Twisting

These days, I go into almost every movie I watch expecting a twist ending. They seem to be more or less a requirement, and are at least so common that I'm more surprised when the film I'm watching doesn't try to pull the rug out from under me than when it does.

In the past week, I've watched two twisty movies, The Last Exorcism and Shutter Island, and while watching both I thought a lot about Inception, my favorite movie of the past year, as well as Departures, a 2008 Japanese drama that I watched recently. Neither of the latter movies involve twists, but I found both more surprising than the former.

The Last Exorcism's twist ruined the movie for me. Everything preceding it would have made sense in the real world. Cotton Marcus was a huckster, an unbelieving charismatic preacher clearly based on Marjoe Gortner (and the documentary made about him, which everyone should see). Nell, the ostensibly possessed girl, didn't really do anything that a real girl who was experiencing psychological trauma couldn't have done. It left the reality of Nell's condition to the viewer, who would undoubtedly project his or her own worldview onto the character. That's nice--it always is when directors don't over-explain their films. But the last five minutes of The Last Exorcism spend all that goodwill on a cartoonish twist that suddenly made me not care about any of the characters I'd spent the past hour getting to know (and in some cases, like).

Shutter Island, on the other hand, twists from the opening scene to the final shot. It throws so many "is this really happening?" moments at the viewer that I quickly stopped caring. I couldn't identify with any of the characters, because the movie wanted me to constantly question whether they were who they claimed to be, or whether they existed at all. It was so obvious that a big reveal was going to turn everything on its ear that it seemed like a waste of energy to get involved. Storytelling is, at its heart, the art of getting people to respond emotionally to characters they know don't actually exist. When your entire premise is that the characters in your story probably aren't real, you're not telling a story anymore. You're just trying to show how clever you are.

Really, Inception and Shutter Island are very similar movies. They both feature Leonardo DiCaprio as a man whose obsession with a lost loved one drives him into an unreal world. The difference, and the reason it's possible to care about his character in Inception but not Shutter Island, is that Inception, despite taking place largely in a world the movie tells you isn't real, goes out of its way to explain to you how things work in that unreal world, and unwaveringly abides by its own rules. Shutter Island has no rules, and as a result can't really surprise. Both movies mean to leave you wondering about what their final moments mean, but only Inception makes you feel like you could construct a reasonable answer if you retraced its steps.

Departures surprised me as well, but not with any twists. It surprised me because it played with my own expectations of movies, especially romantic dramas. Relationships develop in a way that real world relationships often do, and I suspected that they would continue to do so. But main character Daigo Kobayashi proves himself to be stronger, perhaps better all around, than most people, and things resolve in a way that is in retrospect predictable, but didn't feel that way as it played out. As with Inception, I could get involved because I knew the rules. The surprise wasn't in finding out they weren't the rules after all, but in finding out that they could be subverted with enough hard work.

When I think back to some of my favorite twist endings, like those of Psycho and The Ring, it makes me sad that they've become such a cliche. I'm sure they can be made meaningful again, but not until they stop being taken for granted.

Justifying 8-bit Love

I'm really sick of new video games that try to look like NES games, but here's one reason to still love 8-bit games:



Try doing that with a Blu-Ray.

Dickwolves

If you don't immediately get the significance of that title, you can get caught up here and here, and finally here (scroll down to the last post). Got all that? Good.

My first reaction to this controversy was pretty much in line with that second link above. Everyone gets offended by things, and everyone has the right to voice his or her offense. I've done it myself, and I'm sure I'll do it again. It sucks when someone you like offends you, and it's even worse when you go to that person hoping to make them see your side of things and they make a t-shirt mocking you for being offended in the first place.

That doesn't mean you weren't wrong to be offended in the first place; it just sucks. Life is complicated.

I have to admit, though, reading that last post made me finally see the other side of the issue in a way I had previously failed to. I hadn't thought about what it would be like to be a woman (or maybe a man) whose life has been directly affected by rape, walking through a crowd of hundreds of sweaty adolescents (or adults for whom aging provided no escape from that desperate situation), trying to avoid making eye contact with the ones wearing that t-shirt--the one the people you thought were your friends made to mock you for being hurt by something they said, oh and also for having been hurt by sexual abuse.

That, purely and simply, is bullying, and Penny Arcade was enabling it. I don't believe for a second that that was their intent, but they're in a unique position to both make the t-shirt and provide the forum for victims to be mocked and vilified. Again, life is complicated.

The point of this post is not for me to get on my high horse and point out my own moral superiority. If anything, it's to come to grips with my own wrongness. While I support freedom of speech even when I find that speech abhorrent, I also believe in holding people responsible for what they say. I'll still defend the two comics I linked to above. It's unreasonable and harmful to demand that nobody ever talk or even joke about potentially offensive subjects.

But in retrospect, it's pretty easy to see that the t-shirt took things too far. Like Sarah Palin's gun sights ad, it encouraged solidarity between the sane (those who disagreed with Gabrielle Giffords's politics or found the world "dickwolves" funny) and the insane (those who actually wanted to kill Giffords or those who would actually commit rape). The sane always lose with that arrangement. We should avoid it.

Is It Wrong To Be Almost Perfect?

Earlier this week, PZ Myers took on a different sort of criticism of the New Atheists from what they normally receive. Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stephen Asma complained that the usual suspects' critique of religion fails because it focuses so much on the big three monotheisms, and ignores other religions, like Buddhism and animism.

That critique isn't as interesting to me as part of Myers' response, in which he essentially says he would reject a world that was perfect in (almost) every way if that perfection was brought about by acceptance of religious faith:

He really doesn't get it. He could show me a religion that is nothing but sweetness and light, happiness and good thoughts and equality for all, and it wouldn't matter: the one question I would ask is, "Is it true?" It wouldn't matter if he could show empirically that adopting this hypothetical faith leads to world peace, the voluntary abolishment of crime, the disappearance of dental caries, and that every child on the planet would get their very own pony — I'd still battle it with every fierce and angry word I could speak and type if it wasn't also shown to be a true and accurate description of the world. Some of us, at least, will refuse to drink the Kool-Aid, no matter how much sugar they put in it.

This reminds me of a question I used to pose to my intro to philosophy students when we were discussing free will. If someone told them that they could go to live in a perfect world (however they defined 'perfect'), but the condition of doing so was that they had to give up their free will, would they accept the offer? In the whole time I taught, only about three students ever said they would. Those who refused it almost uniformly said that they would rather live in a world full of pain and hatred than exist in one that was perfect, but in which they could never choose to do anything that would ruin that perfection.

For my part, I think I would accept the offer with very little further deliberation. I think that, in a perfect world (as I envision it), I would be too busy being wildly happy to worry that I couldn't wake up one morning and choose to rape or murder my neighbor. I wondered if my students meant what they said, or if most of them were just failing to really imagine what a perfect world would be like.

I don't wonder that about PZ--he's incredibly intelligent, and unlike my undergraduate students, has more than enough life experience to understand what he's rejecting. The fact that he says he would reject an offer very similar to the one I was proposing to my students makes me wonder about the morality of my willingness to accept the perfect world.

Just as I would probably sacrifice my free will to have my ideal world, I'm pretty sure I'd be willing to support a religion I knew was bogus so long as it was otherwise entirely benign. That would mean that it made minimal false claims. It wouldn't prohibit the teaching of scientific truths like evolution and the big bang; discriminate against anyone because of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.; or censor its critics. It would probably, like animism or panentheism, make minimal claims about the nature of divinity. But I'm pretty sure my skepticism about its metaphysical ideas wouldn't trouble me much if it meant that I, and the people I love, would live happy, healthy lives with no worries about money, inequality, or nuclear annihilation.

I might not drink the Kool-Aid, but I also wouldn't run around knocking the cups out of other people's hands.

So does this make me cowardly or immoral? Is there a difference between those and pragmatism? Or is there anything I've missed that should change my mind? Feel free to enlighten me.

Horror Bored

I don't remember the last time I watched a horror movie that I really loved. That's weird, because for several years, I hardly watched anything but horror movies, and had a long list of more that I needed to see. Most of that list feels long forgotten now, as do the times when I felt certain that almost any horror movie you put in front of me would offer at least a little excitement.

The first horror movie I ever saw was the Japanese version of Ring 2, which I saw in a theater in Osaka on my 21st birthday. In other words, I was a late bloomer to the genre, largely because of a squeamishness about gore. But I loved Ring 2, perhaps all the more because I couldn't really understand much of it through the language barrier and having not seen the first movie. When I got back to America, I started devouring horror movies, though I still shied away from the more disgusting ones.

In 2005, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I ended a horrible relationship, and spent a lot of time feeling miserable and nihilistic. Desperate for any kind of catharsis, I started watching the gore films that I had previously avoided, and eventually found that it gave me a sense of pride, having overcome a fear that I had been carrying since childhood. I came to consider myself something of a gore movie connoisseur, and remember with a sick fondness the time circumstances conspired in such a way that I ended up watching the fake Japanese snuff film Flowers Of Flesh and Blood four times in one week.

As the remake trend of the mid 2000s got into full swing, I retreated deeper into low budget, foreign and retro horror, and that's where my interest started to wane. At the risk of blaspheming, most of that stuff is a lot more interesting to read about than it is to actually watch. I can't count the number of times I would read about a movie in one of the Psychotronic guides, excitedly track it down, then spend most of the run time bored out of my mind. As I got more interested in video games, I drifted farther and farther from horror (and therefore from movies in general). And it should go without saying that Hollywood wasn't doing anything to bring me back.

My growing interest in skepticism didn't help matters either. Even early in my life when I was a Christian, I was pretty apathetic about the existence of things like ghosts, demons, and anything you could call paranormal. But reading books by the likes of James Randi and Richard Dawkins had brought me to the realization that such beliefs are completely untenable. This really hit home for me when I saw The Exorcism Of Emily Rose. A girl in the row behind me spent most of the movie crying and having to be comforted by her friends, while I was fighting to stay awake. If you don't believe in the devil, possession's just not very scary.

That's not to say a well-made horror movie can't still creep me out a bit, even if I don't buy its premise, but well-made horror movies are getting harder and harder to find. Even those with a couple of interesting ideas or good performances always seem to wreck things in the end by explaining too much. If you understand a problem, you can at least try to solve it. Real fear is not knowing what you're up against. Does anyone think that Paranormal Activity wouldn't have been scarier if it had ended with the camera on an empty bed while the young couple screamed their guts out downstairs? Did the girl coming back to (apparently) swallow the camera add anything?


Hopefully one day horror movies will interest me again--I've had some great times with them, and would like to again. But, ironically, they've gotten too cowardly to do anything that's really frightening.

The Apophatic Theology of Indie Games

According to apophatic (or negative) theology, God is ineffable, beyond the boundaries of human language. As such, the only meaningful way in which we can speak of God is to say what God is not. While this sort of theology has become a refuge for some modern day Christian thinkers (most notably Karen Armstrong), its roots go at least as far back as the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus. And now Michael Thomsen, in a piece for IGN, has applied it to indie games.

Like hipsterism, 'indie' is a state of mind better defined in terms of what it isn't. 'Indie' isn't Bobby Kotick, Wii Fit, Gears of War, or Nathan Drake. 

I like the idea of describing indie games apophatically. It gets right to the heart of how vapid and puffed-up most of the indie scene is.

Here's the problem with apophatic theology: it only works as long as everyone brings the right presuppositions to the table. In his article "God is the Question," apophatic apologist Mark Vernon writes

Whatever God might be, God is not visible: God's invisible. Whatever God might be, God cannot be defined: God's ineffable. Nothing positive is said. But nonetheless something is said of God.

Well, something is said if you've already accepted a certain fundamentally mystical idea of divinity. If you haven't, you might wonder whether speaking of God in this way actually draws a distinction between the divine and the non-existent.

There's a bigger problem, though. The apophatic view of God falls apart if you start not-saying the wrong things. We can all rub our chins and ruminate on the mystery of the ineffable, but we'd look rather silly smoking our pipes and holding forth on God's fundamental ungerbilness or unforkness.

Take another look at that list of things Thomsen says indie games aren't. Does that actually tell us anything meaningful about them? Of course it doesn't. What could it actually mean to say that a video game isn't Nathan Drake? It's a category error, like asking what purple sounds like. I realize that Thomsen was being tongue in cheek, but that doesn't mean we can't glean some insight from his comments. The indie scene, as celebrated in forums like IGF, is just like the God of apophatic theology: an artifical construct, meaningful only to those who have the right set of presuppositions.

Having said as much, though, we indie game skeptics (and there don't seem to be many of us) open ourselves up to the same claim that snarky Christian apologists often make against atheists: "Why spend so much time arguing against something you don't believe exists?" The answer is simple, though. Believing in something that doesn't exist can have negative effects.

Thomsen is right when he says that "in film and music ['indie' is] a wheezing stereotype long since discredited." By aping the same posture as indie rock and indie movies, indie games have inherited the same disease. Most of them pander every bit as blatantly as their mainstream counterparts, just to a different audience.

It's that pandering that's the real problem, and the reason that I'll keep being skeptical about indie games (and movies, and music). Take away the enablers who demand more pretension and forced quirkiness, who desperately want to define themselves negatively against some (equally imaginary) mainstream, and games will get better. What things aren't doesn't matter--what they are is everything.

Does Not Liking Hip-Hop Make Me a Racist?

A few months ago, I replied to a friend on Facebook who was asking people to list their 10 favorite albums. I didn't think my list was particularly controversial, especially to people who know me. Most of my favorite bands were operating in the late '80s to mid '90 in the UK. Most were part of the shoegaze movement that took off around that time. Like others who responded, most of the albums on my list landed in one or two closely related genres. It never entered my mind that my love of fey British alternative bands would surprise anyone.

It did, though, and soon the "whiteness" of my list was being mocked--exclusively by other white people. I wasn't offended, since the mockery was good natured and pretty funny. But after yesterday's post, in which I might have implied that mainstream music critics spend so much time talking about hip-hop because they don't want to be perceived as racists, I thought about the Facebook incident again. Specifically, I thought (as I did at the time) about why it was acceptable for me to be mocked for listening to so much "white" music when I would never have considered firing back that others' lists were too "black."

These are hardly profound thoughts. We're all aware of concepts like "reverse" racism, white guilt and tokenism. While I don't think that white people who love hip-hop are necessarily guilty of engaging in any of the above, I have to admit that my comments yesterday were intended to make readers question whether any are present when white hipsters heap praise on "Kanye." Of course it's completely possible for someone to genuinely  love both hip-hop and indie rock, but one wonders whether it's really possible to connect with both in the way some critics want claim to.

While I don't think there's a genre of music out there that I inherently dislike, I have to admit that very little hip-hop appeals to me. When it does, it's generally in the vein of early '90s Public Enemy and Ice Cube records, and the appeal is almost entirely technical. Those were some of the best-produced records of their time, but that's as far as my interest goes. I don't--and, thanks to my socio-economic background, can't--identify with the sentiments being expressed in the lyrics. As much as I appreciate the craftsmanship of the beats and the significance of the chaotic soundscapes, it's an intellectual appreciation. My favorite Ice Cube track doesn't move me the way even my least favorite Cocteau Twins track does.

I've always felt like this is a pretty honest assessment of the situation, and not one that leaves me open to charges of racism. I've always rejected the claim, often made by hip-hop's detractors, that it's an inherently inferior form of music since it is often based on samples and allusions rather than completely original musicianship. The same complaint has been lodged against musical styles that I love, like electronic and industrial, for years, and it has always rung just as hollow. I don't have a grudge against hip-hop, but that doesn't change the fact that none of it has ever spoken to me at a level that made me cherish it the same way I cherish records by Slowdive, The Cure, The Pet Shop Boys, and so on.

I don't think my taste in music is "too white," nor do I think that others' taste is "too black." You should listen to the music that moves you, makes you feel sorry for all those poor bastards who didn't live long enough to hear it. Otherwise, you're just wasting your time.