I had no idea what to expect from this movie. All I knew was that Gogo from Kill Bill, Vol 1 was in it, and that her role in Torantino's movie was partly a reference to Battle Royal, so when I found out that the premise was that 40 Japanese school children (grade 7) were dumped on an island by the government, given random weapons, and forced to kill each other until only one was left, I was expecting something mindlessly violent and without redeaming value.
Holy shit was I wrong!
The whole movie is one big analogical representation of the radical violence of early life, and of the brutality of our education system. Basically, they shifted an Ideological State Apartatus (education) into a Repressive State Aparatus (incarceration with a little military thrown in). The film is definately not for the faint of heart. It contains the signature level of blood and violence we've come to expect from Japanese cinema, but the elements all build towards a model of sociological condition imbued through state-sponsered education that is bleak to say the least.
In fact, Battle Royale is a wonderful example of exactly the kind of analogical narrative representation that sci-fi is capable of (though it's not science-fiction by my definition; it's more like modern fantasy, but not quite that either). The point of a movie like this is not to read it in anything like a literal, realist way. The point is to figure out how the film's elements reflect on real-world elements, find the key to translate the symbolism, and then it unfolds in your hands like... hm... I want to use origami to maintain the Niponese theme, but origami isn't supposed to unfold so that doesn't work. Dang. It unfolds. We'll leave it at that.
I'm a little suspicious of such a simple, 1:1 relationship as what I've described, but given how simple the plot is and the film is meant for mass appeal, I think it's justified. There are, no doubt, more complex elements I could pick out on multiple viewings, but in as much as it's even worth our time to figure out what the artist "meant" to do, I'm fairly certain I have done just that.
And now I'm off to drink...
It seems to me that there has to be some kind of very psychological tie-in, here, between the wish fulfillment and suspension of disbelief in action movies, and the the wish fulfillment and suspension of disbelief in role-playing games. The genres themselves are rigged in favour of the hero, obviously, but what do those changes say in a larger social context and why do so many people find that message so pleasing?
The armchair psychologist says that everyone wants to be powerful and untouchable, at some point in our lives, and I maintain that it's not necessarily a masculine/feminine thing, either. We're just talking about a genre that appeals to men more of the time. Surely there's an equivalent genre in stereotypically feminine literature (Romance novels where the heroine is always persued by two men, maybe?). Besides which, a lot of women watch action movies these days, and a lot of action movies star women. We could talk about the sociology and psychology of those statements for quite a while, but I want to keep on a topic, here.
RPG/action movie logic creates the impression that (A) anyone can be the hero, (2) it doesn't take all that long. This is a bit of a blanket statement, I'll admit. I konw RPG gamers who prefer to take years developing a character and allow him or her to grow. These are also the kind of people who's idea of fun is handicapping themselves to a ridiculous degree and seeing if they can still succeed at something they've done a million times. I respect it, but I don't get it.
For the most part, though, gamers seem to want regular and predictable increases in abilities, if the game systems themselves are any indication. There's a quid pro quo (gods I hope the Latin's right) kind of relationship here akin to (and you can tell I'm a teacher now if I'm using this example) "I paid for this English course, therefore I deserve at least a B." In the player's mind, an investment of time ought to automatically equal an increase in abilities.
Does this hold true in action movies? There are a couple of kinds of action characters. There's the Little Guy turned Big Hero model, in which the boy next door, and occasionally the girl next door, stumble into a grand adventure and come back stronger, faster, and with more trunk space. Think of Daniel-san. We also have the Stable as a Table heroes, who are always predictably skilled. Think of James Bond.
So, at least some of the time, heroes do progress. Does this mean we don't identify with the Stable heroes? Probably not. It probably just means we identify with them in a different way. I'll save them until later, then.
And I think I'll leave this entry unfinished, yet again. I'm a fan of letting ideas simmer, fester if you will, in the giant mulch-pit that is my brain. Thoughts will occur unbidden in the shower, or whilst lying in bed trying to get to sleep.
I've been noticing over the last few years how much action-movie logic conforms to RPG logic. There are things that we take for granted (generic conventions) in movies that match up perfectly to the rules and conventions of role-playing games. I have compiled a list of the some of the most obvious, but I?m certain there are more?
It's Only a Flesh Wound!
Ever notice how movie bad guys take one punch and fall down but the heroes can keep on trucking despite a huge number of 'grazing' shots, or 'mere flesh wounds'? Well, that's because those hapless bad guys are just minor NPCs. They only have a few hit points each, or an extremely low Challenge Rating, or what have you. They go down like sacks of wheat. However, the heroes/PCs have loads of hit points, dodging bonuses, pools of 'emergency luck,' and all kinds of things that let them avoid being taken down with a single bullet, or one punch.
As Accurate as a Storm Trooper
Much like heroes have way more hit points than minor villains, villains also can't shoot for shit. They might be dressed up as a crack squad of sharp-shooters, born with high-powered rifles in hand, they've been trained up as the elite snipers of the empire (or whatever). Regardless, they couldn't hit the broad side of the Millennium Falcon if Chewy was mooning them. Well, obviously, they're very low-level and they just don't have the THAC0, or the BA, or the appropriate rifle skills, or whatever. The heroes, on the other hand, can run through a complex filled with bad guys and kill three of them for every one bullet. Hello weapon specialisation; how sweet it is.
Last Week, Mild-Mannered? Today, INVINCIBLE!
The training montage was a staple of the 80s movie, and it has been passed down to us almost totally intact. We don?t hear the same rock-ballad power cords anymore, but Spider-man had to swing around New York for a while before he could 'graduate' up to his good costume and learn his powers. The idea that characters gain levels in movies is so intuitive it almost doesn't need explanation. Obviously, people gain experience. This is fact of life. They learn. That's why so many RPGs are level-based. But sometimes the precise logic of experience points and levels is needed to explain why, for example, Alexandro Montoya (Antonio Banderas) is able to go from 'useless thief would couldn't defend himself to save his life' to 'Zorro, master of the gay blade' in a matter of just a few weeks. The reality is that he was already a fairly high-level thief (or 'rogue' if you insist) and picked up a second class as a fighter. Because he's already a high-level PC himself, he gains low levels very, very quickly (hell, it's only 1000 XP to get to second level). This convention is directly related to?
The Heroic Second Wind
It happens in every action movie. Ever. The big final battle is well underway, and we start to notice that the hero is getting his ass handed to him. The villain is a huge, muscle-bound brute, has prepared the site of battle, and/or is using an array of distraction techniques. He is, to put it bluntly, cheating, and the hero just can't take it. Then there's that moment. It's usually a tight shot of the hero's (bloodied) face and it often plays in slow motion. He looks up, grim determination written on his brow, and proceeds to smash the living crap out of the bad guy. This effect is often achieved through a realisation, the gaining of a concrete plot device, or something like that. But just as often, he merely seems to 'turn it on.' What just happened, you think to yourself? Well, our hero just gained himself a level or two. His hit matrix went up, he gained some new tricks (skills, feats, karma, whatever), and he?s now using them to take bloody revenge on El Bad Guy.
Good, Bad, I'm the Guy with the Gun.
The much maligned alignment system from D&D (and many other games) is an extremely useful tool to predict the actions of characters in movies. Today's heroes are most often Chaotic/Good (like Spider-man). This allows them to be somewhat playful, to have some of the charm of the cooler bad guys. Then there's anti-heroes, who are most often Neutral/Evil (e.g., Riddick). A system like this gives characters just enough depth to suspend our disbelief, but also makes them just predictable enough that the audience doesn?t have to face any particularly challenging moral conundra.
I had easy, free access to sitting through this crap fest, and I thought, hell, I've never seen it. Let's see how bad it actually is.
Well, as it turns out, it's pretty damn bad. This is two hours of standard "we want to bring in a big-ass audience" Hollywood dreck. Granted, Elizabeth Neverheardfromagain is very attractive and not a bad dancer, so given that about 65% of the film has her either naked or in mid-coitus, you'd think there'd be some entertainment value, but there really isn't. The plucky young heroine achieves material success and then nobly gives it up, but not before her ethnic/expendable girlfriend (not that kind) gets brutally raped for no good reason. And in case that's too depressing, there's also a convenient predatory lesbian in a cowboy hat, just for flavour.
Of course, Paul Verhoeven, who one suspects is capable of making a good movie, claims the whole thing is commentary, that it's supposed to be tacky and exploitative, that it's "ironic." That's a pseudo-post-modern dodge that I just don't think we buy anymore. Regardless of the intentions or intended intentions of the creators, the movie's success, what little of it there was, rested comfortably in the cleavage and between the legs of its stars (not counting Kyle McClachlan, of course).
I can now, in total honesty, say that this movie is exactly as bad as everyone said.
The following is the first two paragraphs (around a page and a half) that were at the head of my paper on Metropolis and The Matrix. However, now that it's a paper on just Metropolis this opening seems a little pointless. Anyway, for the genre nuts among you:
In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin, one of SF's greatest writers and literary critics, says "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive" (146). Those of us who study SF know this already, but it's worth explaining to the uninitiated. The mantra of my own critical perspective is: science fiction is always about now. This can be the "now" of the creation of the work, the "now" of the initial reception by an audience, or even, if we are particularly careful, the "now" of our own experience of work. It is not, however, the fictional "now" of the narrative itself. As Le Guin says, the genre is not supposed predict. Audiences who expect prediction experience either disbelief or dismissal. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was not about the actual year, 1984, but a metaphorical reflection of his own society "writ large." The same is true of almost all science fiction. Max Headroom was set "20 minutes into the future" but it was about corporate ideology and the rise of cable television in the 80s. Isaac Asimov's Foundation series was set in a time in the future so distant we have no measure for it, but it was supposed to be a model for an organised, rational society ruled by an intellectual élite. Frank Herbert's Dune, set in a similarly immesurably far-flung future, is a direct refutation of Asimov's vision. Star Trek is largely about the civil rights and counter-cultural movements of the 1960s. Star Wars is a re-telling of the creation myth of the United States of America.
Science fiction is always about now. It is a representation, a metaphor, a commentary on the present, the world as it is, through the focusing lense of fantasy, the world as it could be, shouldn?t be, ought to be, or might be. When we do not view SF in this way we have a tendancy to enter a mode of mockery instead of a mode of analysis or inquiry. When SF fails to match the world as we know it, or the world as we think it will likely be, we laugh because we feel we are smarter than the artists. Orwell's novel fails to accurately predict the political climate of the early 80s in England. This is a true statement. However, the novel is not supposed to accurately predict. Similarly, if SF?s commentary on the time in which we view it frightens us, challenges us, or questions our beliefs, then we can, through this same mode of mockery, dismiss it as so much inaccurate fantasy.
I was supposed to write a paper comparing these two extremely important American SF films. Mainstream they may be, but both have an odd quality of being mainstream movies that really want to be arty. I'll spare you all the details of Fritz Lang's whole deal with Ufa Studios and them competing with American film and blah blah blah. And I won't even bother trying to convince you that the Wachowskis were trying to make a set of movies that were actually about something, because everyone is so pissed off about Reloaded and Revolutions that they won't ever buy that they're quality films.
Anyway, I was supposed to write about both, but it took so fucking long to write about Metropolis that I don't have time for The Matrix now. Gahd damn...
The whole kung-fu explosion in American movies hit its stride with The Matrix. Sure, we'd had one or two Hong Kong-style action movies before then, a couple of them exported movies from Hong Kong, but The Matrix was the one that stuck, and for good reason. It wasn't just a good action movie, it was a good movie all around. What strikes me about the whole trend is that the novelty of it for Westerners was that the actors did their own fights, and they did them with a skill and a panache that we simply had never seen in American movies. There was no equivalent of Jackie Chan or Jet Li. We all had fond memories of Bruce Lee, of course, but he was an institution unto himself, plus he never used wires. The fun of most of Jet Li's movies, flicks like Once Upon a Time in China and the wonderously mindless Twin Warriors, was that the special effects were all done on-set. That was Li himself jumping around and hanging from the rafters. He just had some help from a wire team. It was a new and exciting comprimise between "the actor really doing it" and "holy fuck that looks so cool I don't even care how they did it!"
So along comes The Matrix, made by the Wachowskis, choreographed by Yun Woo Ping, the guy who did
But then comes along The Matrix: Reloaded and, what's this? We've switched back to CG and it doesn't look nearly as good. Alexander and Illya Salkind perfected a visual technique of simulating flying for Superman, and that was in the 70s. It's called rotoscoping and it was the standard of the industry for quite some time. That, in conjunction with wire-work and CG backgrounds could have done a lot of the sequences in The Matrix parts II and III. Hell, the wirework on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon directed by Ang Lee and choreographed by good old Yun Woo Ping, still looks better than the Burly Brawl, and that was a no-CG production. In place of that kind of artistic brilliance, we got an action figure instead of an action star. I have to assume there's a good reason why. Perhaps the Wachowskis got really bored of the laborious Bullet Time process. Perhaps someone just gave them too big of a budget (it's brought down better filmmakers than them!). I maintain that the second and third part of the Matrix trilogy are good films, and they get better every time I rewatch them, but they could have been great films, and those great films still haunt my imagination.
But here's the punch line: Hollywood found a simple, beautiful technique for making exciting fight scenes, used it for a few short years, and then abandoned it in favour of something that costs more and generally looks like crap. I'm confused.
Oeming's art on Powers has made me realise something. Panels are the focusing tool of the comic-book artist. Their size and shape and placement not only guides your eye through the narrative (in ways that can utterly destroy the right to left, top to bottom order of text) but can alter our sense of character or object via the size of the image. A large panel is often read as more significant than a smaller one. A "splash page" (a page with just one image) demands our attention for an extended period of time.
Oeming's tendency to surround small images with negative space, literally blackness, makes me think about a quality of the panel I hadn't contemplated consciously before. Visual artists among you may find this pedestrian, but the surroundings of an image have a profound effect on its sense of "size." Take a 1" by 1" panel and place it in the context of a bunch of other 1" by 1" panels, and it seems "normal sized." Place it on a blank white page and it seems tiny. Place it on a blank black page and it seems ominously lonely. This, to me, is literally framing technique (though I'm sure that term's been taken in art theory already). What surrounds the image occupies our field of view, therefore it has an effect on how we view the image.
This also makes me think of old 40s- and 50s-style comics where the page was always comprised of panels on a white background. It always contained a border and gutters (spaces between panels). Modern comics almost always extend all the way to the edges of the page. The difference in effect is a profound one. Without the white border, the panels lose a sense of being "made up." They no longer appear to pictures sitting on a piece of paper. The border gives the sense of an additional layer of artistic abstraction. We have the comic-book page, but then we have the implication of a secong "page" underneath the panels. By eliminating that border the image is brought forward by one layer, in an abstract sense, "closer" to the viewing eye, and therefore more real (or less unreal, if you prefer).
I've found myself in a funny position. A roll-playing game that I am a big fan of is at this point effectively defunct. It was/is a superhero game using the D20 system (for those who are not gamers, this means nothing. Don't worry bout it). It was a little home-built system done up by a guy in Minnesota and sold on-line in the form of a PDF file. But he is no longer able to maintain the system, fix problems, upgrade, etc. So, a bunch of the fans (who were all on a discussion group) decided to take the guts of the system and rebuild it into a mostly similar but also very much 'tweeked' version of basically the same system (we can do this, legally, because of the Open Gaming License that Wizards of the Coast, the people who now own D&D, brought in several years ago. Plus, the designer has given us the go-ahead, so going ahead we are).
As you all probably already gathered, I'm fascinated by how genre and medium shape narratives. Moving the same story from, for example, novel to film always requires significant changes to the story itself because the two media are so different. For many years now I've run roll-playing games, and what's fascinating there is that, despite working from a fairly standard genre (Tolkienesque sword and sorcery) designing a game and writing a story are two very, very different things.
You see, in a story you don't have to worry about little things like 'rules' and 'fairness.' You can shape a narrative that relies on random events, last minute deus ex machina plot devices, and all kinds of entrances and exits of character. Not so in an RPG. They have to be balanced. They have to be fair. They have to follow the rules. Not only that, but when writing a game you're really only creating the outline for a improvised narrative. Your players will write the story along with you, blurring the line between artist and audience, storyteller and listener. The author function is shared all but equally among all involved. The game master (GM) is the setting and the impetous for plot, certainly. He or she has a great deal of control. However, players are the protagonists. They're the heroes. They ought to be the driving force of the game. The decision makers. They have almost all the agency. Part of the challenge of designing a good game is making sure you provide motivation for the players, because otherwise literally nothing happens.
Now, that's designing an individual story or adventure. Designing the system of rules that governs that story is a whole other thing entirely, and just as involved with genre. See, most of the RPGs out there are specific to a genre. D&D is fantasy. Cyberpunk is gritty science-fiction. There are games set in the Old West. There are sports games. There are space operas. There is Wuxia (Chinese fantasy). There is just about anything you care to play, if you look hard enough. The game we're working on (called "Pheonix" for now) is based on comic-book superheroes.
We find ourselves in a funny position. We have to design a system that is 'generic' in both sense of the word. On the one hand, it has to fit any game setting (from the ridiculous to the grim), but on the other, it must emulate superhero comics as we know them. We have to create something that will give the GMs a way to fool (suspend the disbelief of) players into thinking that they're experiencing a comic-book fantasy first hand, but those GMs must also design their games on principles quite different from those stories (for the reasons I outlined above). In a sense, we're designing the 'theory' behind the game. We're creating a rigid system of methodology of storytelling. We're creating the rules that both storyteller and audience must live by if they want to experience these narratives.
I'll have more concrete thoughts on this project as I go, and I'll have more thoughts on the implications of RPGs to modern theory, as well. Friends of mine have argued that RPGs are a living example of the death of the author because the 'readers' (players) are actually in charge despite feeling like they're subject to the whims of the 'author' (GM). I'm not sure if I buy this (I'm certain I don't buy Barthes' "Death of the Author," so that's no doubt related). However, since I was about eight years old, the player/GM relationship has been second-nature not me. I've never quite thought of it as author and reader because, hey, it's just not the same and insisting on that metaphorical representation would only cloud the issue. However, it might just be the case that RPGs could function as the perfect metaphor for the actual behaviour of artist and audience in fiction.
More thoughts on this subject as they occur.