Being A Good Gardener

By Turnfollow 

Link to game: https://turnfollow.itch.io/a-good-gardener

Games broadly consist of choices. It’s through these choices that they engender a sense of participation in the events they depict. A Good Gardener, a short narrative game about being a prisoner of war, has plenty of decisions for the player to make, but those decisions are ultimately trivial. Really, all the player may do is participate in the game’s rigid drama, following its rules so as to bring about its cruel and poignant conclusion.

It’s in this way that A Good Gardener problematizes the assumption that a player’s participation always is inherently positive. In most games, making progress is codified as virtuous and the player is encouraged to feel good about following the game’s rules, especially if they can excel at doing so. In A Good Gardener, participation is made to feel much more ambiguous.

A Good Gardener is the second game from Turnfollow, a partnership between developers Ian Endsley and Carter Lodwick. It maintains the DIY comic book style and small scale, single location structure of their debut project Little Party and positions the player at a similar proximity from the larger events of the story. From the decimated building where they carry out their daily gardening chores, the player can trace the progress of the unspecified battle unfolding outside in the changes to the skyline above – planes sail ominously overhead while fumes and, as the days pass, flames eventually swallow the surrounding buildings. All the while they plant and water seeds in their garden, as instructed by an anonymous minder who checks in from time to time. This moustached, stern looking fellow is firm but polite, and always respectful, the kind of person you don’t begrudge taking orders from.  

Where the seeds should be planted is for the player to decide and they may sculpt their garden however they see fit. Perhaps dividing new seeds and old ones into separate beds makes things logistically smoother when it’s watering time, or maybe the plants are more aesthetically pleasing when arranged in rows. It often rains – on those gloomy, deep blue mornings when the trickling sadness of the situation swells momentarily into outright despair – but not enough to keep the player’s watering can full through the dry spells. Inevitably some seeds will have to go thirsty, and it’s the player who decides which plants wilt and which thrive.

But thrive they must. For the sake of the war effort, as the visiting overseer explains. A twist-like revelation makes that connection between the player’s work and the external conflict so literal that it approaches ham-fisted, but it’s effective in prompting the player to reconsider their role in perpetuating the violence outside. It was at this point in my playthrough that I stopped gardening altogether, though doing so didn’t have the effect I expected or wanted. Instead of coming to admonish me for my unpatriotic behaviour, the overseer stopped showing up at all and I soon missed his company. My garden too, which I’d taken much pride arranging despite some niggling reservations, now lay desolate. Each day unfolded exactly like the last, lonely and meaningless. Though I’d been a prisoner since the start, now I really felt like one.

If the player chooses to stop planting seeds, A Good Gardener effectively stops too. Days still pass but the story doesn’t progresses any further. The only way to end the experience is to quit, like putting down a book midway through a page and never coming back. In this way, Turnfollow essentially renders the decision not to garden invalid. It’s in the title after all. And so the curious player inevitably gets back to work and the game continues along its predetermined course, bringing about a resolution that’s detrimental for both the protagonist and the world outside.

I have to wonder to what extent Turnfollow intended for the game to turn out this way, because the message it imparts is very bleak, and has a tenor of nihilism about it. The player is locked in a system fated for self-destruction, their only solace being whatever ever joy they can derive from the menial busy-work laid in front of them – busy-work that is complicit in sustaining the ill-intentioned system. Certainly there’s meaning and fulfilment to be found in the process, be it the relationship they develop with the overseer or in the artfulness with which they perform their gardening, but they must still participate, like it or not, in a malevolent agenda beyond their control. There’s no opt-out, no means of resistance. And that’s a very ominous parable for the current political climate.

Related works: Little Party (Turnfollow, 2015)

Saudade, a memory in ASCII

By Zack Hamilton and Gui Santos

Link to game: https://radioteque.itch.io/saudade

It’s surprising how often first-person exploration games, often described dismissively as “walking simulators” by close minded players, are also memory simulators. There are those that allude to or recount events that have already transpired – pioneers of the genre like Gone Home and Dear Esther fall into this category – and then there are others which attempt to approximate the hazy dream-world of recollection, to manifest the obscure multisensory experience of remembering before your eyes and beneath your fingertips. Saudade, a student project created by Zack Hamilton with help from Gui Santos, is of the latter mould, described by Hamilton as “a short simulation of homesickness”.

Saudade explores the ways memory warps and rearranges lived experiences in our minds, condensing places, thoughts and feelings into a continuous and amorphous stream of senses and emotions that possesses its own logic and symbolism.

A beach, an apartment, a museum; Saudade’s narrator wants to recall time spent with their mother but it’s places and scenery that they remember most vividly rather than details of the woman herself. The player visits these locations one after another, each following on intuitively from the last in the way that the stage sets of memories do, despite their nonsensical spatial relation to one another.

Perhaps it’s something about the gelatinous movement speed in Saudade and similar exploration games that so thoroughly captures the frozen snowglobe feeling that memories posses. In their slowness, they approximate the way in which memories seem to stretch beyond their natural duration, unfolding in slow motion like a flashback in a Hollywood film. Indeed, Saudade also expresses an interest in how media and technology inform our perception of what memories look and feel like. If sun bleached instagram filters are example of technology being deployed to imbue our memories with a feeling of authenticity then Saudade’s ASCII visual style, whereby every surface and object is built different coloured letters and numbers, seems to emphasise the artificiality inherent in all technologically assisted depictions of past experiences.

Towards the end of the game, I see a silhouette hanging above the horizon, arms outstretched like a crucifix or perhaps an angel. “I’m climbing the ramp up to the museum….” says the narrator, “and if I look hard enough I can I still see you over the horizon”. Without a doubt the iconic shape the narrator sees is that of Christ the Redeemer, the statue that surveys Rio de Janeiro from atop Corcovado mountain. The museum too, an enormous white disc seemingly suspended in air like flying saucer or a Bond villain’s secret lair, is clearly Oscar Niemeyer’s Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, located about 10km east of the Redeemer on the other side Guanabara Bay. At this point, it seems likely to me the “mother” addressed by the narrator isn’t a person at all but Rio de Janeiro itself. Or more likely, it’s more ambiguous than that.

“Saudade” is a Portuguese word widely claimed to be untranslatable into English, but which can be roughly understood as referring to feelings of longing and melancholy not unlike what English speakers know as nostalgia. Another distinctive feature of saudade however is an underlying instinct that the thing which is pined for can never be recovered – that it’s lost or missing forever. Considering its sombre score and gloomy colour palette, there’s a brooding unease to Saudade that goes beyond the fleeting pangs of sentimentality I recognise as homesickness. While I don’t doubt that the narrator literally misses Rio de Janeiro, the city, I also wonder whether it might represent some other important part of their life; cities, after all, are composed not only of glass, metal and concrete but communities and families, thoughts and memories. Staring into the black spaces between the alphanumeric characters that comprise this quiet and lonely world, I wonder whether something, or someone, has been irrevocably lost.

Related works: Home is Where One Starts (Wehle, 2014); Dear Esther (Chinese Room, 2012); Gone Home (Fullbright, 2013)

Choreography

I don’t know how to dance, but I’ve been learning tai chi. To an onlooker, I suppose tai chi looks a bit like dance, though it’s technically a martial art. The principles are the same: you memorise a sequence of motions and perform them to a rhythm – sometimes with music, though doing so isn’t necessary. Each to their own tastes of course, but the end result isn’t what I’d call thrilling to watch – I find it resembles something like a war dance performed underwater. Gentle, slow and meditative, the average tai chi routine isn’t the kind of thing you’d break out in club. Rather, tai chi is a dance you perform for yourself. Sure, it has exhibitory qualities, but the real value of tai chi is the experience of performing it: the sense of calm, concentration and fulfilment derived from correctly and fluidly transitioning between each pose; the bodily pleasure of maintaining an even balance and momentum, of being acutely aware and in control of your presence and movement within a space. Tai chi turns even a task as mundane as walking into full-body experience. Much more than just moving your feet, doing the tai chi walk (to “walk like a tiger”, as my instructor calls it) means rotating your body from the hips, keeping an active posture and carefully redistributing your weight so as to take each step without a sound.

In many ways, videogames are another a kind of dance we perform for ourselves. I’m thinking here of one game in particular: not Dance Central, or Dance Dance Revolution, or even Space Channel 5, but DICE’s critically decisive, unlikely cult favourite Mirror’s Edge. In Mirror’s Edge, raw movement is it’s own reward. In Mirror’s Edge, the player can derive considerable enjoyment from simply navigating the environment with poise and panache. Forget scores, objectives, checkpoints, achievements or collectables. In this major studio anomaly from late 2000s – when experimentation was still viable in blockbuster productions and EA, of all companies, was leading the crusade – simply getting from A to B is a joy in and of itself. Skilled traversal is a dense and complicated recital consisting of umpteen discrete actions which must be rehearsed, memorised and then strung together, each executed with precise finger movements and exact timing. Mirror’s Edge is a videogame performed as dance.

To play Mirror’s Edge is to be a choreographer. An action game centred around the discipline of fast-paced, gymnastics-informed urban navigation called parkour, skilful play in Mirror’s Edge depends not only on performing standard actions like jumps, slides and rolls competently (that is, with a good aim and keen sense of timing) but also upon how the player arranges those movements. When it comes to high-level play, composing an efficient routine is just as important carrying it out, and practicing that routine over and over until you can pull it off flawlessly is where the game offers its deepest satisfaction. But that fact isn’t evident right away.

The standard game mode in Mirror’s Edge is your typical big-budget affair, meaning it consists of 6-hour long “campaign” divided into discrete, scripted levels in which the goal is to get from one end to the other: jump some gaps, punch some bad guys; job done. Though decidedly linear, the game’s environments are littered obstacles of all shapes and sizes, so navigating them can be little tricky on a first playthrough. To compensate, the designers to included a handy guidance feature which turns important objects like railings, poles and doors post-box red as you approach them, highlighting a clear path through the rooftop melange. Spend any amount of time in the game’s time trial mode, however, and you’ll soon learn that these prescribed routes are far from efficient. Before long you’ll be carving your own trails, springing from walls instead of climbing drain pipes, shaving off a few seconds here and there by vaulting fences and slipping under pipes you’d previously avoided or passed around.

It’s true that there’s still a great deal of direction going on on behalf of the designers, even when you break away from the suggested track – indeed, attaining a top rating on many of the time trial stages is often a case of discovering the subtle alternative trails cleverly embedded inside the orthodox route. Yet, as many a speedrun video can attest, there’s still plenty of wiggle room left for personal discretion. The more you play Mirror’s Edge, the more you really do become a parkour choreographer agonising over your routine. You find yourself honing that routine through trial and error until you land upon that sublime sequence of actions that gets you in under the target time with whole seconds to spare, every movement dissolving fluently into the next, not an ounce of momentum wasted.

I wrote earlier that when you do tai chi, you’re cognizant of every twitch and tremble, suddenly hyperaware of muscles you didn’t even know existed. Of course, that’s only true for so long. After enough repetition, instinct kicks in, and what you’re left with just a calm contentedness – the colours of the room around you; the sounds of your breathing. This, I guess, is the Zen component of tai chi.

If you take notion to run through one of Mirror’s Edge’s campaign levels after putting a decent chunk of time into the time trial challenges, you’ll encounter a similar sensation. The trail stages are composed of short extracts from the larger levels, maybe a minute or two’s worth of content from somewhere in the middle. As such, when you do decide to replay a whole level from the start, now and again you’ll encounter these familiar slices that are burned into your brain. Before you know it you’re going through the motions, rattling off each step just like you rehearsed.

And I guess this is the lesson that Mirror’s Edge has to teach us about choreography. It’s an obvious one, but valuable nonetheless; to get all Motorcycle Maintenance on you here, choreography reminds us that all things, no matter how fluid and pretty as a whole, consist of individual parts that can be studied, rehearsed and mastered, and that no matter how daunting or unattainable that contiguous whole might seem – be it a dance routine or any other task – if attended to one step at time, patiently and meticulously, it can be achieved. You stop worrying about each individual step and just live it.

This post is my second contribution to “Blogs of the Round Table”, a monthly community writing exercise organised the smooth operators at Critical Distance. If you’re looking for top notch game’s criticism, they’ve got you covered.

http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=March16

What Your Fingers are Doing

I love Paste and I don’t think it’d be controversial of me to suggest that they publish some of the best videogame criticism on the net. That being said, I did take issue with the slightest of details in Garrett Martin’s recent review of Firewatch, which I’ve tried to respond to here – mostly for the opportunity to work through my own thoughts on the subject. My (very minor) beef is with the last paragraph, in which, in a well intentioned rhetorical maneuver designed to emphasise the strength of the game’s writing and characterisation, he sets aside the “game” parts of Firewatch from its “narrative” parts, dismissing the former as unremarkable compared to the outstanding quality of the latter:

Firewatch is a game, and it feels like one when you’re moving Henry through the gorgeous Wyoming forest, or exploring a cave in hopes of solving one of those mysteries. It’s not useful to write about it as a game, though. Who cares what your fingers do while you’re playing this? Yes: it has graphics. The stuff that matters is what Henry and Delilah talk about on their radios.

(After this he goes on to list a few other things that “matter” that are ostensibly removed from its “game” parts.)

The thing is, I don’t think you can chop and divide Firewatch into parts as the author does here, into mundane player actions and ostensibly more expressive elements. I think, like in any videogame, what your fingers do is far from trivial, and even if it’s not immediately obvious to you, you do care. To do a disservice to the terrific, nuanced work of videogame academic Brendan Keogh by glossing it briefly here, the gist is that you can’t separate the work your fingers are doing – or any part of your body for that matter – from the pleasures or meanings you take a away from a videogame. As Keogh elaborates in his thesis, any response you have to a videogame (intellectual, emotional or physical – though perhaps these distinctions are dubious) occurs in a holistic way, whereby every aspect of a game converges to produce meaning. So in Firewatch, even if the most interesting part (“the stuff that matters”) is purely the auditory content of Delilah and Henry’s conversation, you can’t discount all the surrounding videogame phenomena, including your own hands clutching the controller, because all of it informs how you receive that dialogue.

The impact of the Firewatch’s evolving relationship is very much dependant on your impression of who Henry is, and while a whole lot of his character is expressed through his words, so much is also communicated through audio, visual and mechanical qualities: his walk speed; his grunts and shouts; the embodied sense of his weight, stature, age, strength and temperament conveyed by the combination of your finger pressing the “A” button and the time it takes for him to climb a ledge or hop over a tree trunk. Similarly, Firewatch’s wonderfully palatable sense of paranoia isn’t something baked into its code in 1s and 0s but a sensation that emerges from your participation with the game. It manifests in the dialogue choices you make, but also in the way you move through the world, the tentativeness with which your fingers nudge the thumbsticks forward or the frenzied way they whip them around in response to a distant sound.

My point here isn’t to judge whether, if completely divorced from the rest of the game, Firewatch’s dialogue would make for a more or less compelling experience (though I’m sure that most folks – the reviewer included – would agree with the latter). Rather, I’m trying to illustrate that it would be an entirely different experience without everything else that constitutes the game. What your fingers are doing while you’re playing Firewatch is incredibly important, not just because they’re providing the stage directions and camera movements that propel the experience forward, but because they’re also vital receptors. So much pre-conscious (to pinch one of Keogh’s fancy phenomenology words) sensory information emerges from how your fingers control and respond to what you see on-screen, and to dismiss this whole channel of engagement is to discuss a comparatively impoverished experience.

The last element Martin includes in his list of things that “matter” is this:

…what you feel as the story unfolds like a short story on your television screen, visiting the private grief of others who can struggle to communicate just as torturously as all of us in the real world can.

And I emphatically agree. But it’s important to stress that “what you feel” is a product of your entire, embodied relationship with the game – it’s prompted not just by what you hear, but also what you see, how you move, where you go, what kind of controller you’re using and, importantly, what your fingers are doing.

Kicking Against Patriotism with A E S T H E T I C S

I’m currently taking a class on Asian culture and globalisation and had to come up with something to illustrate some of the themes we’ve discussed so far. This monstrosity is that something. If vapourwave wasn’t dead already, it is now.

A little explanation. Vapourwave, the satirical music genre cum bottomless meme gutter, actually came during a class discussion regarding Walter Bejamin’s ideas about authenticity and originality. You see, while some vapourwave composers are a more ambitious than others, many of its most renowned practitioners seem to pride themselves on doing as little as possible. It’s like Duchamp for the chillwave generation; to be incredibly reductive, you take some karaoke-reject 80s pop tune, loosen off the tempo a couple notches and then repeat for infinity. The interesting part (assuming there is one) comes not from the object itself but the act of its insertion into a new, unexpected context. There’s some precedent for this kind of conspicuous musical recycling in acts like the Avalanches and Girl Talk, but whereas those artists erected intricate multi-story labyrinths from an enormous inventory of samples, the vapourwave kids are happy to just let their pilfered songs play out mostly as is, often looping the same section for minutes at a time. This is what makes the genre an interesting case study to discuss Benjamin: can vapourwave be “original” or “authentic” when it’s provenance is so blatant? Is there any value in these sorts of reproductions that isn’t already present in the source material?

The genre’s flagrant appropriation of Japanese culture also makes it a particularly suitable talking point for considering contemporary Western perspectives of Asia. Clearly there’s a whole lot of exoticism going on, and it was this particular characteristic I set out to confront with my piece. Rather than tone things down, I made an effort to ham up the orientalism as much as possible, but importantly I did so in both directions, matching each of the genre’s obsessive Japanese affectations with an equally ludicrous grab bag of Scottish stereotypes. The result, I hoped, would be something so inundated in tacky cultural signifiers, so muddled and so stupid that any semblance of a coherent national identity would become impossible. It contains, after all, a traditional Scottish song performed by an American; dialogue from a film based on a Japanese book named after an English pop song directed by Vietnamese-born French filmmaker; sounds from a bagpipe mainstay written by Germans; dialogue from a film about Scottish history directed by and starring an Australian.

Globalisation is a tricky phenomenon, and certainly the conflation of “universal” values with “western” ones is worthy of concern. One thing’s for sure though: any pretensions of cultural purity went out the window a long time ago, and as silly as something like vapourwave might seem, at least it’s doing its part to make sure everything stays nice and polluted.

Save State – No. 3: Blue-Alien Krishna and the Art of Drawing Badly

So I missed a week. Call me a quitter, but already I’m starting to wonder how realistic it is to hope to post something everything seven days, or at least to put out pieces of the same scope I’ve produced so far. There’s also the fact, or course, that I’m an exceptionally slow writer. A major part of keeping this blog in the first place is to try to get over that.

Anyway, I do actually have a fairly good reason for skipping out on last week’s entry. I had a piece in the works that I was pretty enthusiastic about and that I felt deserved more thorough consideration than a week’s worth of idle moments permits, so I made the decision to take the plunge and pitch it to someone, I guess as a way of committing to seeing it through. Maybe I was being niave, maybe the idea makes more sense in my head than in writing, and maybe nobody cares, but the truth is that before beginning this blog I’d never formally pitched anyone anything unsolicited. How’s that for some writerly gymnastics – in the space of paragraph I’ve turned an admission of incompetence into a smarmy a pat on the back. I’m a magician.

I’ll tell you what I emphatically am not, though: an artist. Not that I didn’t know that already given I haven’t drawn so much as stick fugure since scraping through art class in high school by the frazzled hairs of my gummed-up paintbrush (I’ve always been heavy handed and I had a tendency to apply paint like ketchup) but I think I’m due the above ego boost after the total hopelessness I experienced this afternoon trying to draw pretty much anything. There I was, of adult age by law, sat with a pencil and blank sheet of paper for the first time in nearly a decade and utterly lost, painfully aware that my younger self would be much better equipped to deal with the situation than I was now.

The occasion was “Art Jam 02”, the 6th of the weekly brunch events hosted by BROEIKAS, a temporary indie games workspace housed in the back of Utrecht’s verdant Broei cafe. (Both Broei and Broeikas mean “greenhouse” according to Google Translate). Previous events have included an introduction to “voidscapes” (a nascent genre of first person exploration games that consists of imaginative, lonely places to peruse) and a valentine’s-themed showcase of cooperative multiplayer games. It’s a friendly and chill setup, with a wide open space, a couple of projectors and a rotating exhibition of video game artwork. Besides being a cool environment for existing developers to get together, it’s also a rare public window into the world of indie game development – something we could do with seeing more if games are to become the approachable, culturally diverse medium they deserve to be.

Back to my shitty drawing. More so than the technical execution, one of the biggest challenges was deciding what the hell to draw. The chosen stimulus, a bizarre animated film called La Planète Sauvage, was more of a distraction than an inspiration, but I can confidently say I’ve never seen anything like it. A French/Czechoslovakian co-production and Cannes award winner, it’s trippy, Bosch-esque feature film about a spiritualistic race of giant blue amphibian people who adopt humans as pets and spend most of their day meditating. It’s envisioned in realist, medieval style that I found pretty disturbing, but FlyLo’s into it so it can’t be all that bad.

In the end I settled for drawing a lighthouse, which soon became embedded in a more expansive landscape (way too ambitious for my meagre ability) and eventually transformed into a sort of observatory thing on stilts, reached via a winding wooden walkway – I blame The Witness. What I discovered while rediscovering drawing – or I guess what I was reminded of – is how creative process boils down to a perpetual back and forth between two states of mind: inspiration and problem solving. I say inspiration, but for me the former is more a kind of desperation. Rather than approaching a project with an idea already in mind, normally I find I have the energy and drive to do something, but no rel notion of what, so it becomes a matter of just picking any old thing to get started – hence the lighthouse, though it could be an opening sentence or a couple of random chords, just whatever can scuff up the overbearing purity of the blank page or the pristine silence.

From then on it becomes a case of retroactively justifying my decisions. I’ve drawn this lighthouse but it can’t just float there in nothingness (actually that might have been cooler…) so I need to draw some mountains to fill in the empty space, a raised walkway to reach the entrance, a waterfall to plug the gap between the mountains, etc. Before long, I’ve got something where I once had a terrifying nothing. I guess this is what people talk about when they refer to process oriented artistic practice; not in the sense that I was following some rigorously defined procedure, but in the way in which the subject of the piece emerged through the process of drawing instead of preceding it as a mental image. In the few occasions I’ve been successful at writing music, I’ve noticed a similar dynamic at play, though there gets to a point where I’ve got enough a foundation that my brain jumps ahead to the fully realised version of the song. From then on I’m working towards achieving that mental construction, tweaking ever element till it sounds how I imagined. I get this is all probably excruciatingly mundane stuff to read but I’m finding it sort of therapeutic so I won’t apologise.

Here’s my terrible pictures to laugh at. I couldn’t begin to delineate a step-by-step breakdown of how the second one came to be. Divine possession maybe.

What I’ve been…

Playing:

• The Witness
• Firewatch

Reading:

• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (have started it twice, now resuming it for a third time)

Listening to:

• Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan

Watching:

• I’m Not There
• Hail, Caesar!

Save State – No. 2: Spotlight

Hoist the flags and tootle the trumpets: I actually did the thing I said I was going to do. Last week I set out to make a habit of hashing out some words about an experience (or preferably, experiences) I’ve had during the past week, and by jove, here’s a second step towards doing exactly that. The style’s still a bit dry and impersonal for my liking but it’s no fun if you get everything right all the time, so hey ho. 

Spotlight is highly amused by your concerns about adequate “work-life balance”. On the rare occasion we do catch anyone from the Boston Globe’s investigative team at home, we quickly gather slippers and a cuppa isn’t exactly their style. Back-to-back phonecalls are made from a barren, wallpaper-less appartment; a dishwasher drawer is slammed in frustration; an alarm clock shows 4 am, ticking away another sleepless night. Early in the film, reporter Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) turns up to the office sodden with sweat on a Sunday morning to find his boss leaning over a desk, the overhead lights switched off. He, Robby Robinson (Michael Keaton), apparently couldn’t get a tee time at his usual course.

“It’s called a leisure activity,” he explains, “you should try one some time”.

“I run,” Rezendes retorts, still out of breath.

“Yeah, you run to work”.

Never mind that the only times we see Robinson getting a couple of holes in, he’s only there to butter up his opponents for leads on his story.

The irony is that the Spotlight team set their own deadlines. A considerable anomaly in the thin days of the modern newspaper press, the four-person crew are granted the freedom to pick their own stories and spend as long as it take to see them through, which sometimes means more than a year of persistent burrowing. Established on September 27th 1970, Spotlight was founded on the belief that good stories take time and that the best journalism can actually make a practical and immediate difference to people’s lives. More than just exposing corruption, Spotlight was conceived as means of confronting it, which is exactly what happened when they uncovered evidence of systemic sexual abuse in the Catholic church. A dramatic and thoroughly entertaining retelling of that story, Spotlight imagines reporting as activism, as vigilantism even.

Noble a proposition as that sounds, you can’t help but question the sustainability of an operation like Spotlight in the pitiful climate of modern journalism. Sure the team produce what you might call “long tail” content in wanky boardroom jargon (the Boston Globe is currently offering a free “best of” eBook of notable Spotlight stories going back to 1988), but with longform writing becoming a harder sell with every passing year, you have to wonder whether an outfit that breaks a story just once or twice a year is really viable. Just ask the reporters themselves: with the arrival of a new editor at the Globe and the promise of some hefty cuts, the team spend the film’s first 20 minutes preparing for the worst. Rezendes in particular anxious, restlessly haranguing co-workers for absolutely any inside gossip on the team’s future.

To be fair, Rezendes in his normal state is a force to be reckoned with. While the performances are top notch all round – Keaton’s Robinson is firm but likeable as commander-in-chief and Rachel McAdams’ Sacha Pfeiffer is convincingly sympathetic in her role as confidant to the abuse victims – it’s Ruffalo’s hyper-caffeinated, subtly eccentric turn as Rezendes that steals the show. Head slightly askew; eyes locked and set to penetrate; hand scribbling furiously in a notepad; watching Ruffalo is both invigorating and exhausting, generating a kind of frenetic energy I haven’t felt from a film since Whiplash. Luckily the incoming editor has the right idea about newspapers, institutions and accountability, so it’s not long before we get to see him and the rest of Spotlight at work – and it’s quite something to behold.

Whiplash, too, is as film about commitment and sacrifice. Like Spotlight, it asks the audience how much is too much when setting aside your normal life – friends, family, comfort, health, sanity – in the pursuit of something bigger. In Whiplash it’s complicated: we don’t know whether to be amazed or horrified as we watch Andrew abuse himself and mistreat others for the sake of his drumming performance, especially since he’s the only one who stands to gain from the ordeal. Spotlight, however, is a unanimous testament to plain hard graft in the name of moral responsibility. No matter the strained relationships, the new grey hairs or the increased blood pressure, in the end the Church gets exposed and it’s all worth it. To have approached the situation with any less intensity, the film suggests, would be ethically inappropriate.

I wonder how much better the big newspapers would get on if instead of politely asking readers to turn off their ad-blocker, they forced them to watch Spotlight in it’s entirety before proceeding. I can’t think of a better endorsement for good old-fashioned journalism.

What I’ve been…

Playing:

• The Witness

Reading:

• Fire Season by Philip Connors (SOON)

Save State – No. 1: The Big Short

Galvanised by Austin Walker’s terrific Off the Clock series, I’ve decided that February 2016 is an auspicious time to get back into this blogging thing. Following his lead, I’ll be take reflecting on some of the experiences I’ve had during the last week, mostly likely media-related seeing as my life as of late is an uninterrupted l relay race from one nutritious content package to the next. I hope future entries will be a bit more conversational in tone as I get more comfortable with the format but for now, here’s some fairly stiff-sounding observations about The Big Short.

Before the lights go down, The Big Short has already made its point. As a comedy about the handful of Wall Street outsiders who saw the 2008 economic meltdown coming, the film’s premise is its own argument. Its insight is this: the fact it’s admissible to turn the financial crisis into a comedy at all speaks to the success, witting or not, with which the banking system conceals the violence it brings to bear upon society’s most vulnerable.

Humour needs distance to be considered tactful; this is principle implicit in the question “Too soon?” comedians often ask after sending up a touchy recent event. What the banking system does, through its oodles of lingo and bureaucracy, is create this distance. Through layers of abstraction it hides the stock market’s human cost and renders blame diffuse when things go wrong. It’s this same opacity, the systemic gulf between boardroom decisions and people’s lives, that excuses the humour. We can laugh at The Big Short because just like the bankers who let it all happen, we don’t see the direct connection between some dodgy trades, some risky loans and the livelihoods of millions of people.

The film’s gradual shift in tone reflects a growing awareness of this connection, getting less farcical proportional to how much we learn about the crisis’ real world effects. The change is embodied by Mark Baum (Steve Carell) the comically obnoxious management honcho who cuts taxi queues and interrupts almost every meeting (including a group therapy session) with loud phone conversations. Somewhere along the line, Baum becomes the film’s moral centre, keen to use his role as an insider and part-accomplice in manufacturing the crisis to try and do some good. Despite this sort of detective fiction-style plot of slowly accumulating evidence, there is something of a sharp turning point about two thirds in, triggered by a remark by self-exiled ex-Wall Street guru Ben Ricker (Brad Pitt):

“Here’s a number. Every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die.”

I’ve haven’t managed to track down a source for this quote, which is the film’s most direct attempt to lay down the gravity of the situation, but here’s a similarly chilling statistic from Elizabeth MacBride in the Atlantic:

In the modern era, for every 1% increase in the unemployment rate, there has typically been an increase of about 1% in the number of suicides.

A suicide does in fact feature in the story – we learn that pseudo-protagonist Mark Baum’s brother took his own life a few years prior – as does a perfunctory David Simon-style anecdote which sees a recently evicted family packing their bags as part of a montage sequence, signalling that the film is actually aware of the seriousness of its subject matter. And yet, while hardly a laugh a minute, The Big Short is emphatically a comedy. When Ricker delivers the sobering line quoted above, he’s doing so to snap two young traders, whom the impending catastrophe is about to make very rich, out of their agonizingly goofy victory dance, a cringe-worthy display like something out of a typical nerd-to-hero comedy like Superbad.

So why then, did writer/director Adam McKay and co-writer Charles Randolph choose to make a comedy instead of an outright indictment? Well, maybe because the financial crisis wasn’t a discrete, coherent fuck up with obvious perpetrators. Maybe understanding the financial crisis as a comedy – the ultimate comedy of the errors – is closer to the truth.

While they’re happy to list off character traits that helped fuel the disaster – ignorance, incompetence, selfishness – the writers don’t single out individual culprits; there are no villains here. Even the most corrupt and morally deficient of the bankers, like the sleazy Miami loan sharks who make their money selling multiple homes to naive immigrants and pole dancers, are played for laughs. Rather than anger, what the film prompted me to feel towards these types was something between ridicule and pity. It’s the same response I have to bumbling politicians like Ed Miliband: when I see types like him, the nauseatingly awkward sandwich eater that he was, I don’t see a contemptuous poor-hating bastard but a bewildered product of a particular kind of upbringing, so far removed ordinary civilization that the workings of everyday life are mystery. Of course someone like that’s going to be totally oblivious to the real world impact of their actions.

The same is true of these bankers I think, with their cocktail parties, weighty wristwatches and sports cars with tinted windows. These are people with an aptitude for numbers who probably went to university, had a good social life and  did alright in their studies, and then came out the other end without any particular calling other than to nab a quick, well paying gig to start putting that student debt behind them ASAP. Who knows, maybe they even had an uncle or a cousin at a firm somewhere to give them a leg up. Just like all of us, they’re a product of their circumstances, and while of course a certain amount of personal values and morals must come into it, at the end of the day they’re just folks doing what presents itself most obviously to them as a sensible way to get by.

This is the realisation dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk came to during his three year investigation of the working environment at London’s big banks. Speaking to Janice Forsyth in an interview for BBC Radio Scotland, he explains that his assumptions about bankers were much the same as most of us, fed by popular media representations like The Wolf of Wall Street. “They’re all cocaine snorting, whoring, gambling addicted psychopaths selling us shares in companies that don’t exist – that’s what I thought.” What Luyendijk discovered though – and I think this is the same message The Big Short tries to put across – is that they’re just ordinary people trapped and eventually transformed by a corrupt system. “Many of them are just rather naive, 22-year-old working class lads and girls who are really good at maths and they look at their student debt and they have no idea what they are getting into… then they enter this environment that is fundamentally abusive.”

The problem with banking, Luyendijk argues, has nothing to do with individuals. Simply hiring “better” people won’t change things. The problem is the system itself – a cut throat, gruelling business in which employment spins on a dime and profit conquers all. “I think if you want to understand why banks treat us citizens so badly, we need to understand first why banks treat their own people so badly and I think this is because banks in their current form… are really blueprints for short-termism. And so rather than blaming individual bankers for acting on the temptations of all of them, we should change the laws so that the interests of an individual banker is again aligned with the common interest and the general good.”

I think this is why The Big Short’s humour is an appropriate and effective way to tackle the financial crisis. Not only does it capture the absurdity and dramatic irony of events that no one involved quite grasps, chaotically spinning out control (there’s something darkly funny about Mark Baum realising only too late that the company he’s been screwing over all along is his own), but it allows us to empathise with the bankers to some degree. Comedy arises from recognition; we recognise common foibles and can imagine a similar situation happening to us, god forbid. While none of the characters are supposed to be likeable, the comedy humanises them. Baum is the typical high strung, naval gazing finance guy who devotes his entire life to his work, and it’s funny to watch him get into a tizzy until we learn that it’s because of this same rabid workaholism that he wasn’t there for his brother when it mattered most. Jared Vennett’s (Ryan Gosling) transparent macho schtick is comical in how desperate is comes across, but we come to understand it’s a survival mechanism, a necessity in a business that’s trying to push him out. After things go south and the Lehman Brothers clear out all their staff, all that’s left among the empty desk and scattered papers in an enormous pyramid of Red Bull cans, like a kind of monument. It paints a funny picture, but also a sad one.

“Many of them are so unhappy,” Luyendijk says of the bankers he met in London. “Many of them told me ‘actually I would take a huge pay cut if I could be proud again of my job’.”
Yes, some of the bankers in the The Big Short are idiots, and laughably so. But there are no villains; just people doing their jobs.

What I’ve been…

Playing:

• The Witness

Watching:

• The Thick of It
• The Man Who Wasn’t There

Reading:

• Fire Season by Philip Connors (Re-reading actually, helping to get me in the mood for a certain upcoming video game)
• First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Žižek (Still. I’ve been at this for nearly a year)

David Lynch’s Disney Film – The Straight Story

There are few artists who make me feel as uneasy as David Lynch, and certainly none who can do it with such haunting beauty. Lynch has an unparalleled knack for generating subtle, ambiguous sensations that feel so familiar and are yet utterly indescribable, like feelings recalled from a dream I’d forgotten I’d had, from some time long ago. That’s why I find his horror so effective, often overwhelming; I can’t shake the feeling I’ve lived the experiences he’s showing me, that I recognise the dark, unknowable presence that stalks much of his films, always just out of sight. The Straight Story, Lynch’s 1999 biographical film about 73-year-old Iowan Alvin Straight who drove two-hundred and forty glacially slow miles on a lawnmower to visit his older brother, is unlike any of his other features, or at least not tonally. Rather than disturbing and uncanny, The Straight Story endearingly sentimental – like a two hour cut of all of the syrupy heart-to-hearts from Twin Peaks except played…. well, straight. I always had the sense that Lynch’s absurd, ironic portrayal of small-townsfolk with their larger-than-life eccentricities came from a place of genuine affection and respect, and The Straight Story would seem to confirm that hunch. The personalities we encounter among the cornfields of America’s midwest are quirky to be sure, and certainly a little exaggerated – the large old lady reclining in a deck chair with a small buffet of donuts, the commuter driven to hysterics by deer who keep throwing themselves in front of her car. But not by much. Spend enough time in small towns are you realise everyone is a little strange, yourself included. Eccentric as they might be, the folks in The Straight Story feel authentic. (See the game Beeswing for another excellent experience that nails the weirdness of ordinary people.)

The other thing that The Straight Story gets so painfully right is the quiet, ambivalent emptiness of rural life. It’s this that makes me feel so uneasy and conflicted. The golden sunlight on the beautiful countryside, the absolute stillness of everything; it’s that feeling you got on a warm and perfect evening that this could be your last night on earth and you’d happy with it, like being old before your time. There’s just something about seeing Alvin trundle along on his lawnmower next to fields and telephone lines that makes me feel contented, peaceful, nostalgic and somehow deeply, deeply sad all at once. It’s comfortable and it’s mundane, the country life on display here, but not in the way kind of feeble-minded way David Byrne wonderfully takes to task (though sometimes I feel the same way as him small towns too). Nope, this is different. It feels familiar – like a dream; or like home.

Listlessness and Melancholy in Diemen – Video Games and Nostalgia

This post is my first effort to participate in the monthly Blogs of the Round Table activity hosted by Critical Distance. This month’s theme was ‘Nostalgia’.

I envy those who claim they haven’t a single nostalgic bone in their body, but I also pity them because I suspect they’re lying. I’m a relatively young person in the grand scheme of things and yet I find that nostalgia – at least in the way I understand it – is a persistent and fundamental presence in my daily life, despite the fact that I also consider it to be more or less a sham. That bittersweet daydream of a time when things were simpler that washes over you when the season’s changing, or pops up out of the black as you pass a certain building in your hometown – that sudden apparition of a moment in your life when you were truly content: it’s a lie. Dig a little deeper into those memories you remember all the problems and worries that were swimming around your head back then, just as they do now, that acted as filter between you and your appreciation of the moment at hand. It’s only in hindsight, removed from the anxiety of the moment itself, that it’s possible to perceive its “ideal” qualities, its supposed relative calmness or novelty compared with your life now. “Nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound,” says Don Draper in the iconic carousel speech from Mad Men, but I reckon it’s more like an itch that can never be sated, a recurring feeling that if only you could scratch hard enough – if only things could be like they once were – everything would be fine.

More than any other medium, apart from perhaps music, video games are a form fixated with nostalgia. They sustain an entire mini-industry upon mining their own past, be it through remakes and remasters, the refreshing and resuscitation of old franchises or retro-chic games that go out of their way to evoke an existing experience rather than a new one. Such projects predicate themselves on the notion that it’s possible to recapture that “golden feeling” promised by nostalgia with sufficient reverence to the past, but time and again they prove it’s not – after all, that feeling is a fallacy. Even the most accomplished attempts still feel somehow hollow, like they’re missing some ineffable secret ingredient. New Super Mario Bros. is a perfect example: it’s expertly crafted and conceptually identical to the vaunted 2D Mario games of the late 80s and early 90s but as competent as it might be on it’s own merits, it feels meek and bland in comparison to your memory of those games. As Austin Walker pointed out on a recent edition of the Giant Beastcast, you have to recognise that pining for those “ideal” past experiences is fruitless and that a much better idea is to seek out new ones that might turn out to be as powerful and poignant in the long term. The irony though, of course, is that you’ll only know after it’s too late.

I just moved to a place called Diemen situated on the edge of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and I feel like it’s the New Super Mario Bros. of towns. Growing up in Scotland, I was exposed to plenty of pop culture from America that expressed a nostalgic fondness for the supposed serenity of the suburbs – TV shows like Freak & Geeks and the Wonder Years, with their peaceful and perfectly manicured, tree-lined neighbourhoods. Walking around Diemen in the golden hour glow of the late evening is the closest I’ve felt to being inside one of those idealised depictions of the American suburbs. It’s calm and quiet, kids play happily in a nearby park as cars glide patiently around bends and in and out of driveways. The only place to go is the shopping centre and the only commotion is outside the ice cream shop. The Netherlands’ flat terrain and it’s cultural preference for neat, efficient design means that the streets take on the squared-off, endless quality I recognise from American television, very unlike the winding, narrow roads full of potholes and divots I’m used to back home. It’s a nice enough place to be and definitely reminds me of those stereotypical images of suburban bliss, but like New Super Mario Bros., Diemen feels banal and empty. Instead of the warm sense of fulfilment that the nostalgic representations of this kind of environment promise, what I feel instead is excruciating listlessness and melancholy. Instead of a place with it’s own character and identity, Diemen is an attempt to imitate an idea about a kind of place that doesn’t actually exist, just as New Super Mario Bros. conspires to be the elusive “archetypical” Mario game. Nobody thought, when envisioning those original games we hold so dearly, “let’s make this one exactly like before!”

If nostalgia has one purpose, its that it helps us justify our own experiences to ourselves. No matter how confusing, mundane, trivial, or even painful an experience may have been at the time, our brain has a knack for preserving and amplifying its positive aspects in hindsight, allowing us to console ourselves in the realisation that every period of our lives contain things to be grateful for. Home is Where One Starts…, a short first-person exploration game by David Wehle, articulates this phenomenon to great effect. Playing as a woman revisiting her childhood home where she was abused by her father, we are privy to her memories of this traumatic time and surprisingly, we discover there’s plenty about it that she recalls with affection. Pottering around the filthy debris of the mobile home where she grew up, the profound sadness of the scene is obvious and yet we can also discern glimmers of hope – the origami cranes posed on the window and the posters of the planets on the bedroom wall elicit warm feelings despite the surrounding circumstances, signifiers of an active, innocent childhood imagination since outgrown. There is a genuine yearning in the narrator’s voice as she remembers climbing the hay bales next to the pond on long summer nights, despite the fact that she is now clearly in a much better place.

Maybe one day I’ll look back fondly upon my aimless strolls around Diemen too.