention of Hugo voters. This column is my second attempt at an Alternative Hugo shortlist for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form. Continue reading The Alternative Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form →