Yearly Archives: 2016

June 21, 2016

Game log 6/16

6/18/13: GOG promotes their summer sale by giving away Torchlight for free.

• Torchlight (2009): Runic Games (Seattle, WA) [2 hrs]

An “action RPG” — where “action” means “just click click click incessantly,” and “RPG” means “but with an intricate system of crap and crap upgrades and crap upgrade currency etc.” Maximum ado about nothing. I like games where you’re rewarded for paying ever closer attention to what’s going on; this is the opposite. Cleanly executed, at least. One hour was just the right amount for me. Then I did another hour.

6/28/13: “Humble Bundle with Android 6”: 10 games for $5, but two of them (Frozen Synapse and NightSky) I already owned from prior bundles, and one of them (Pulse) is for Android only, so better call it 7 games for $5. I didn’t play any of them until now.

• Aquaria (2007): Bit Blot (= Alec Holowka & Derek Yu) (Winnipeg, MB / San Francisco, CA) [21.5 hrs]
• Fractal (2010): Cipher Prime (Philadelphia, PA) [1.5 hrs]

Aquaria is in the noble genre of the nonlinear action-adventure, or “Metroid-like.” (The internet, alas, has taken to referring to this genre as “Metroidvania,” but that’s inane and inaccurate and I reject it.)

I said once that the graphic adventure was the king of game genres, but that was rash; it might just as well be this. Or maybe it’s that this is the queen of game genres. There’s definitely some yin and yang going on between them.

Plain old adventure games are goofy and forthright and frequently embarrassing. Action-adventure games play hard-to-get, which gives them a tinge of charismatic cool. That is, adventure games are dogs and action-adventures are cats. They each have a story that they won’t reveal until you do something, but in an adventure game, when it comes time to withhold, it basically just bites its lip and eagerly waits for you to say the magic word that gives it permission to bark again. Whereas an action-adventure will fill the screen with a giant monster and have it stomp you over and over again until you learn to obey. Then, and only then, it will feed you your snack.

Okay, so I guess I’m actually saying that where adventure games are like dogs, action-adventures make you the dog. Definitely something to do with dogs.

Note that video game genres need better names. It’s a more pressing need than in film, because to be a film audience all you have to do is sit and look, no matter the genre; a game player’s job, on the other hand, is completely different from genre to genre. Yes, maybe there aren’t really “genres” in video games, just mix-and-match elements… well, if so, that’s fine: they still need better names. “Action” vs. “Action-Adventure” vs. “Adventure” is like distinguishing the meals of the day solely by how spicy they are. (“In the morning I usually have a Bland, and then in the afternoon a Medium, and then in the evening another Medium — but understand that the afternoon meal is characterized by sometimes being bland, and the evening one is sometimes spicy, so generally we refer to the evening meal as a “Spicy-Medium” and the one in the afternoon as a “Medium-Bland.” The morning one we can safely just call “Bland” — though, footnote, there are some European examples that are, in fact, spicy…”)

So Aquaria is an “Action-Adventure,” but really it should just be called “lunch.” (i.e. “Metroid.” Except that’s still lame, because it’s naming the genre after an exemplar rather than as itself — like calling lunch “a sandwich-like.”)

I spent many hours playing Aquaria; all these digressive paragraphs correspond to that time expenditure. Now the review: dreamy fishtank world full of varied sea creatures — odd, atmospheric, memorable. Game itself — engaging enough to hold me down for very long play sessions, but ultimately too distended to be satisfying; it didn’t feel respectful enough of my time and effort. If the whole map were shrunk by about 30 percent — just the distances, not the content — and the game was saved every time you entered a new area, and there were about twice as many stops on the quick-transit system, and the boss battles were a little less obtuse, this would be a splendid, transporting 10 hour game. Instead it’s a trying 20 hour game.

I got all the way to the FINAL FORM of the FINAL BOSS — and as soon as I could see that the end was within reach, the spell was broken and I was suddenly filled with the awareness of how little I actually cared about this mermaid game. So after more than 20 hours of play and with only one obstacle remaining, I declared myself done (and watched the last 5 minutes on Youtube). Better late than never.

Fractal, meanwhile, is just what it appears, a puzz-procedural in the Bejeweled vein, but with hexagons. These sorts of games directly target the subconscious, so only the subconscious can review them. My subconscious shrugged at this and said “nah.” So that’s that.

• Organ Trail: Director’s Cut (2010/12): The Men Who Wear Many Hats (= Ryan Wiemeyer & Michael Block) (Chicago, IL) [.5 hrs]
• Stealth Bastard Deluxe (2011/12): Curve Studios (London, UK) [8 hrs]

Organ Trail is, as you can see, an opportunistic hipster mashup of the Apple II Oregon Trail with the standard zombie apocalypse shtick. Ha ha, get it? Good idea, right? Yeah, I get it. It’s cute, for what basically amounts to a conceptual pun. But I never thought Oregon Trail was a very interesting game and I just don’t go for the zombie thing, so this isn’t for me, as a half hour’s play confirmed.

Stealth Bastard is a pretty typical “puzzle-platformer” (= kind of like Sunday brunch). Middle-of-the-road stuff: the levels are mostly superficial button-rigged contraptions rather than deep or elegant puzzles, and the screen is always a little more cluttered than I wanted it to be. But I like puzzle-platformers so, sure, I’ll take it. A noteworthy touch is that prescient-seeming snarky commentary appears onscreen when you fall for a trap or, alternately, make a breakthrough. This is a nice use of the counter-intuitive fact that the whole process of solving a puzzle is actually a pre-planned experience, even though the player always has the sensation of blazing his/her own trail. Video games tend to blur the line between free will and determinism; I like it when they find ways to revel in the blur.

• Broken Sword: Director’s Cut (1996/2009): Revolution Software (York, UK) [6 hrs]
• McPixel (2011–12): Sos (= Mikolaj Kamiński) (Nowy Tomyśl, Poland) [2 hrs]

Calling a revised release a “director’s cut” even though the director had total control over the original release is stupid. In this case it should properly be called “Broken Sword: schizophrenic tart-up for the console and touchscreen market.” The original game, which I thoroughly enjoyed in the year of its release and replayed fondly about 10 years ago, continues to stand. It has its shortcomings, of course, but it’s coherent on its own terms. The new version constantly intrudes on that coherence with a lot of clumsy insertions, replacements, and deletions, with mismatched new art and audio, and an overall depressing sense of Lucasian disjunction between the 1996 and 2009 incarnations of the aging designers. In short: this was tacky and kind of a drag, but I played it all anyway.

McPixel is deliberately asinine to the max, a joke game meant to feel like a 7-year-old made it. It’s an endless, spastic, dadaist restaging of the SNL MacGruber sketch — so a parody of a parody: just the kind of indefensible and compulsive thing a 7-year-old takes for humor. When I was 7 would I have thought this was funny? or would its calculated childishness have raised a red flag? I probably would have thought it was funny, but also a little weirdly menacing, the way other people’s ideas of “naughtiness” always are. Since it’s deliberately a stupid waste of time, it kind of defies critical response. The only worthwhile question, I guess, is whether it helped put me in touch with my sense of the exhilaration of the stupid. Not consistently, but sure, a little. Faintly.

• Waking Mars (2012): Tiger Style (Austin, TX) [7 hrs]

My favorite thing about this game was its genre defiance. It looks like one kind of thing, talks like another kind of thing, and has the gameplay systems of a third kind of thing. That means it’s none of those things. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s better or more interesting than those things, but it does mean that the question “what is this?” becomes stimulating in itself. I don’t think Waking Mars quite added up, but it took its originality seriously, which I admire, and I enjoyed the process of letting this unknown quantity sink in and make its case. One of the great attractions of video games is that each game has to sell its own paradigm from the ground up. I never stop feeling grateful for the sheer scope of aesthetic tourism this form allows, even if a lot of stops on the tour are only so-so. Or worse. This was so-so.

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May 25, 2016

Game log 5/16

5/30/13: “Humble Weekly Sale: Telltale Games.” $5 for eight games, two of which I played soon thereafter:

• The Walking Dead (5 episodes, 2012) [feels like a real TV show. In the world of computer games that’s a revolutionary achievement. It was widely hailed as a major milestone for the form — rightly — so I wasn’t going to miss it, even if that meant putting up with a lot of zombies and “desperate measures” apocalypsploitation. I enjoyed it even though it wasn’t for me]

• Puzzle Agent (2010) [a tasty, atmospheric cartoon, unfortunately made to house a series of flimsy unprofessional puzzles. But the art direction is clearly a labor of love, and it’s very short, so it managed to leave a good impression despite itself]

That left the following six games:

• Back to the Future: The Game (5 episodes, 2010—11): Telltale Games (San Rafael, CA) [12 hrs]
• Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse (5 episodes, 2010): Telltale Games (San Rafael, CA) [15.5 hrs]

Back to the Future is certainly superficially impressive as a piece of licensing work — the Marty McFly impersonation deserves some kind of award — but underneath it’s still flat and dumb and gawky in all the ways adventure games usually are, which puts it into an embarrassing uncanny valley of quality. Neither offensive nor lovable.

Sam & Max: The Devil’s Playhouse has all the same limitations, but the material better suits the style. It’s Mad Magazine loopy mayhem, which is inherently more forgiving. The puzzle design is occasionally clever, and the experience benefits from the variety and unpredictability inherent to zaniness. Still dorky, though.

Adventure games have always had an unfortunate tendency to be creatively undercommitted, by which I mean that the player can sort of smell the world of the programmers the whole time. Telltale games prior to The Walking Dead seem to have tried to counter that by deliberately doubling down on “story” and “characters,” without addressing the real problem, which seems to me more one of confidence than craft. The result is that the games feel simultaneously undercommitted and overcommitted (as in “why are you acting like I care about these stupid paper-doll characters?”) — which is the way of dorkiness.

• Poker Night at the Inventory (2010): Telltale Games (San Rafael, CA) [4 hrs]
• Hector: Badge of Carnage (3 episodes, 2010–11): Straandlooper (Donaghadee, Northern Ireland) [9 hrs]

Poker Night at the Inventory isn’t really a full-fledged game, just an experiment at creating the illusion that you’re in a social space with four other characters. The illusion basically succeeds for about 20 minutes, and then dies as soon as dialogue begins to repeat. It was striking to observe myself feeling the intimidation and shame that I would feel at a real poker table. (“Dammit, even Strongbad is more worldly and competent than I am!”) I stuck with it for a couple more hours because I was interested in getting some poker experience, but eventually I came to see that playing against these spastic AIs hardly even counted as poker.

Hector: Badge of Carnage was distributed by Telltale but isn’t actually a Telltale game, and it has a very different personality from anything else here. It’s in the tradition of Leisure Suit Larry, willfully “seedy” and “naughty,” which means at heart actually innocent, but still not my kind of company. I will grant that the artwork is well done, a nice stylistic solution to the longstanding problem of doing 2D adventure games in high resolution. Might this be the only game I’ve ever played from Northern Ireland? Not sure.

• Puzzle Agent 2 (2011): Telltale Games (San Rafael, CA) [2.5 hrs]
• Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures (4 episodes, 2009): Telltale Games (San Rafael, CA) [12 hrs]

Puzzle Agent 2 is a weak retread of the already watery Puzzle Agent (see above), reusing art and, inexcusably, the exact same story. I got the sense that it was put together as quickly and cheaply as possible, maybe by interns and meek new hires who didn’t dare introduce any new ideas or improve on any of the things that ought to have been improved. Graham Annable’s visual style is still compelling, but the game couldn’t be more superfluous.

Wallace & Gromit has all the same problems as Back to the Future and Sam & Max (and the Telltale Monkey Island game that I played a few months back), but the gentle domesticity of Wallace & Gromit’s world put me in a mindset more accepting of inanity. Playing this game is nicely congruent with doing some knitting, or waiting for a Rube Goldberg contraption to butter your toast, so even at its dullest — and it is frequently quite dull — it at least feels cohesive. As usual, brand-matching is Telltale’s real forte, and here it’s second to none; I had no doubt that I was puttering around in the company of the actual Wallace & Gromit. (Wallace’s voice is another top-class impersonation. If only Kermit the Frog had been so lucky.)

Meanwhile in the present day:

4/21/16: Stephen’s Sausage Roll, purchased new for $29.99 — by far my largest single expenditure on a video game in at least 7 years, probably much longer.

• Stephen’s Sausage Roll (2016): Increpare Games (= Stephen Lavelle) (London, England) [31.5 hrs]
• Jelly no Puzzle (2013): Qrostar (= “Tatsunami”) (Japan) [8.5 hrs]

This is the second commercial game by the designer of English Country Tune (which I mentioned in the previous game log) and, like that game, is an exquisite collection of Sokoban-variant puzzles. They are truly hard but never cruel; they generously communicate everything about their own solutions except for the new insight that each puzzle requires the player to reach. There is something stirring about the abstract, musical quality of this kind of communication; it’s an art of taste and feeling, as much as any other art. The best such puzzles are designed by people who have an ear for that musicality, and Stephen Lavelle is a gifted composer in this medium. He also has a good sense of the aesthetic value of entering that abstract thought-space, and the game knowingly cultivates an atmosphere that sensitively complements the puzzle-solver’s inner atmosphere.

Playing this (and The Witness a couple months back) has reminded me that it’s possible to feel really and truly engaged by every minute of a game. After one hasn’t been for a while, it’s easy to find one’s standards dropping involuntarily.

In the Steam discussion forum for the game, in response to the many people who showed up to say “$30 you gotta be kidding me,” the developer posted a list of what considered to be “amazing free puzzle games,” the first of which was Jelly no Puzzle. So after I was done with Stephen’s Sausage Roll, I decided to play that (free, for Windows or Android; sorry, Mac, though you can still play a version of the first six puzzles here).

Jelly no Puzzle (that’s Japanese for “Jelly Puzzle”) is similar to Stephen’s Sausage Roll in that it is concerned with abstract communication, but different in that its communication is almost always a deliberate misdirection (which is only occasionally the case in SSR). You “read” each puzzle until you understand what it requires, then figure out how to put that into action… and only then do you realize that the implied solution has in fact been subtly blocked. Then the real puzzle begins. The true solution is always something that goes somehow against the flow implied by the layout. The challenge here is to recognize all the ways the puzzle is influencing your thinking in order to be free of them, and engineer a stubborn solution that disregards the insinuations but actually gets the job done. This too is a mode of communication, sort of like a magician tricking an audience.

I will admit to looking at hints for the last two puzzles, after being stuck for nearly an hour each. The rest I proudly did by myself.

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May 23, 2016

The Twilight Zone: 13. The Four of Us Are Dying

TZ13

directed by John Brahm
teleplay by Rod Serling
based on a short story by George Johnson
starring Harry Townes, Phillip Pine, Ross Martin, and Don Gordon
with Harry Jackson, Bernard Fein, Peter Brocco, Milton Frome and Beverly Garland
music by Jerry Goldsmith

Friday, January 1, 1960, 10 PM EST on CBS.

Watch it on Netflix.

Happy New Year to all Twilight Zone creators, writers, producers, and narrators! It’s 1960! The year you turn… 36! Just like Arch Hammer, that unscrupulous, lowdown, no-good man! (Readers, please be aware that I had written the previous entry before watching this one and had no foreknowledge of Arch or his age.)

With this in mind, let’s consider the opening text as subconscious self-portraiture:

His name is Arch Hammer. He’s 36 years old. He’s been a salesman, a dispatcher, a truck driver, a con man, a bookie, and a part-time bartender. This is a cheap man, a nickel-and-dime man, with a cheapness that goes past the suit and the shirt: a cheapness of mind; a cheapness of taste. A tawdry little shine on the seat of his conscience, and a dark-room squint at a world whose sunlight has never gotten through to him. But Mr. Hammer has a talent, discovered at an early age. This much he does have: he can make his face change. He can twitch a muscle, move a jaw, concentrate on the cast of his eyes… and he can change his face. He can change it into anything he wants.

The seedy con-man in Rod — now the star of two consecutive episodes — is the embodiment of moral anxiety. “What evil am I secretly capable of?” This episode is basically the same as all stories where magic powers — particularly invisibility — are the road to voyeuristic corruption: first the nervous audience is tantalized and titillated by the thought of unlimited sex, money, and cruelty without consequence; then the villainous magicians get their deserts, and we go home feeling relieved to be relatively powerless.

“Voyeurism” is really just an expression of normal impulses, filtered through social phobia: the desire to be with people without suffering the risks and terrors of being known to them. The existence of “invisible man” cautionary tales — in fact, the very notion of “voyeurism” itself, this idea that wanting to look at people even though you’re scared of them is a DIRE PERVERSION — is a product of social-phobic self-flagellation, which is to say a product of social anxiety itself. I.e.: “I like people, but people don’t like or accept me. Oh god, if they ever found out I like them, I’m sure they’d think I’m a super-creep. And since I really want to fit in, I’ll try to get in line with that opinion and agree: it’s true, I’m a super-creep. Oh god, what creepy things might I do? Thank god I don’t have the power to turn invisible, or you can bet I’d spend all my time being downright cheap and tawdry. A cheapness of mind; a cheapness of taste.”

But “The Four of Us Are Dying” brings it even closer to home, by making Hammer’s “most odd talent” be one of transformation, rather than disappearance. If Rod isn’t sure who he is — an innocent kid in idyllic Binghamton? a boxer in the ring? a soldier killing men in the south Pacific? a calculating ladies’ man? a husband and father? a hack writer? a TV producer in a suit? — he may well feel that in any given role he’s a phony, just playing a part for his own gain, hiding behind yet another convenient mask, living out his life in a personal twilight zone. And isn’t that, after all, a writer’s “most odd talent”? You tell lies about yourself, and sell them to anyone who’ll buy. Last week he was “Fred Renard.” This week he’s “Arch Hammer.” The question is, who is he when he checks into the “Hotel Real”?

In other words, Rod’s not even sure he’s entitled to the make-believe on which the show is founded; even this kind of escape is potentially dirty.

And we don’t have to have written it to share in his discomfort. Being audience to fiction is just as protean as inventing it; just as guilty, if you’re susceptible to that kind of guilt. There’s something noir about enjoying something like noir, make-believing your way into a wonderland of neon and cigarettes and dames that really, properly, aren’t yours.

Why not a beautiful dame? Why not? I never had a dish like that! I’ve never been loved like that! Why shouldn’t I?

This story — this girl, this money, this nocturnal glamour — is as much an undeserved fantasy for the audience as for Hammer. Who are we this week? This is a dream, and in a dream, we can be anyone: we just have to think of a face.

Oh god, we’re such creeps!

I’ll admit that the first time I watched this episode it didn’t really hang together for me because I couldn’t feel my way into that basic dream-guilt; I don’t share it with Rod. The episode just seemed like a series of disconnected ideas — especially the melodramatic scene with Mr. Marshak, which felt tonally arbitrary and more than a little silly.

It was only on second viewing when all the above clicked for me — oh, I see, the feeling is supposed to be guilt — and suddenly the Marshak scene made sense too. It’s a classic dream moment: in the midst of all the fantasy of changeability — I’m a cool cat! I’m a tough gangster! I’m a macho boxer! — suddenly deep, dark familial guilt rises up and pins you down. The scene confused me the first time around because I took it literally, as just some weird speech intended for the random boxer from the poster. But of course in a dream, the dad is just as protean as the self; for Rod, dreaming this episode, this dad is the dad. We’re to understand that underneath the borrowed face, in some mythical sense, Marshak has the right man after all. Hammer himself deserves every word, just as he deserves the bullet.

“I gotta concentrate! I gotta concentrate!” he pleads, trying to out-think society yet again, but the inescapable Other who represents emotional truth cannot be escaped, and kills him. To invisible men, the fear of being made visible is indistinguishable from the expectation of death, so here, out of left field, is that death you ordered.

Beyond the sudden contrivance of it, it’s also unsatisfying that the “figure of truth” is just some guy operating under a misapprehension. It would be a more effective ending, I think, if Mr. Marshak was made a little more weird and biblical when he showed up at the end, a little more like an avenging angel.

(A father killing his own adult son is a relative rarity in fiction, no? Nice paired casting, by the way. I thought maybe they really were father and son. Nope.)

I mean, look: I’m trying as always to speak to the psychological root here, and I mean what I’m saying, but the fact is, this is a goofy and clumsy episode. As I’m sure you already agree. Great neon lights set, though.

• The “scattered clippings” on the bed (see above) are just repeated duplicates of the only two clippings actually used in the episode. I guess he bought several copies of the paper.

• More of Serling’s undercooked pretentiousness (a la “And When The Sky Was Opened”): “Mourning becomes you, Maggie.” / “Me and Electra.” What could possibly be the point of this meaningless and utterly inapt allusion? (No, this doesn’t relate to my comment about a parent killing a child; Electra kills her mother in revenge for her mother having killed her father. Like Hamlet. If you want to make a case for how this relates to “The Four of Us Are Dying,” be my guest, but I’m skeptical.)

• I note that Rod oddly neglects to end the episode by reminding us that it all happened “in… The Twilight Zone.” And it feels wrong not to hear it. Why, after all, are we tilting up to the stars if he’s not going to tell us what zone this is?

George Clayton Johnson, author of the source story, will be back with original scripts later, from which we’ll get a better sense of his personality. The original story here, apparently called “All of Us Are Dying,” isn’t available online so I can’t speak to it; reports are that as usual Serling dumped just about everything but the premise. It is worth noting that in this case, the story was unpublished when Serling bought it, and though it did later see print, is generally considered as an appendix to the Twilight Zone episode rather than its precursor.

Passing thought while rewatching: This is the greatest TV series of all time. Look what craziness it gives us the opportunity to see! And think what variety of further craziness it’s going to encompass! It’s a true thrill. And such a show is no longer possible.

The reason this can’t be done again (and why all attempts at reboots seem weak) is because we don’t have a sturdy no-frills directorial standard practice anymore that can accommodate all this stuff convincingly. There is no artistic tradition today that could so easily scoop up this particular story, say, and deliver it, as-is, without aesthetic strain. None of this acting, none of this camera technique, is conceivable in the present culture. And that seems like a sign of cultural weakness. We should aspire to be capable of anything. The cult of originality has deprived us of the reassuring competence of generalism. I’d gladly trade back, if we could.

Now that’s out of the way, I can admit what this episode is really all about: ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jerry Goldsmith!

30 years old, with only three film scores under his belt, but already clearly embarked on his life’s work of writing terrific, inventive music for mediocre productions. My considerable enthusiasm for his sound world (plink thunk wah-wah buzz whoosh snap!) is sadly dampened by the fact that most of it is wedded to junk. Even with this score, I find myself wishing the episode were better just for the sake of the music. This is great stuff.

Composed and conducted by Jerry Goldsmith.

Recorded December 4, 1959, 7:30AM–12:10PM, Goldwyn Studios

16 players:

Maurice Carlton, Nicholas Dann, Herman Gunkler, Ralph Lee, and Jack Stacy, reeds
(= 2 flutes, 3 clarinets / 2 alto saxes, 2 tenor saxes, baritone sax)
Leonard Mach, Uan Rasey, and Manuel Stevens, trumpets
Marshall Cram, Edward Kusby, Randall Miller, and William Schaefer, trombones
Sam Furman, piano
Robert Stone, bass
Milton Holland and Bernie Mattinson, percussion
(= drum kit / vibraphone / xylophone / marimba / bongo / boo-bams / gourd)

Incidentally, my source for this stuff also gives the date for the “sideline” call (i.e. the on-camera musicians) and thus the date the bar scene was filmed:

September 3, 1959, 7:30AM—5:30PM (Sideline), 4:15–7:15PM (Recording), MGM Studios

3 musicians: Sam Furman, Maurice Carlton, and Robert Stone (all of whom, as you see, played the real score, too. The trumpet player with lines, however, is an actor.)

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May 15, 2016

The Twilight Zone: 12. What You Need

TZ12

directed by Alvin Ganzer
teleplay by Rod Serling
based on the short story by Lewis Padgett
starring Steve Cochran and Ernest Truex
with Read Morgan, Arline Sax, William Edmonson, Doris Karnes, Fred Kruger, Norman Sturgis
music by Van Cleave

Friday, December 25, 1959, 10 PM EST on CBS.

Watch it on Netflix.

Yes, that’s right, we’ve skipped all the way to Christmas, because last Friday — i.e. December 18, 1959 — The Twilight Zone was pre-empted. Press release follows.

“Iran: Brittle Ally,” an hour-long television portrait of the oil rich U.S. ally which shares a 2,000-mile common border with the Soviet Union, will be the third program in the “CBS REPORTS” series on Friday, Dec. 18, 10:00–11:00 p.m. The program will be presented just four days after President Eisenhower visits Iran on his tour of Asian and Middle Eastern nations, and will include scenes of his visit.

CBS News Correspondents Edward R. Murrow and Winston Burdett will narrate the special filmed program. They will interview Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, as well as other Iranians from various walks of life, and American citizens living and working in Iran. Among those on the program will be Abol Hassan Ebtehaj, until recently Managing Director of Iran’s Plan Organization; David E. Lilienthal, former Director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, who is currently supervising the building of a similar project for the Iranian government in Kuzistan; and Col. William A. Kuhn, Deputy Chief of the U. S. Mission to Iran.

Iran, historically known as Persia, is a constitutional monarchy and has been ruled by kings for 2500 years, longer than any other country in the world. Geological surveys indicate that the country fairly floats in oil. The huge refinery at Abadan is the world’s largest, with a daily production capacity of 410,000 barrels. On the Dec. 18 program, viewers will see phases of the oil industry at Abadan as well as scenes of Iran’s two next best-known world export industries, the production of caviar (from the Caspian Sea) and the weaving of (Persian) carpets.

This program sounds like an admirable and surely expensive piece of work by CBS News, so I don’t begrudge it pre-empting the Twilight Zone. As far as I can tell, Iran: Brittle Ally is no longer extant (though a transcript survives). What does it say about our culture that 60 years later, The Twilight Zone is available in pristine condition for anyone to watch, whereas Edward R. Murrow’s interview with the Shah of Iran (of “actual history” fame) has apparently been lost or destroyed?

IT SAYS NOTHING, is the answer. It just happens to be that way. (Also, if it did say something, it wouldn’t necessarily be something negative.)

Anyway, that’s a little blast of The Glaringly Bright Zone — a quick taste of “historical time,” which serves nicely as a palate-cleanser between bouts of mythical time. (That’s why CBS ran it, presumably.)

Now back to our regularly scheduled Twilight.

What You Need is sort of a “goose that lays the golden eggs” story. In this one the goose happens to win, but it doesn’t change the message: “this is why we can’t have nice things.”

(Which is an expression that I deeply dislike. It’s a nugget of pure resentment — ostensibly “something everyone’s parents said” but actually a quite dysfunctional thing for any parent to ever say — now being compulsively passed around in the culture as a supposedly tongue-in-cheek “wisecrack” that is, in fact, tacit perpetuation of the same resentment. “Joke” resentment is always more insidious than overt resentment; it’s like a cockroach that can squeeze into any crack.)

Anyway, it’s not a very good episode, but it’s an interesting spin on the magic-man Santa Claus motif, since it’s about dread of the impulse to abuse him. The lead character (“Mr. Renard,” eh?) represents Rod telling himself: “aw, even if there were a magic man, I’m sure I’d still manage to louse it all up, what with my venal nature.” As usual — as always — the essential conflict is just one fantasy identity chasing another. This time it’s the lowlife and the kindly old man. The test pilot and the nerdy little dork and the ordinary suit weren’t invited to this one, but there’s always next week.

It’s starting to be almost embarrassing how they all happen to be 36.

This episode, in fact, aired on Rod Serling’s 35th birthday (Jesus’s 1959th), which we can read as an anxiety gauge. It means that he gave himself about one year’s forgiveness, intuited about one year left between himself and his day of reckoning. The protagonists have to be 36 — rather than say 66, or 16 — because to Serling, by 66 the question “what sort of person” is already decided (either “a kindly old” or “a mean old”); at 16, any answer to the question “what sort of person” is too obviously provisional. Whereas 36 is the age when the question is answered decisively and irreversibly: the official life-narrative will finally stand revealed! This is what “drama” promises and threatens, so obviously, he thinks, the subject of any drama ought to be at that age. You can hear it in his voice, that to 35-year-old Rod, nothing promises high stakes more chillingly than saying “Protagonist. 36 years old.”

As usual — exactly like I said about Perchance to Dream and The Lonely — the heart of the episode is a dream dialogue between the two halves of the self, the way of nature facing off against the way of grace:

“I don’t need a partner. I don’t need anything. I’m content.” / “Your partner don’t satisfy so easy.”

“Serenity, peace of mind, humor, the ability to laugh at oneself. Those are the things you need most. But it’s beyond my power to give them to you.”

Then we get a convenient ending where the magic man has in some passive sense tricked Renard. This is, as usual, a psychologically phony way of contriving a conventional resolution. In this case it’s also not very satisfying because the particulars are so dumb. “Suddenly, everyone was run over by a truck.”

Frankly the whole premise is vague. Is it just that the guy magically knows what people will need? Or is it that he magically arranges good fortune for them, and these props are obscurely the instrument of it? The baseball player at the beginning doesn’t actually need a ticket to Scranton in any magical way; once he has a reason, he can just buy one. What he needs is the job itself, which is offered to him out of the blue immediately after encountering the old man. So did the old man do it, or not? Seems like our writer didn’t really care about the distinction; the important thing is just that this old man is a magic-man Santa Claus. That much comes through crystal clear.

The real underlying premise is just the standard fantasy that life is a story and all our uncertainties are just uncertainties about the text. “Oh I see, then I get hired to coach that team in Scranton. Well that answers that!” This fantasy has such deep roots that it hardly even feels like a fantasy. We can play along without it being spelled out coherently.

Rod is admirably blasé about rules; rules would just weigh these dreams down. When he does give rules, they usually feel inserted, disingenuous. “The things you need you need just once.” Oh?

This story had the rare distinction of having already been adapted for TV, on ABC’s Tales of Tomorrow in 1952. That version is almost entirely faithful to the original story (from the October 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction) — except for a moral hedge at the very end.

The original story has actual science fiction in it, and also sort of a point to make about ethics: that perfect knowledge is incompatible with standard morality. Whereas the Twilight Zone version, as usual, strips the scenario down to its simplest paper-doll dream-image, and then invests it with vague psychological angst.

It’s like the stories are adapted for the show by being read to a nervous child and then a script is written based on the child’s drawing. More or less, I think, this is indeed how it works. The child’s name is Rod Serling, and the drawing is in his head.

We think of cultural material as always being siphoned upward, from a state of “folk” where it’s born wild, toward increasingly self-aware sophistication. It’s good to remember that sometimes it also goes the other way. Rod Serling is sort of like the Brothers Grimm, but instead of culling his stories up from the dreamlife of the illiterate commoners, he’s plucking them from the literate world and melting them back down toward unselfconscious fable.

Anyway, the Tales of Tomorrow version is pretty good. It’s certainly interesting viewing as an example of relatively ambitious live TV from 1952; the three-camera technique is already impressive in its way, but the impression is strong that TV still saw itself as “visible radio.” That’s an antiquated point of view but I found it can also be stimulating — how luxurious it is, after all, to be able to see all these people!

Story author Lewis Padgett, by the way, was a pseudonym for the husband-and-wife team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore. Apparently in at least some of their jointly-credited works, they genuinely split their writing — trading off sessions at the typewriter — so there’s no knowing which of them wrote this one, or which parts of this one. (I suspect that if I really studied their individual styles I’d have some guess, but I haven’t and I’m not going to. I’ve read “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” also by “Lewis Padgett,” but that’s it.)

Van Cleave’s music isn’t in the same league as his score for Perchance to Dream, but it’s not bad — the “magic” arpeggio figure is nice, and I respect how he manages to apply it constantly without wearing it out. Good use of organ, too. I’m not sure “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” is so tremendously apt that it needs to be in every scene; I guess Rod must have said “play up the Christmas-y aspect of the story, ’cause it’s airing on Christmas.” And since there isn’t really any Christmas-y aspect of the story, Van Cleave must have felt it was incumbent on him to hit it pretty hard.

Composed and conducted by Nathan Van Cleave
Recorded December 9, 1959, 9AM – 12:15PM, Goldwyn Studios.

9 players:
Joseph Krechter, clarinet / bass clarinet
James Decker, James McGee, and Richard Perissi, horns
David Filerman, George Neikrug, and Olga Zundel, cello
Jack Cookerly and Eugene LePique, organ / piano / celeste

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April 13, 2016

The Twilight Zone: 11. And When the Sky Was Opened

TZ11

directed by Douglas Heyes
teleplay by Rod Serling
based on a short story by Richard Matheson
starring Rod Taylor
with James Hutton and Charles Aidman
music by Leonard Rosenman

Friday, December 11, 1959, 10 PM EST on CBS.

Watch it on Netflix.

As you well know by now (but I’m about to say it again anyway, to refresh after a couple months’ break), my basic framework for reading The Twilight Zone is to treat it like dream interpretation. To wit: the unresolved foreboding that makes up the majority of an episode’s running time constitutes the episode’s real meaning, whereas the ultimate twist resolution, no matter how clarifying it might seem, is actually a defense against the true meaning, a rationalizing escape route that allows us to deny and suppress the emotion we’ve just been experiencing.

At first it might seem like “And When the Sky Was Opened” defies this scheme, since there’s no “twist” per se; the nightmare just intensifies in the final act, and the only explanation we’re ever given is fuzzy and mystical:

It’s as if… as if maybe we shouldn’t have come back from that flight at all. Maybe somebody… something… made a mistake and let us get through when we shouldn’t have.

In other words, “the reason this is happening is because some Other is doing it.”

The old pulp convention of alluding vaguely to “somebody… something…” is basically a butterfly net for catching up any and all projected ideas of Higher Authority. Even those in the audience who would scoff at the concepts of “God” and “Fate” still have social intuitions of Authority, like anyone else; they just need to be snagged delicately, without waking the dreamer. Hence all those Ellipses… Of… The Uncanny!… which are the sound of the rational mind being tiptoed toward as it snoozes, its hand loosely grasping the keyring, its villainous moustache fluttering with every wheeze. The keys of course unlock the cell of “sanity.”

“It’s as if… somehow… this was… supposed to happen.” Got ’em!

Anyway, as I was saying: it may seem like “And When the Sky Was Opened” doesn’t follow the standard scheme of repressive rationalization, because it never turns a corner into revealing or explaining itself. But, in a sense, the whole story is an “explanation” that serves to cushion the real core of the episode, the bulk of its action: Forbes’s struggle to be taken seriously and make himself understood. As usual, it’s fundamentally a social crisis that we’re watching, not actually a science-fictional one. Forbes has memories that aren’t corroborated by other people, and so is forced to contend with the terrifying feeling that either he or everybody else must be insane. Everything to do with the test flight into space, the “somebody… something” making a mistake, and the eventual obliteration of these three military men — it’s all a narrative misdirection that just serves to take the edge off the actual angst, the underlying nightmare: the fear of having the contents of your mind differ from the people around you.

It’s really no different from the old Lady Vanishes, North By Northwest, Spanish Prisoner scenario — you return to the scene the next day and lo, it’s all changed and you’re the only one who remembers the thing you remember — but here without any deceit or scam as an “out.” The essential nausea of that dramatic situation, after all, is not of being betrayed but of having the feeling that you haven’t been betrayed, that the discrepancy between realities is in fact socially absolute, which means that your sanity, the root of your claim to social integration, is on the line. For much of “And When the Sky Was Opened,” this horror stands relatively exposed: the direct conflict of mutually incompatible subjectivities.

This episode’s use of the trope is distinctive in that it implies that the nauseating discrepancy between one man’s reality and another’s is transmissible. One version of the world seems to be catching, like a virus; the dividing line between realities is a moving storm front. The world as we know it is all in our minds, so we’re extremely dependent on one another’s minds. The episode shares this idea with “outbreak” plots, movies about zombies and pod people. The deepest horror is not actually of the specific symptoms of the virus that’s going around (in this case, complete non-existence), but of the fact that one’s only defense against insanity — namely, corroboration from other people — is the very part of the the self/world complex that is diseased. If you can no longer trust other people to confirm that you’re a person and that the world is the world, all you have left to work with is your own animal instinct. And that’s where the fear lives.

It’s worth noting that in these sorts of stories — that is, stories where someone says “I know it sounds impossible but you gotta believe me, Harry! It was right there, I saw it with my own eyes!” — we always know that the “crazy” guy is gonna turn out to be right. Our narrative sympathies are always instinctively with the “insane.” Uneasy sympathies, but sympathies nonetheless; deep down we all resent the notion of “insanity,” exactly because it’s a determination always to be made by an unreliable, zombie-susceptible, world of other people. Who are they to say who’s sane?

Escapist entertainment is an opportunity to indulge this resentment. But we’re not ready quite to throw in our lot with pure individual irrationality, either, since that brings its own world of lonely terrors. So our expectation is that such stories will put us through the changes — briefly test the water — and then deposit us back down where we think we belong, in some kind of cute compromise between individuality and “sanity” that conforms to the fashion of the moment.

Consider the philosophical slalom that must obligatorily be negotiated by something like, say, Harvey. (Which I suppose I should admit I’ve never seen all the way through. But would like to.)

Or consider Don Quixote, which, as I recall it from many years ago, seems like perhaps it’s going on and on and on just because Cervantes isn’t truly happy with any particular form of cute compromise. How after all ought Don Quixote to end? Ask your intuition. My gut tells me that, properly, it ought not to.

Maybe I sound inconsistent here. Earlier I said that The Lady Vanishes et al. give some sort of plotted “out” from the horror of experiencing disparate realities (i.e.: The Lady didn’t actually vanish; the people on the train are lying as part of an intrigue), whereas “And When The Sky Was Opened” is more merciless about trapping us with the essential discomfort. And yet just prior to that I was saying, at some length, that The Twilight Zone always provides its own sort of explanatory “out,” and that this episode is indeed no exception.

Well, both things are true. The difference — between The Twilight Zone and The Lady Vanishes — is one of degree, not type. My overarching Twilight Zone theory — that it’s a true fear followed by a false rationalization — is just an extension of the same principles at work in more “realistic” entertainments. What is The Lady Vanishes appealing to in the human soul if not this same thing, more obscurely?

Many stories are fantasies, but don’t dare admit it to themselves, nervously cloaking themselves in the garb of realism. Generally, The Twilight Zone is a fantasy that admits it, but still doesn’t dare admit what kind — that is, that it’s actually an emotional or social fantasy rather than a truly scientific or “paranormal” one.

The sci-fi justification for this particular episode is, as I’ve said, admirably thin-to-absent. But even what little there is doesn’t really hang together. If at the end of the episode, these guys have been removed not just from Earth but from all of Time, past present and future, why does the hangar still have a separate fenced-off area with a dust cover for the absent X-20? That certainly seems like “they never returned from their trip” rather than “they’ve never existed.”

Indeed, there’s already something strange about the idea that this particular test flight brought about their retroactive nonexistence — including presumably the nonexistence of the test flight. If the Eerie Someone Or Something that brings about their absence lives Outside Of Time, presumably It wouldn’t need to wait for any particular moment in time — and certainly not for a spaceship to fly up into Its neck of the woods and catch Its attention — to realize that It wanted to eat these guys.

(So on second thought, I guess what we’re supposed to take away is that the Great Authority hasn’t actually rewritten the past, has only rewritten the present world — including everyone’s memories — so that the permanent abduction of these guys goes unnoticed by the rest of humanity. Which, I note, is the exact inverse of that clever episode of Rick and Morty about memory parasites. I have no doubt the Rick and Morty writers had seen this one.)

This episode — like “Where Is Everybody?” but even more literally — equates the frontiers of military technology with unthinkable extremes, where emotional and existential normality threaten to break down. The recurring association is, I think, not coincidental within the mind of Rod Serling, whose tortured relationship to the Higher Authority of Uncle Sam and the military establishment is fueling a lot of this stuff. As the series continues we’ll be seeing lots more test pilots, astronauts, and soldiers wrestling with deep existential confusion, imposed, in the line of duty, from somewhere on high. 900 miles and higher.

This is our first episode based on a Richard Matheson story, although only very loosely. The differences between the Matheson and the Serling versions are perhaps instructive.

In the original 1953 story, “Disappearing Act,” there is no outer space and no military; the story is presented as the diary of an unsuccessful writer, and his eventual disappearing act is fate’s answer to his private plea for the universe to be simpler (than his tangle of frustrations, infidelities, confused emotions):

I’m sick of it all anyway. Bills, bills. Writing, writing. Failures, failures, failures! And little old life dribbling on, building up its beautiful, brain-bursting complexities like an idiot with blocks.

You! Who run the world, who spin the universe. If there’s anybody listening to me, make the world simpler! I don’t believe in anything but I’d give… anything. If only…

Oh, what’s the use? I don’t care anymore.

This private wish brings about the gradual Lady Vanishes erasure of everyone and everything he has ever known or has ever known him, with him going last, and the diary remaining behind. (Final sentence: “I’m having a cup of cof”)

Matheson’s framework gives a richer meaning to the gimmick, even a moral: recognize that wanting less of the messy stuff of life means wanting less of your own existence. It’s a cautionary tale about getting what you wish for, but since the caution is fantastical, it’s really just a reminder: look more clearly at your wishes.

The Rod Serling version does away with any such overt wishing. These particular three guys weren’t wishers — they were just minding their masculine American business, breaking sound barriers and whatnot, under orders from Uncle Sam. Any cautionary moral is thoroughly buried in their subconscious, underneath and behind their commitment to that system of values. That’s the Rod Serling way.

But perhaps for storytelling purposes that way is actually preferable. It’s truer to the nature of dream not to know one’s wish consciously, or put it into words.

Because “careful what you wish for” does apply, somewhere below the surface. It still feels like a “careful what you wish for” story, even though there’s no onscreen wishing.

What is it, then, that these three men have ventured, that dooms them to erasure? I’d say it’s ultimately something similar to the frustrated writer’s desire for a simpler world. Implicit in their masculine American military ordinariness is their willed dedication to that way of being, as an illusion of order. They followed orders and flew into space and into danger; someone needed them to do it, so they did it, ’cause that’s what men do. So they want to believe.

Look how conspicuously the episode shows them going through the motions of 1. JOSHING ONE ANOTHER and 2. DRINKING BEER and 3. HITTING ON WOMEN. On the face of it, that’s all just there to serve on prime-time TV as some “normality,” as something to get broken down by the coming paranormality — but that’s exactly my point: even the mass audience subconsciously agrees that this tight concept of “normality” is cruisin’ for a bruisin’.

These guys want to believe in their particular world of conventions, a world simpler than the one we actually live in, because they want life to run smoothly. And so the Great Irony Beast makes it so. “You want to comfortably know your place in relation to everyone and everything; you want to just get along with the world and fit in? Then I guess you don’t want to be you. That can be arranged.”

(This is what I take to be the meaning of Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, too.)

Another thing Rod has altered is the title. “And When the Sky Was Opened.” What does this title mean?

One guy on IMDB says it’s a reference to Acts 10:11 (in which Peter has a vision of a picnic blanket descending from the heavens with all the animals of the world on it, which he is encouraged to eat — no, really) because in one translation (not King James, for what it’s worth) it includes the phrase “and he saw the sky opened up,” which is as close as the bible ever comes to the exact words “And When the Sky Was Opened.”

Another guy on IMDB says it’s a reference to the line “When the pie was opened” from “Sing a Song of Sixpence” (again with eating animals!)

These both seem extremely unlikely to me, not least because they have absolutely nothing to do with the content of the episode.

As best I can tell, the title is simply an embarrassing Serling stab at “ominous, bookish, biblical-quote-style resonance” without any actual biblical quote to sustain it. Sure sounds like some kind of awesome literary reference, right? Good enough for government work.

Here are some other good grown-up-sounding titles for anything:

“For As The Book Was Sealed And All Looked Upon It”
“Else He Too Be Forsaken In That Land”
“As Ever Unto Little Children”
“Or When In Gardens Green We Tarry”

These titles are especially well suited for stories that take place on Mars, but don’t let that constrain you. Knock yourself out. These titles are offered under a Creative Commons license, etc. etc.

Music is by the fairly esteemed Leonard Rosenman. This is his only Twilight Zone score; I assume the choice not to return — if it was a choice — was his rather than Rod’s, because this is very good work indeed.

Rosenman is sometimes noted for his relatively highbrow approach to the Hollywood style, and while this episode isn’t anything too ostentatious, it definitely has an angular modernist feel that makes a satisfying contrast with Herrmann’s minimalist/Romantic approach. (This points the way that the series as a whole is going to go, toward the bizarre-modern of the 60s, typified by the second (more famous) main title music.)

I thought maybe I’d just link to one standout cue, but the entire track is only 12 minutes and it’s all pretty good, I think. So enjoy.

I happen to have some info on these scores, so heck, I’ll share it. I like thinking about the real place that this stuff came from; maybe you will too.

Composed and conducted by Leonard Rosenman.
Recorded November 23, 1959, 2–5 PM, Goldwyn Studios.

12 players:
Sylvia Ruderman, flute [no relation (?)]
Charles Gentry and Mitchell Lurie, clarinets
Sinclair Lott, horn
Robert DiVall, trumpet
Frank Flynn and Ralph Hansell, percussion
Verlye Mills, harp
Ray Turner, piano and celeste
Israel Baker, violin
George Neikrug, cello [still alive!]
Robert Stone, bass

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March 24, 2016

Best Original Screenplay* 1948: The Search

Screenplay1948-title
Screenplay1948-creditScreenplay1948-credit2

Winner in the category of WRITING (Motion Picture Story) at the 21st Academy Awards, presented March 24, 1949 at Academy Award Theater.

The other nominees were:

Louisiana Story – Frances and Robert Flaherty
The Naked City – Malvin Wald
Red River – Borden Chase
The Red Shoes – Emeric Pressburger

The Search was also a nominee in the category of WRITING (Screenplay); it lost to the adapted screenplay of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. (The Search was the only film nominated in both categories.)

Screenplay is not accessible, to my knowledge.

First lines in film:

– Get them out as quickly as you can, but be careful with them; they’ve had a very rough trip.
– Yes, ma’am.

BROOM Hooray! We’re back on track, everybody!

BETH Sort of.

BROOM This was basically “Son of Marie-Louise.” It was by the same author, and it was the same weird thing, somewhere in between being a real story and a just-for-the-sake-of-depicting-important-issues story.

ADAM I found this much more affecting than Marie-Louise.

BROOM Were you annoyed that BETH and I sort of switched into making-fun-of-it mode, toward the end?

ADAM Well, I was sort of tearing up toward the end. I thought it was very sad. Even though it had all these clunky elements, it was still very affecting.

BETH I actually was crying in the beginning, and didn’t want either of you to know.

BROOM I knew.

ADAM We knew.

BROOM But I was moved also. I was moved basically until he started learning English, and then it became…

BETH Some other kind of movie.

BROOM Yeah. It didn’t work for me anymore.

BETH It was this weird combination of didactic, Disney-style educational film, mixed with these really moving, poignant scenes of shell-shocked kids being hustled through the system, which were probably pretty accurate. It made me really think about what that was like, and I hadn’t thought about what that was like. And I thought about your grandmother, and what these people went through.

BROOM She was a little older. But I felt the same way for the first half: there was something effective about its being in between — just like Marie-Louise was, but even moreso — in between a documentary and a fiction… kind of a transparently shoddy fiction. I thought it was such a strange and interesting effect that the movie essentially started with the boy running away from a documentary about him. There was a narrator, like a real documentary: “And now the children get in these trucks, but they’re very afraid…” And he couldn’t take it any more and ran away. I found that affecting. I was having the same thoughts you were: “Oh, right, of course it’s traumatizing. Of course these people are ruined for life.”

BETH Yeah. These kids can’t trust anyone, even kind adults, because all they know is the opposite.

BROOM It was striking to me: I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie about a terrible event like a war or a genocide that’s purely about the trauma in the aftermath. The bad thing is no longer happening, but you’re living in a traumatized world.

ADAM Well, Sophie’s Choice.

BROOM But that’s about flashbacks, and this was really exclusively a movie about coping in the present. Yes, I guess Sophie’s Choice is also about “can you find love again, can you find meaning again, if you’re a traumatized person,” but what I was gonna say is — I’ve seen devastated Germany and France in so many World War II movies — Saving Private Ryan and the like — but somehow, because it was shot in such a pedestrian way on the real locations, and because we were in this mindset of thinking about trauma, I was really struck by it in a fresh way: “Wow, places that were normal are now just a crazy landscape of rubble.”

BETH That’s what Germany, Year Zero is. It’s also about a boy wandering around rubble. It looks so much like this, but it has a different tone.

ADAM I found it weirdly disturbing to see all the children running away from Americans. I wanted to be like “No no no, you misunderstood!”

BETH Right! But that’s how the Americans reacted too. That moved me.

ADAM The Americans weren’t really very… I mean, Montgomery Clift was like a child whisperer — but the matron was just doing her best. She didn’t have the touch.

BETH She did not have the touch. She was like, “Say something nice to them. Because I can’t.”

ADAM “Her parents were gassed.” [the matron, without a hint of sadness:] “I see!”

BROOM It was a point being made, in the scheme of the movie, that she and her male equivalent were emotional clods.

ADAM Were you supposed to see her as having been redeemed and softened by the end?

BROOM No.

BETH You don’t think so? I do.

ADAM I think the actress just wasn’t skilled enough to convince you of that.

BETH I think you’re supposed to see her as well-intentioned, doing her job as best she can…

BROOM Yeah, I think, as ADAM said, she just didn’t have the touch; she’s just one of those people, and such people still do good works in the world.

ADAM The actress was too kindly at the beginning and too brusque at the end to really show the character arc, but I think she was meant to be, like, a tough cookie in the system who softened. But maybe not.

BROOM Well, I think the logic of the “dramatic arc” only applies so far. I feel like this movie — just like Marie-Louise — was trying to be very open about the fact that its function was just to help you think about a thing in the real world. “We’re only telling a story insofar as that’s a good way of getting across the documentary content.” That’s what it seemed like to me. So I thought the matron character, and the dumb guy who was like “Ah! I see! This boy is afraid of punishment!” — the only point was, like: “Sometimes, in the happy friendly world, kids still encounter people who seem scary to them.” And that was it. It wasn’t supposed to be about what happens to these particular characters. That’s how I felt the whole movie: storytelling as a way of getting at reality; as opposed to storytelling as wonderful in itself. And I think that’s why I felt done with it after a certain point. When we were just in the anticipation-of-the-ending phase. Because this story was never a real journey, to me, it was just a scheme.

ADAM The pacing was very slow in a way that — I don’t know if that was just the forties, or the style of this movie in particular — but there were several minutes of just jeeps, or driving…

BETH “Why are we watching so much of this dinner party?”

ADAM The movie had a real surprising willingness to just let you listen to foreign languages and have no idea what was going on.

BETH I actually liked that about it, because I feel like that established a sense of realism. “Oh, this is what it would be like if I were there.”

BROOM I wondered whether that might be just that we were renting it on Youtube and maybe that kind of subtitling doesn’t come on automatically. But then I thought, “well, it’s working for me as it is.”

BETH No, Marie-Louise was like that too.

BROOM But that was a foreign-language film.

BETH Yeah, but sometimes there were other languages within it.

BROOM Well, Europeans are more likely to know other languages.

ADAM There was nothing you needed to understand. Everything got translated for you, ultimately.

BROOM Yeah, you’re right. It worked so well this way it was probably intended. And it was suitable since it gave you the experience of being one of these kids who doesn’t understand the language being spoken to them, most of the time.

BETH Right.

ADAM Next time they should make it from the perspective of the boy, where you can’t understand any of the words until two-thirds of the way through.

BETH Until you’re looking at pictures of —

BROOM Umbrellas and ostriches.

ADAM Tomatoes. “Pretty girl!” Montgomery Clift did look a lot like Tom Cruise, and he did have that wisacre-knucklehead “I’m sure of myself” charm of Risky Business Tom Cruise. He was really hot.

BROOM From the very beginning I thought, “Oh, he’s like someone.” After about ten minutes I thought, “Owen Wilson.” But later I thought, “No, it’s Tom Cruise, because Tom Cruise acts exactly like this, too.” The whole personal presentational style and demeanor.

BETH How he carries himself.

BROOM What he does with his face, his manner. You said earlier that he’s like a child whisperer, but actually — knowing in advance it was going to be about Montgomery Clift thawing this traumatized kid…

ADAM You thought of Rainman?

BROOM No. I thought it was indeed gonna be a “child whisperer” movie, and then I was struck by the fact that this American, “Steve,” was not actually particularly attuned to the kid; he was just a basically nice guy.

BETH He was also doing his best.

BROOM Right. He didn’t have a special kind of soft touch. He was just the kind of person where you can sense that he’s friendly. Even if he says the wrong thing, and yells at you when you say you want to find your mother. That was the moment when I really detached from the movie. It was obviously just to draw things out.

ADAM Even though I knew that they would find each other, I was legitimately worried that he would be taken to America and never find her. I didn’t actually think that was gonna happen, but it was still stressful.

BROOM So did you guys not share with me the sensation that we were a couple meters further away from this movie than we would be from most movies, as an audience?

BETH I did share that sensation, yeah. My impression of Montgomery Clift prior to this was that he was really intense, always kind of overplaying his roles, but here he was doing what the job called for, which was to be slightly dopey — you know, a normal guy, instead of an intense, suffering soul. And that impressed me, because I didn’t think that was part of his ability.

ADAM I can’t even think of anything else he was in.

BROOM What have you seen him in, BETH?

BETH Red River and something else, with Elizabeth Taylor.

BROOM We can look this up. A Place in the Sun?

BETH Yes.

BROOM I had his Wikipedia entry open because I just wanted to read this one thing into the conversation: “Clift’s second movie was The Search. Clift was unhappy with the quality of the script, and rewrote most of it himself. The movie was awarded a screenwriting Academy Award, but the original writers were credited.”

BETH He rewrote most of it himself?!

BROOM I assume it just means his part. Which is probably why we were scoffing at the absurdity of the dialogue in other scenes, and less so his scenes.

BETH Yeah. Interesting. How old was he?

BROOM Twenty-seven or -eight, depending on when it was filmed. He turned twenty-eight in 1948.

BETH So part of what I found problematic about the matron was her acting, but I also think she wasn’t given very good stuff to work with. Which contrasts with how good the mother was, because I think she also wasn’t given great stuff to work with, but she sold it. Also the British guy who ripped the vestments off the kid.

ADAM “Oh! You’re not a little Catholic boy!”

BROOM “Oh I see! That’s not his real name!”

ADAM That was still a heartbreaking scene, where the mother has to wait there excitedly.

BETH We had to suffer already knowing what was going to happen. It’s super-manipulative, in a way that isn’t okay.

BROOM That scene actually didn’t work for me. Because this obviously isn’t her son — we the audience know it and the writers know that we know it, because we know very well that our boy didn’t sign up for the choir when he first arrived — so when we’re watching her waiting in this room, we don’t feel suspense, we just feel like, “Ughhhh….”

BETH We feel dread.

BROOM Yeah, just dismay that we’re about to watch her get bad news and be sad. They make us sit with that for a while. I thought, “Does this map on to some emotion that’s relevant to this subject matter?” I’m not sure it does. It’s not awareness-raising in any real way. So that didn’t really work for me.

BETH But the whole movie is manipulative, in that it’s giving false hope to all of these people in this moment who might still have unresolved situations with their own relatives.

BROOM Well, it’s 1948 by the time this comes out.

BETH I guess by then most things have been resolved.

BROOM In fact, the movie was pretty clear that in real life, the mother would almost certainly be dead. It was only miraculously that she happened to be alive.

ADAM This movie doesn’t really shed any tears for Dr. Malik or the daughter.

BETH It sure doesn’t!

BROOM When they said that the father and sister were deported and he was left with his mother, I was so sure that the mother was going to die and it was going to be about finding the father and sister. But it was the other way around.

ADAM “Dr. Malik was known all over town because he was a good doctor.” Then there’s six minutes of them playing violin.

BETH That was a needlessly long scene.

BROOM No, that worked for me. The point was that he came from a place of culture, safety, beauty, and this magical sound of classical music that you’re never going to hear again. I felt like that was worth something.

ADAM Until you hear that angelic children’s choir…

BETH And you think maybe he was drawn to those voices. I think maybe that’s what we were supposed to think.

BROOM No, I could tell those voices weren’t Czech.

ADAM Very little actually seemed Czech in this movie.

BROOM He looked Czech, to me.

BETH The French kid at the beginning who was his friend was a good actor. I was struck by him prior to anyone saying anything. There’s a lot of pure cinema in this, which I appreciated — like the whole scene where they were running away.

BROOM You mean dialogue-free?

BETH Yeah.

BROOM I thought maybe you meant using real-world people and locations.

BETH No.

BROOM My opinion about Richard Schweizer is that his whole attitude, which is a very old-fashioned attitude — the fundamental idea of it kinda works for me: you admit that what you’re doing is propaganda, and then you tell a very schematic story — I think within that premise, Schweizer actually has good ideas. Like the picture of the dogs on the wall, that’s affecting; it works for me. Or, like I said, the scene of music-making at home. All these things, which are essentially filmic ideas, are good. But then the dialogue is like… it’s like what my grandmother would write. I feel like my grandmother had this old-world dramatic heart, where she would very much identify with the idea that the kid looks at the picture of the doggies on the wall and that means “mother” to him. She would have thought of that, and she would equally have thought of dialogue like “Oh dear, what is this that you’ve done!” This stilted, melodramatic attitude toward dialogue. I can believe that Montgomery Clift rewrote all the words that came out of his mouth, but he didn’t rewrite the actual content of the scenes, because they still served those weird functions.

BETH Yeah. There were some weird scenes.

BROOM When the kid is like, “I want to find my mother!” And Steve says “Just come have dinner! Go to your room!” That didn’t make any sense for the character.

BETH “Jeeps are from America! I am from America! I’ll be right back!”

ADAM Did that boy serve any function other than to cry and make Karel realize he didn’t have a mother?

BETH No.

BROOM To be a wretched American. I didn’t enjoy his presence at all. Or his mother’s.

BETH Yeah, she was weird.

BROOM It seemed like amateurish actors for a lot of the parts. Except for Monty. I can imagine they budgeted more for that role and for the mother.

BETH And that guy, his army buddy who’s in Rear Window and a lot of other stuff.

BROOM That seems to be Wendell Corey.

BETH He was a solid sort of “If I’m here, things are gonna be fine” kind of guy.

[digression about Wendell Corey’s political career &c.]

BETH Do you have any final thoughts?

BROOM Before we wrap up I want to make sure we all talk about this as writing, since that’s the project. Oh, and let me establish: this is the year in which it starts to get skoovy about what award category to follow.

BETH Are you gonna write S-K-O-O-V-Y?

ADAM S-K-O-O-V-I-E.

BROOM If I do transcribe it, I would go with the Y. A “skoovie” with an I-E would be a noun. You would put it on your mantelpiece.

ADAM You affix it to the back of your boat.

[digression about Boaty McBoatface]

BROOM Right, so, this year there was no “Best Original Screenplay,” there was just “Best Screenplay” and “Best Story.” This movie was the winner of “Best Story,” which we went with because “Best Screenplay” went to an adaptation, and we’re trying to follow the concept of “original screenplay.” Of course, there had been a “Best Story” category all along, so, yes, maybe we should have started with that. But there’s no backsies in this game. So this movie was the winner of “Best Story.” Do you feel that it had… the best story?

ADAM I think that the story will probably linger in our minds for longer than the writing will.

BROOM For sure. I don’t remember a single word from Marie-Louise, but I remember the gist.

BETH I don’t remember a lot of Marie-Louise, I have to say.

ADAM They were in the Alps. And they had to leave.

BROOM She was hiding upstairs and knocked a ball down the stairs and had to reveal herself.

BETH I remember that, but I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t told me. I remember the beginning the most, where they were in the shelter.

BROOM It was really the same movie: she’s a traumatized girl, and then she comes to live with sweet Swiss people.

BETH I think it’s a story that’s worth telling.

ADAM It’s The Secret Garden.

BROOM There was also a whole section about how the people who worked at the textile mill were going to work overtime for the sake of the kids, somehow. Sort of the communist section of the movie.

ADAM Do you think this is where Steven Spielberg got the idea to identify one child in a concentration camp by their garment?

BROOM No. But during the bloodhound scene, I thought, “If Steven Spielberg saw this, he’d say ‘That’s good! Use that.'” Where the kid runs away from the dinner table, feeling alone without his real family, to go look at a picture of loving doggies. Come on! That’s gold.

BETH But that scene wasn’t well directed.

BROOM I thought the shot of him looking up at the picture was the right shot.

BETH But the kid’s reaction wasn’t directed well. It was very exaggerated.

ADAM That’s why they needed Jonathan Lipnicki.

BETH He needed Steven Spielberg, to guide him.

BROOM I want to throw out this thought I had at the beginning: art that is made to serve the political conscience of a moment, in that moment seems the most profound, and in every other moment seems the most transitory. And this in itself reveals the falseness of our idea of what “profound emotions” are. That was my thought, almost immediately, when the movie started with, “You know this just happened in Europe; now we’re all soberly going to the cinema to honor it.” And that section actually ended up being moving to me. But I was thinking, “What makes someone pay to sit down and watch this?” I guess if someone told them it was good. But I feel like now, we go to see The Hurt Locker or something… well, I didn’t see that, so I don’t know…

ADAM Hotel Rwanda.

BROOM That’s the classic “no one actually wanted to watch it” movie. I’m talking more about these American military venture movies that get made all the time. For example: because I want to use my BAM membership, I’m totally going to go see the drone warfare ethical debate movie with Helen Mirren shouting into the phone. It looked like crap from the preview, but then it got pretty good reviews. But I thought, “Movies like that get good reviews because people get really high on this idea that if something is in the media, is politically important, and has some kind of ethical element to it, it’s deep.” But then after time passes — we had to rent The Search off of Youtube because it’s never going to be released on DVD; no one needs this anymore.

BETH But, at least at the beginning, in the first twenty or thirty minutes, I thought, “I’m so glad I’m seeing this!” Because there’s no way I would if we weren’t doing this project. But later my attitude shifted a little bit. I didn’t need to see this, really. But I’m happy to have seen that beginning. It moved me and made me think about the war in a way that I hadn’t before.

BROOM I concur with that whole paragraph. I had the same experience.

ADAM We’ll see in a year’s time which we remember more of: this, or The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer.

BETH This, I think.

BROOM I guess what I was saying is: it seems like this is more profound than — well, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer isn’t a good counter-example. You know, say, Mary Poppins. It might seem like Mary Poppins is about nothing, whereas this is about children in the war. But actually the function of art is not to be about —

ADAM I’m reading Emma right now, on my phone, and it’s not really about anything; it’s about a couple of families in an English country village. And I was reading articles today about Emma and “simple-minded criticism that it’s not a profound enough subject to be art,” but of course that’s the whole point; because the subject is unprepossessing is what makes it psychologically compelling.

BROOM I wouldn’t say it’s “because.”

ADAM You’re right, it’s not “because” — because War and Peace is also psychologically compelling.

BROOM I know I praised the movie for being only half-fictional, earlier, so maybe it sounds like I’m being hypocritical, but I think it goes together: this movie felt like it was serving a documentary function, to me, rather than a more characteristically “artistic” function. And I’m happy for that, in a way, I feel like this is a nice way to convey things. It’s sort of a spiritual documentary; “think about this type of situation; we’re not going to talk about specifics.” But that’s a different experience from watching a profound work of art.

BETH I feel like it had a lot in common with a Disney cartoon. It had a message; it wasn’t subtle about it, it didn’t have a gentle touch. It wanted to get a specific point across. It was predictable in the way that cartoons are.

BROOM You’re talking about Mickey Mouse cartoons, or edutainment cartoons?

BETH I’m talking about Disney feature films; even contemporary ones, though I’m not sure I would draw parallels with Zootopia…

ADAM But like Lilo and Stitch.

BETH Yeah, or Finding Nemo or something like that.

ADAM Yeah, it had a Finding Nemo quality.

BROOM The plot was the same, sort of.

BETH It’s like, “You know she’s going to find her son, right?” And of course she is.

ADAM What’s another movie where one character is searching for the other character and they just miss each other, like three times?

BETH Well, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, where he’s looking for his bike and he passes it on the highway…

ADAM What’s that movie where one character goes over the hill right when the other one’s coming over?

BROOM That happens all the time! It happens so all the time that when it happened in this movie, it didn’t even register. It didn’t make even a single tick on the dramatic earthquake sensor in my head. We’re watching this to think about kids in Europe, and the story stuff is just the same old stuff. That close-call thing probably happened on the vaudeville stage all the time. My grandmother knew about that. “Oh, I’m afraid I must be going, I can’t stay any longer, Mrs. Smith! Goodbye!” “Goodbye!” “Ah, I’ve looked everywhere in the city for my wife!”

[we read the New York Times review]

BROOM So do you think that praise is through war-colored glasses?

BETH Yes.

ADAM Clearly.

BETH And how could it not be? Everyone was affected by this big thing.

BROOM I’m just suspicious of that. Even as I was affected by parts of this movie, I’m suspicious about that impulse to be moved by the thing that one is supposed to be moved by in this historical moment.

BETH I don’t think it was because he was supposed to be, I think he just naturally was because he too was traumatized, in whatever way.

BROOM But when you heard that they were making — what was that movie called?

ADAM Flight 93.

BROOM Exactly! When you heard they were making that, didn’t you feel something like “I get what you’re doing, but…”

BETH Yeah. And that’s why no one saw that movie.

ADAM Lots of people saw that movie.

BETH Well. It’s not like a movie that anyone rents now. And I guess The Search isn’t a movie that anyone rents now.

BROOM We could do Flight 93 in a double feature with Hotel Rwanda.

BETH A masochistic afternoon.

ADAM You could do those with Team America: World Police.

Last lines in film:

– Karel-e!
– Maminka!

Screenplay1948-end

A complete radio broadcast of the 21st Academy Awards is known to exist somewhere out there, but I can’t find it online. Luckily, there’s also an archival film version, apparently complete, uploaded by the Academy here in what seems to be its entirety.

That’s right! This is the first one you can really sit back and watch like it’s Oscar night! Throw a party! Break out the hors d’oeuvres, the themed drinks, and place your bets on who’s gonna win!

Or you can just watch the salient clip for our purposes:

Very clearly, there is no acceptance speech. But who is the man who claims the Oscars? Deborah Kerr seems to be telling us that “––– will accept the award for the film.” Unfortunately the orchestra seems to believe the award has gone to King Kong so the name isn’t audible. (Something like “Ingdar Penninfeld.”)

(Later, when Ivan Jandl wins a special award for best juvenile performance, director Fred Zinnemann accepts, and we can see that he is clearly not the same man who accepted the writing award.)

Give it your best shot, everyone. This must be resolved.

Comments (2)
March 15, 2016

Disney Canon #55: Zootopia (2016)

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[This screenshot and the one at the bottom of the page are from the trailer, not the actual film. They’ll be replaced whenever the next entry in this series goes up. (The Big Hero 6 placeholder images have just now been upgraded to the real thing.)]

Full spoilers (and other kinds of spoilage) throughout. The reader is firmly advised to have seen Zootopia — now in theaters — before proceeding.

ADAM I thought that was high-class all the way. Solid quality, and pleasing. I’m happy to elaborate on that.

BETH I also liked it very much. I don’t know where I’m landing in terms of how it falls in the canon, but I was really into it. Those are my opening thoughts; we will all elaborate.

BROOM I had a very complicated reaction; I’m not sure I can make a one-sentence opening statement. I wanted to hash it out in conversation. I don’t know what it adds up to in one sentence. And maybe no reaction to a movie is really one sentence. So I’m not going to fake like I have one sentence.

ADAM That’s interesting, because I felt uniformly positively about it. I thought the characters were compelling and inspirational without being one-note, and I thought it was appropriately subtly topical, and it was really beautiful to look at and had a lot of imaginative jokes on the main theme. And I also think that a detective story was a good peg to hang it on, because everyone can find a detective story engaging for two hours, even kids. It wasn’t too complicated for kids to follow but it wasn’t insultingly straightforward either. It was more interesting than just “little girl moves to the big city.” That’s what I was afraid it was going to be, but it was more than that.

BETH Did you predict who the bad guy was?

ADAM I did only once it became clear that the predators were being framed. Because there was only one “prey” in the whole movie, other than Judy.

BROOM I guessed who it was when they got to the drug lab, and not before.

ADAM Yes, for me it was when she said “but who’s been framing all these predators?” which was right before they walked into the drug lab.

BETH I’ll just own up to not guessing. Then when I saw it who it was, I thought, “oh, duh.”

BROOM But I’m proud to say that I did guess, much earlier, that the victims were all suffering from the drug effects of the plant that she had elaborately named.

BETH I also knew it was a drug, but I didn’t put it together with the plant.

ADAM Yeah, if I had gone back and made a lineup of all of the things in the movie that we hadn’t used yet… It was pretty good about using everything it introduced. Even the sloth got reused, in a way that I found pleasing. All right, Broom, so what were your complicated feelings?

BETH Do you have ideological issues?

BROOM I guess you could frame it that way. I’m kind of surprised that you guys don’t immediately know what would be complicated about my response to this; I assumed that everyone would intuitively agree on what was complicated about this movie. But I guess not. The complication has to do with the purported topicality of it — the messaging of it — as it relates to the premise of the anthropomorphic world. Which is not a premise they invented for this movie, it’s a longstanding premise. They tried to both interrogate it and its metaphors, and also keep running with it. I didn’t know how to reconcile — and I was hoping to try to work this out now, unless it’s a just waste of your time because you really didn’t have any of these issues — but I didn’t know how to reconcile the message of it —

ADAM The message being “We are more than our biological origins, and you can be anything you want when you grow up, and don’t stereotype”?

BROOM Yeah, more or less. I took the message of it just to be a standard contemporary anti-bigotry message, as you’d find in any number of editorials and medium.com essays.

ADAM All right, so, on the one hand…

BROOM Well, wait, before we dig into “what Broom thought” — You personally did not have issues in this direction? It really worked for you, or you didn’t “go there,” or… ?

ADAM Well, yeah — though I’m not saying that I’m going to disagree with your view once you articulate it.

BROOM Yeah, but I think that an unarticulated ease with something should usually be left intact. I don’t want to claim that you ought to question what you didn’t question, if it just felt right to you. The important thing is, to you, it didn’t feel like a problem? Because I didn’t come up with my problem to try to be smart; I felt uncomfortable.

ADAM No, I didn’t feel uncomfortable.

BETH I think I’m somewhere in between you. I didn’t feel uncomfortable, but it was also sort of on my mind: “What do I actually think about this?” Like when she was in the press conference saying cringeworthy things, I thought, “well, wait…” This is always my problem with movies: when I’m taken by them, when I’m wrapped up in the watching of them, I’m not really outside of them enough to talk about what I think about their ideologies. “I was just into the movie! What do you want??”

BROOM That’s why I wanted to pause the conversation before I start articulating this further. I think that if a movie worked for you, allowed you to get wrapped up in it, that means that whatever ideology we try to identify in the movie — if we identify it accurately — it’s something that your subconscious is comfortable taking on. I can say for myself that within the first five minutes of the movie — when they explained “This is how our world works: predators used to be predators, but not anymore! Now we live together!” and then they cut to different animals in an audience together, and one type of animal is being “a hick” — I just felt it, I felt immediately very uncomfortable.

BETH Because even the upending of those stereotypes — addressing them at all — is uncomfortable?

ADAM That hick fox — he gets to come back and be a pastry chef.

BROOM Again, I don’t want this to all be about the way I happen to end up expressing it… but I guess I’m really hearing that you guys didn’t have that experience at that moment. So I guess for me the issue is: we only want to watch movies where different animals are different kinds of people because that feels true about the world. And insofar as it feels true, that’s what we — from an ideological standpoint — would call “bigotry.” Now, I personally am very uncomfortable with the public rhetoric around bigotry because I think it doesn’t acknowledge the ways in which that perception of the world is natural and inevitable…

ADAM Natural and inevitable that what?

BROOM We can’t deprogram ourselves by deliberately “upending” these perceptions. Natural and inevitable that people experience other people as, essentially, different kinds of animals. A slow-moving person at the DMV seems like they’re from the slow-moving species of person. That’s a psychological reality, one that cartoons jibe with. At least for me. Do you disagree with that?

ADAM No, sure, I mean, Speedy Gonzales… But the part I’m not following is, what part of that seems uncomfortable to overlay on the way people are with each other?

BROOM Boy, so you really don’t feel it the way I do. Okay, let me see if I can formulate this…

ADAM If it’s too complicated to unpack, we don’t have to.

BROOM I can do it! I’m just reluctant to create a conversation that seems to be about the words I use to describe it, because for me it’s an intuitional thing, and I would rather you counter what I’m saying with your intuitions. But I guess your intuitions were copacetic.

ADAM My intuition was that all Disney movies have messages; in recent years they’ve all tended to be politically progressive messages. If you think about The Lion King as an early, ham-fisted politically progressive message, and then compare it to something like this…

BROOM I consider The Lion King to be the turning point, toward deliberate messaging.

ADAM But they all have deliberate messages. You know, Dumbo‘s message is “believe in yourself.”

BROOM But I think a refrain in our discussions about many of those earlier Disney movies was that while we might pick apart politically incorrect things that occur in them, probably the creators never consciously thought about those things. Those movies were a revealing of subconscious assumptions, because the artists were just using their intuitions to work out what would make a good story. There was a relative lack of deliberate philosophizing, which is exactly what allowed us to see the various stereotypes and subconscious ideologies. Whereas since The Lion King, it really feels like they run everything through a conscious censor, to make sure it makes sense, and then try to say something deliberately.

ADAM They’re not all expressly political. The message of Lilo and Stitch was “Ohana means Family, and Family means no one gets left behind,” which is not a political slogan per se. But here, what I appreciated about it was that it was a little smarter than The Lion King. The heroine has her own unexamined prejudices, and that creates problems; but she overcomes them, she’s not a bad person. And you identify with her stereotypes at the beginning, because the fox is shifty, he is a kind of con-man, but as you get to know him, it turns out not only is there a backstory that explains that, but also he’s so much more than that. It’s easy to identify with the progress of the hero, and that makes it a little more impactful. That’s why I didn’t feel uncomfortable with it. And I didn’t feel that they were essentializing any of the animals…

BROOM You didn’t? “Essentializing” is exactly the word. Why else were any of those characters assigned to those animals, if not the essentialization — racialization — geneticization — of personality traits?

ADAM But the villain was a sheep! And there was that hammy gay tiger who loved Gazelle! And —

BROOM But those are just a few foreground story-inversions of the actual operative premise of the anthropomorphic world. The whole idea of Zootopia — when we first heard about this movie two years ago, we thought, “A city of animals? That hardly even counts as a premise!” It’s just such a basic, ground-level thing, in cartoons. It goes back to Aesop. Why would we ever tell a story about a talking animal? Because certain people seem like that kind of animal. But what do we mean when we say people “seem like” an animal? We mean something very subjective, an impression, which nonetheless we might share with our whole community of peers, to whom it seems equally intuitive. Like, guess what, hicks with a Southern accent seem like they might well be a different species from me! And all my friends agree, it does kinda seem like hicks are a different species. So hey, you know what would be a great way to represent them in a cartoon: as a literally different species. That feels intuitive and satisfying. So then this movie says “We’re going to actually talk about this head-on,” but…

ADAM But for the most part, it wasn’t like all the rabbits only talked to other rabbits. I don’t think she even saw any other rabbits in the city.

BROOM I mean: what do the predators eat? — in this scenario where we’re claiming that they’re both actually and specifically predators, and not, at the same time.

ADAM They didn’t get into that I assume because it would be uncomfortable for human audiences, thinking about the sources of our food.

BROOM The metaphor is that minorities who cause fear in the majority because of stereotypes are depicted here as “predators,” but in this world they have none of the actual traits that predators have — except for the ones that are funny for throwaway jokes in the course of a scene. That all puts us in a very uncomfortable place. If we want to see each other as equals who should be treated equally, the premise of our depiction cannot be that we’re different species based on our different personalities or social roles.

ADAM I understand that, but… they were all mammals! They didn’t really get into their essential species natures. This is the first one I can think of where there was no love story, and I guess that was deliberate, because that would be a whole other level of uncomfortable conversations, if there had been any kind of sex.

BROOM How is what you just said not an expression of exactly the kind of stuff that the movie was ostensibly telling us to get beyond? Are the fox and the rabbit in the movie “just people,” who are essentially equal and can be in love? Or are they essentially different, in a “fox vs. rabbit” kind of way? In which case, what does that correspond to?

ADAM It doesn’t map on perfectly to human society, because they are essentially different, which is why there were no cross-species couples in the movie, because rabbits can’t mate with foxes.

BROOM Right.

ADAM But on the other hand, the movie’s not saying “therefore people are different species.” That’s just carrying the metaphor too far.

BROOM Then where does the metaphor end? What is the metaphor, in your mind?

ADAM The metaphor is that, like… I don’t think it does, nor did it feel to me like it — It neither intended to nor unintentionally landed on “different types of people are different species.”

BROOM You don’t think that’s the metaphor?

ADAM No. My mind didn’t go there while I was watching it.

BROOM I think your mind didn’t go there because that’s been the subconscious premise of all anthropomorphic cartoons, forever. Like, if there’s a Sidney Greenstreet character in a cartoon, the huge crime boss that you go into the back room to meet, and of course he’s a hippopotamus because hippopotamuses are really big — it works just like a caricature does, it says “Let’s admit that our response to this ‘type,’ when we talk about ‘types,’ is essentializing.” When they talk about “typecasting” in Hollywood, they’re talking about the fact that we see each other with these prejudiced eyes that are reponsive to superficial things. And a cartoon that shows such things as different kinds of animals, and has fun with it, is basically an embrace of that aspect of our nature. Which I think is good, because I’m very wary of all the rhetoric now about seeing past race. I think that you can’t deliberately see past what you are seeing, and cartoons show us that. So Zootopia was a cartoon in that spirit, that nonetheless was — on a storytelling and philosophical level — trying to say “Here’s what we’re gonna do about it.” I felt like the cartoon itself reveals why we can’t just think our way out of it, “nice” our way out of it. Here’s a cartoon where we’re watching a rabbit with big eyes getting beat up by a fox, and you can’t deny that the scene makes sense to people.

ADAM Right, but then a half hour later, you find out that the fox, when he was eight, got beat up by a bunch of rabbits.

BROOM Different fox, but yes.

ADAM And did that feel unreasonable?

BROOM That was in the context of “learning,” in a very deliberate way. That felt to me like “this one bit of the subconscious has for the moment risen into the view of the consciousness, so what do we say about it?” But we’re still surrounded by a sea of the subconscious, and the subconscious says: “the world is a city of different kinds of animals that are hilariously different from each other, and there’s a sight gag for each one.” That’s the unexamined ground-level. Then, yes, ever since The Lion King, there’s also this additional conscious element that purports to be an examination of it.

BETH I’m trying to think about how I would see it if I were a child, what I would take away from it. And I originally was angry with the parents for being so — you know: “We can’t expand our boundaries. Learn to be complacent; that’s the way to have a happy life.” I think rejecting that has been a message in Disney movies all along: “Push your boundaries! See what you can be! You can do anything!”

ADAM “I wanna see what’s over that ridge!”

BROOM Yeah, or as the lyric had it in this movie, “I wanna try everything!”

BETH And I think that’s a good message. And I like how it kept showing that she was put in these fear-inducing situations and refused to succumb to them. The race stuff is more complicated. Because I think what it wants me to take away — which is sort of what Sesame Street wanted me to take away — is that the world is made up of all different types of people, all different types of creatures, and you don’t necessarily know anything about them just by looking at them. You have to spend time with everyone and get to know them. And I think that’s what it was trying to say. You can’t make a judgment before you know what someone is about. Very basic kids’ stuff, but not at all offensive, I think. It’s not like I’m not hearing what you guys are saying, but I think — as far as messaging goes — it did it with a pretty light touch, in an unobjectionable way.

ADAM Yeah, I didn’t come away thinking “Idris Elba is a water buffalo with whom I cannot mate.” Although I get what you’re saying. It hadn’t occurred to me to think about it in those terms, but.

BROOM So, during the pivotal press conference scene, when she says, “well, there might be a biological component…”

BETH I wanted her to say “This is just what I heard the doctor say in the lab!”

ADAM That was pretty negligent of her.

BROOM I think they tried to introduce that she’s frazzled by the situation so she’s just reaching for things to say.

BETH Yeah. I wanted that to be more explicit, for my own child- empathy reasons.

BROOM I could see a whole story conference playing out, about how to set up that beat. But did you not at any point think, “Well, I don’t know what the rules of this world are! For all we know, the thing she’s saying could be true!” Because it’s not a question of any real principle, it’s just up to the Lords Of Disney, the writers who made up this fantasy story. Our faith — that these predators aren’t actually reverting to their original predator-nature — is purely a political-correctness faith. Because as far as anthropomorphic animals go…

ADAM But it was also set up by the whole movie. By the logic of the story — we’d been told at the very outset that predators and prey had overcome their tendencies…

BROOM Yeah: how and by what means? Total magic! We have no idea!

ADAM Right, but we already knew that was part of the internal logic —

BROOM So at this point in the story we’re challenged to have faith in that, a thing which has been completely glossed over…

ADAM It was obvious that Emmett Otter hadn’t suddenly turned into a bad person. That’s why they made him seem so meek.

BETH Yeah, I think that’s why they used Emmett Otter as the primary case.

ADAM Do otters eat meat? I don’t even know what otters eat. I guess so.

BETH Fish, I thought.

ADAM I guess that makes you a predator. There were no fish in this movie. Well, it is a mammal city.

BROOM I felt like they were very much in “The Bell Curve” territory here. The character says, “Well, if the science shows it…” and we the audience are supposed to be shouting “NO! No, the science would never show that!” And it has nothing to do with the movie — there’s no actual science to evaluate here — it just has to do with our political anxiety that it could turn out that way. Which in this particular movie…

ADAM But it was flatly refuted by this movie.

BROOM In The Three Little Pigs, guess what! The wolf is a dangerous wolf! That’s also a cartoon with talking animals. In this movie, at the beginning, a rabbit voice-over tells us that wolves are not dangerous anymore, and then later in the movie it’s called into question whether wolves are dangerous anymore. There’s no philosophical principle to which we’re referring here.

ADAM Understood. But given that the whole setup of the movie, for the first hour or so, is that predators don’t eat prey, suddenly when a mild-mannered family-man otter goes berserk in the back of a limousine…

BROOM Like I said, I was able to guess what was going on! Well before that, in fact.

BETH So would you not want your children to see this because you find it problematic?

BROOM No, I don’t think it does any damage. But… Well, actually my personal feeling — and I recognize that this is a fringe point of view — I think it does a certain kind of damage in suggesting that this underlayer of what’s going on — the basic perception of “different animals are different from each other, a predator is different from prey” — it suggests that society will be better off if we all fervently deny that that’s what we perceive. This felt like a cartoon about the virtue of that kind of denial, which is something that I already find discouraging in contemporary culture.

BETH That’s a good way of saying what your problem with it is. I get that.

BROOM I’m disheartened by all the public rhetoric about how much good we can do by denying — not what “is true” in some objective sense, but what seems true to us. And cartoons are about what seems true to us.

ADAM But I did think this movie was more progressive — or rather, a more second-order take on this problem. It didn’t actually say that all of the animals are the same, or that you can’t see that they’re different species.

BROOM For example: all Italians look like rats. [ed.: shrews]

ADAM Like, Judy was cute, and she did have bunny-like characteristics, but they were part of the benign variation in the grand mosaic that was the political fabric of this community. It wasn’t saying that she was not a bunny, or that bunnies are identical to elephants. If it had just been two different types of animals, it would have been creepier and more unsettling, but the fact that it was a thousand types of animals, it felt easier to take. And nobody was saying that all animals are the same — but all animals have the same rights. That kind of pluralism felt intuitively comfortable to me.

BROOM I was uncomfortable even before the plot went there, just in the fact that it was about whether she can be a cop. “No bunny has ever been a cop!” “Well, I’m going to, because I don’t believe in those limitations.” And then there are overt and overwhelming physical reasons — she’s like one-tenth the size of all the other cops.

ADAM Right, but then it turns out in the training that she has other virtues that compensate for that. She’s able to use her lightness and quickness to surmount the tundra wall!

BETH She has ingenuity!

ADAM She’s able to dash around the big rhino and make him hit himself in the face!

BROOM [feigning revelation] Ohhhhh! I see!

ADAM The movie explicitly addresses your objection and dispatches it.

BROOM No. Because my objection is not to the logic of the story — Does she get to be a cop? Oh she did, you’re right! I forgot! — I’m saying that visually, the impact of this as animation — what are we experiencing? This is not a thing that exists in the real world…

ADAM Well it is, actually.

BROOM Where someone is absurdly one-tenth the size of all their coworkers? That doesn’t happen!

BETH I actually had the thought, “They’ll need to make a tiny badge for her! They don’t need to do that with people.”

ADAM When women first started becoming police officers, it was a common objection that they were not physically as strong as men. But then it turns out that there are other things, other ways that women are different that makes them more talented police officers, like their emotional intuitiveness… Again, not to be essentialist… But I think gender is an instructive example. Gender is not like race; everyone acknowledges that men and woman are physically different in certain ways, and even emotionally different in certain ways, but it’s not… People nowadays ought to think that men and women have the same rights and the same ability to aspire to the same things, notwithstanding — in fact, precisely because of — their partial differences.

BROOM Wait. I mean, I recognize that that’s become a standard bit of rhetoric, that last part of your sentence there, but I’d like to hear you back it up: what do you mean, “because of their differences, that’s why they have equal rights”? How does that work?

ADAM No, I don’t mean because of their differences they have equal rights, I mean that once we acknowledge that the difference between men and women is benign and something to be celebrated, then it’s possible to appreciate the ways that men’s and women’s differences can inform and better institutions, as opposed to be something to be overcome. I’m thinking of, like, Sonia Sotomayor talking about “a wise Latina” on the Supreme Court, and why her different perspective is valuable. I mean, first-order feminism was all about claiming that women were the same as men, and latter-day feminism is all about saying that women are different than men, and not only is that okay, but it’s actually beneficial to men that women’s perspectives be included. So, to me, you’re right, with race it’s a much creepier thing to imply that there are physical or essential differences…

BETH But there are. I mean, it’s “creepy” only because we’re supposed to believe that everyone’s equal, but it’s…

BROOM My attitude about all of this stuff is that, like, race, gender — whatever categories you want to put people in — they have statistical meaning, but not individual meaning. But they do have individual meaning to people subjectively, because the way we experience the world is in terms of categories. And a cartoon of animals is about that experience, that unshakeable experience, that there are categories of things. It’s actually comforting to see a cartoon that says “Y’know, a little weaselly guy? He’s kinda like a weasel!” And you think, “Yeah! He is! Someone doing a Steve Buscemi impression is kinda like a little weasel character!” And that is bigotry. That is the essential thing that society is always trying to stamp out.

ADAM You’re saying this movie wanted to have its cake and eat it too, in that way.

BROOM I think the public rhetoric wants to have its cake and eat it too, and this movie was exposing that, in, to me, such a naked way. A cartoon about animal-people, I’ve always felt, is a bastion of admission that we do in fact see the world this way.

ADAM Because Robin Hood is tricky, and the rhino guards are stupid.

BROOM Yes! They’re rhinos! They’re leather-skinned, beady-eyed thugs!

ADAM I was thinking about Robin Hood a lot during this movie.

BROOM Yeah, because Nick was like Robin Hood.

ADAM He was like the fox Robin Hood meets George Clooney.

BETH A little bit.

BROOM Beth, did you identify with Judy? When she was crying, I thought, “she’s crying like Beth.”

BETH Yeah, I did.

BROOM ‘Cause you thought those were your parents, and that’s where you’re from, and now you’re in the big city.

BETH Not exactly. But when she was crying I thought, “That’s kind of like me.” So we both had that thought.

ADAM So this may have been the most flawlessly executed gender progressivism in all of our Disney movies thus far, and it was helpful that it wasn’t a love story, in that sense.

BROOM Do you know why that was the case? Because they didn’t mention gender once in the whole movie. That is what makes it an actual subconscious, intuitive progressivism.

ADAM Although I’m sure it was very conscious at Disney.

BROOM Well, I think that’s been a long process of being anxious about something that actually could have come so much more easily. We didn’t actually have to go through Pocahontas to get here. All you have to do is just make the movie. No one needed to see Pocahontas before they could accept Judy Hopps.

ADAM I don’t know. [My nephews] love Dora the Explorer, but I don’t think Dora the Explorer could have been made without Pocahontas.

BETH It’s so hard to say. But I’m kind of more on Adam’s side, because these things become part of the culture and then they seem like they were always there.

BROOM I think things become part of people’s actual subconscious interpretations of the world, and then that’s what they depict.

BETH Well, everything feeds everything.

BROOM But I don’t think that Lady — and the Tramp — was depicted as such a “lady” in need of a “tramp” because the writers thought “Let’s reinforce this stereotype!” It’s just what they had in them.

ADAM But they’ve been, like, thrashing their way out of it. Every single movie for the last thirty years has been trying and trying and trying. I know that Brave is not a Disney movie, but… Each one has been this, like, two-point-oh, three-point-oh, version of a feminist protagonist.

BROOM Yes, I totally agree. This movie just did it with grace: the protagonist is this bunny who happens to be female but it’s never necessary to mention it.

ADAM Although I think the fact that she was female worked into the story, you know? There were no other female cops.

BETH There was one other.

ADAM But most of the cops were male.

BROOM Maybe I’m just expressing my own private experience of this movie in saying that the feminism didn’t seem labored, but it didn’t seem labored in that respect. And I don’t want to learn the wrong lesson and say “Well, they had to go through thirty years of hard labor to get to that point.” They didn’t earn this by doing those other movies.

ADAM But they learned how to do this. Which was not intuitive to them.

BROOM It’s not the same “they”! There’s a generational shift over thirty years.

BETH I think culture was going through these same cogs, you know, in the Clinton era, so that was what was being reflected in Pocahontas.

ADAM As you probably know, there’s been a kerfuffle in the last few days because Hillary Clinton praised Nancy Reagan for having “started a national conversation about AIDS,” and people freaked the fuck out.

BETH They really freaked out.

ADAM Right. And then yesterday, Hillary Clinton released a long Medium post in which she ate her words, and everyone is happy now.

BROOM Well, she ate her words for two sentences, and then just talked about her good record on AIDS.

BETH Are they genuinely happy?

ADAM Yes. Everyone seems to have laid down their arms. But I’ve been thinking a lot about the things that changed between the 80s and today, and things that seem totally right-as-rain and normal today — there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work to get to a place like that. And this movie makes me think of that, because Disney has been trying so hard not to be “the princess studio” for so long, and so badly, but finally, this felt more or less natural and graceful. And God bless you, John Lasseter. Finally you guys have more or less figured it out, and I’m glad of it.

BROOM Also in Inside Out, the gender was not a key issue in that movie.

BETH That’s right.

ADAM As we start to talk about “why are there no cross-species relationships” and “what do the predators eat” — it got me thinking: making a movie like this is actually very ontologically complicated! Figuring out how to depict a universe like this that will carry you along briskly enough that you don’t start thinking about, like, “where’s all the animal poop?”

BETH I like that we saw a preview for a movie in which an animal poops, right before this started.

BROOM That was the first onscreen animated defecation I’ve ever seen, and it was in the preview.

BETH And it was a bunny.

BROOM I believe that in the Silly Symphony era, when they made “The Tortoise and the Hare,” and they put a bunch of different animals in the bandstand cheering them on, they just drew it, without any reflection at all. Nobody talked about how that world worked; they drew it and subconscious stuff came out. And nowadays — first of all because of how things are nowadays politically, but also because the animation production process is so long and elaborate — it’s gotta get discussed. I mean, I’m sure there are still concept artists for whom the work is just a pouring out of the subconscious: “I just kind of imagined how their world might look and I thought maybe the traffic light would look like this!” And that stuff ends up in the movie, and something subconsciously true is being revealed there. But like you said, this is a complicated question, and one that the movie takes on in a very direct way.

ADAM But only in part. There’s a lot of sight gags about it, but they really keep you moving along. Part of the reason the movie felt so refreshing was because it moved so fast, and they had to move you so fast so that you wouldn’t stop to think about things like this.

BROOM But they also asked you to stop and think about it.

BETH At the end, the bunny and the fox are partners, but I’m not ruling out that they could get together.

ADAM Yeah, they’re like Scully and Mulder.

BETH They’re like Scully and Mulder, there’s a flirtation there, so in my child’s heart, I’m rooting for them, and I don’t have a problem with it. I’m not thinking about the problem.

BROOM Sure.

ADAM What’s in the natural history museum in Zootopia?

BROOM I thought we were going to see people in there. I was interested to see.

ADAM I thought the nudist colony was one of the funniest jokes in the movie, precisely for this reason.

BROOM Yes, it was funny. It can be funny to knowingly play with conventions. But it means rising above something that made intuitive sense and artificially distancing yourself from it, going “Ha ha, what were we thinking!” And there’s always a real answer to the question “what were we thinking.” When you’re making fun, you’re always avoiding the real answer.

ADAM The Wikipedia “Talk” page is really going to get into these problems!

BROOM But — keeping in mind that there was like a 20-person team credited with “Story” — consider: this movie did not inherently have to begin with a narration stating that “Predators and prey used to be as you know them to be in the real world, but now they just get along.” They could have just started the story. Certainly the Silly Symphony of “The Tortoise and The Hare” just started right in; they didn’t narrate us in with “In this world, the animals act like people! Let’s see what they’re up to today!” Whereas this movie very conspicuously started with “Hey, you think that predators attack prey. Well, here they used to. But now they don’t anymore.” That’s throwing down a gauntlet and saying “Think about this!” And then later in the movie they really do make you think about it, because there’s a scene where at a press conference about whether predators are dangerous, a bunny says that maybe they have a genetic proclivity to be dangerous. You can’t tell me “oh, it just carries you along, you just roll with it!” This is a movie about a flub at a press conference! It’s about Hillary Clinton saying the wrong thing! Very explicitly.

BETH Yeah.

[digression about Hillary ensues]

ADAM So if I had sat down to write a movie about “all the animals live in a city together”… I mean, the mind boggles at all of the world-design challenges that that entails. Yes, I guess the rodents would have to live in a little town, and I guess the penguins would have to live…

BETH Right, there would have to be a very cold place.

ADAM Right, and a very hot place. Although if they have to go to the bank, what do they do? Well, you saw that water buffalo going through the blow-dryer before he gets on the subway, so I guess… Anyway, as a kid, my mind would have spiraled out of control thinking about these things.

BROOM At the beginning they showed some of the weather machinery, and I was surprised. “They’re really going to take the time to show how there’s snow there and rain there?”

ADAM They showed that?

BROOM They showed snow-belching machines and then rainforest showerheads, when she was on the train at the beginning listening to Shakira.

BETH It seems like what you keep coming back to is that everything is very consciously designed, in a way that it didn’t used to be, and that stories have become so much about integrating political agendas…

ADAM About answering objections.

BETH Yeah, starting from a defensive standpoint instead of just a “let’s tell a story” standpoint.

BROOM I think it doesn’t actually start there, but it goes there, with a sense of purpose about it.

BETH Because we’re so aware of all the criticisms that might be lobbied.

BROOM As soon as a movie starts up and shows cute animals of different species interacting like different “types” of people, I feel like “Okay, we’re in the politically incorrect world of gut feelings. I get it, I’m all for it, and I’m happy to watch this cartoon.” But then what the animals are talking about is “How are we going to get over our differences? Maybe we don’t actually have any differences!” and my head immediately starts throbbing. I feel like “Oh man, they’re screwed! They’re in for it now!” And that’s how I felt the whole time. I said I had a complicated reaction, so all that’s the discomfort side of it. I also thought it was great! I had a great time watching it; I love that they finally did a noir mystery.

ADAM I thought about Who Framed Roger Rabbit? but of course that wasn’t a Disney movie.

BROOM Sure it was.

ADAM Wasn’t it Touchstone Pictures?

BROOM Touchstone was just Disney’s adult distribution arm. Yeah, it was like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? which was already supposed to be like old Humphrey Bogart movies. And it was like L.A. Confidential. It was a New York noir and an L.A. noir mashed together. The city in which she arrived at the beginning was totally New York, and the city in which they investigated the mystery was totally L.A.

ADAM There was an actual intersection of Tujunga and Vine, which I think is in Burbank where the Disney Animation Studio is.

BETH There were lots of cute gags.

ADAM I liked the gag with escalator and the giraffe. I liked the gag with “Mr. Big” — even though it’s sort of obvious. When my high school did Guys and Dolls, they cast the Collins twins, of NBA fame, as the bodyguards for the shortest guy in school. So I’d seen that gag already.

BROOM When the woman was crossing Fifth Avenue and the donut was coming at her, and she’s saying [New Jersey accent] “Oh your shoes are to die for” or whatever, I thought, “Huh, they put in ‘a Jew’ and the Jew is a vole,” or whatever she was [ed.: shrew]. Then later: “Oh, she was an Italian.” Well, it really comes to the same thing.

BETH I really thought she was a Kardashian type.

BROOM She was a New Jersey Italian.

ADAM But they were from The Godfather — that’s a whole other country.

BROOM But that’s just it. A person could actually be Italian. Nobody at this table is, but it would just be like being ourselves, except we’d happen to be Italian…

ADAM But they weren’t really Italian, they were from The Godfather… Okay, I mean, I get it —

BROOM Understand: my discomfort when I thought she was a Jew was not, like, “Those are my people! How can you do this to me?” It was more like “Don’t you know that by your own rules you’re not allowed to do this?” Don’t they realize the dissonance? That’s basically the issue. Like, the whole movie is very carefully about the fox, and let’s be real clear about what the fox is not: he is not black. The fox is Jason Bateman; the fox is not black. She’s afraid of him, she carries pepper spray because of him, he’s a “predator” who’s not actually inherently dangerous but grew up being treated that way so now he’s cagey… but he is not black, he’s Jason Bateman.

ADAM I had forgotten that George Clooney is the voice of The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Maybe that’s why I was thinking about George Clooney.

BETH Well, but also the glasses…

ADAM He was hot. Let’s just be honest.

BROOM Which one, Fantastic Mr. Fox, or this fox?

ADAM This fox.

BROOM He was no Robin Hood.

BETH I would agree that Robin Hood is sexier than this guy.

ADAM I don’t know, I liked this guy a lot. He was kind of a wiseacre.

BETH Eh, he had a polyester shirt…

BROOM Adam, in the pantheon of furry-dom, Robin Hood will always be at the top. This guy is just, like, supporting a pilaster at the bottom.

ADAM I kind of liked Gazelle’s tiger dancers with the glitter on their faces.

BETH I knew you did. They had some good moves.

BROOM I thought the idea of “Gazelle” was pretty funny.

ADAM So was that desk cop tiger who was into donuts gay?

BROOM and BETH Yes.

ADAM Okay. He was playing, like, the gay friend from Mean Girls.

BETH He was “everyone’s best gay friend.” Which, again, I guess you can raise questions about…

ADAM So do you think a gay tiger can have an interspecies romance, because it’s non-procreative?

BROOM Did you guys really not experience some kind of internal buzzer when she says “Bunnies can call each other cute but it’s kind of offensive coming from you,” and he says, “Oh, and here I am, some stereotype of a donut-eating cop,” and then she says “You actually have a donut caught under your neck fat”…

BETH Yeah, so, what are you doing, movie?

BROOM Yeah, did you not have a moment of thinking “This is all amusing but what is the movie?” I’m not offended, but what is this?

BETH Yes. I kept asking, like, “So are you just trying to confuse us out of being critical of this, because you’re so aware that you’re, like, aware on top of aware?”

BROOM I want to be clear that I was never once “offended” by anything in this movie. It was all very easy to take, no problem. But talking about whether these movies are “dreams” or “theses”…

ADAM This felt like a thesis to you.

BROOM This felt like… an anxiety dream.

BETH Do you think that in ten years this will seem like an outdated way of making a movie about this subject?

BROOM Yes. I don’t think this will age well as an issue movie. But I think the detective story in it will make it watchable and it will continue to be sold for decades.

BETH So what would you liken it to, in the canon?

ADAM I assume Broom will liken it to the vulture Beatles in The Jungle Book.

BROOM No. I don’t think this exact thing existed before. The vulture Beatles were there just because some animator drew them and thought “it’s funny if we draw mop-tops, like on those silly mop-topped boys who are so famous.” And that’s it. I don’t think this kind of overthinking existed back then. It didn’t exist prior to The Lion King.

ADAM Well, they were making fairy tales, before.

BETH Right, they weren’t doing a lot of original stories.

BROOM Seriously: when the protagonist is sitting opposite the new mayor and saying “because of my gaffe at the press conference I don’t think I will be a good front for the new racial politics of the police department,” I was thinking “this is not a Disney movie! It’s a now movie.” And I was also wondering about the little kids in the audience — what is that worth to them? Thankfully, the lighting was really pretty the whole time.

ADAM It was really pretty to look at.

BROOM I wish everyone’s eyes had been smaller. Other than that, the look was great.

BETH I wish her eyes weren’t purple. That was distracting to me.

ADAM That just made her feel like an anime hero. What did you think of the lemmings that work at Lehman Brothers — I mean “Lemming Brothers”?

BROOM You tell me. Is that where you felt like you were depicted?

ADAM Was that a sly Wall Street joke? I guess so.

BETH Did you see the ad for “Zuber”?

ADAM “Migrate yourself.” I liked that the different species of animals had different logos on their iPhones.

BROOM I didn’t notice that. I saw that she had a carrot.

ADAM Yes, but the mayor or somebody had a paw.

BROOM I had the thought at one point that the DVD era — or Blu-ray era, or streaming era; the “you’re gonna watch it a thousand times at home” era — has created this aesthetic where they really pack stuff into the screen, which creates a whole different experience. It’s a little alienating; it doesn’t feel as much like you’re the intended audience. There’s the feeling that stuff is being lost on you constantly.

ADAM Yeah, I didn’t catch all of the movies that the weasel was hawking.

BROOM I saw that the three old ones were familiar, and then he said “even movies that haven’t come out yet,” and I tried to vacuum them up with my eyes but I couldn’t take it all in. But guess who will: people who buy it on Blu-ray.

ADAM [My nephews.] I think they’ll really like this. And this is a good soft introduction for kids to noir, which I approve of.

BROOM I kind of wish there were a politically-unburdened mystery investigation Disney movie.

[digression ensues about Jessica Rabbit]

ADAM I do think the pace helped forestall objections. This was a lot more frenetically paced than a movie from the past. It had so many scenes in it, so much happened, and there were so many characters. That was satisfying.

BETH And so many little cut-away jokes.

BROOM I will register a minor beef. They should not do double callbacks. A single callback is very satisfying.

ADAM They did a double callback to the pen.

BROOM Yeah. “It’s called a hustle.” The second time isn’t satisfying! You get to do it once!

BETH Yeah. That’s just, like, a basic rule.

BROOM And at the very end there was another one between the two of them.

ADAM Well, they kept calling each other “Dumb bunny,” “Sly bunny,” “Sly fox,” “Dumb fox.”

BROOM They just went a second round on a couple of things. You can’t do it twice!

BETH Well, maybe kids like that stuff.

BROOM They do.

ADAM Should we read the New York Times review?

BETH Yes. Which I think said it was more for grownups for kids.

BROOM I think texturally, and zanily, there was plenty to keep kids interested. Those kids in the theater stayed quiet the whole time.

BETH Yeah. They were into it.

BROOM But it still hurts my feelings, in a way. Because I feel like animation, this kind of pure world of the imagination, is the antidote to a lot of the anxieties that burden our public culture…

BETH You feel like no one can be free.

ADAM It’s a “critic’s pick!”

BROOM Of course it is! It was very good! I feel like in some ways this is a five-star top-of-their game movie. I just also wanted to scrub certain things out of it.

[we read the New York Times review]

BROOM That seems awfully offhand of the New York Times. Surely they recognize that these movies are important.

ADAM Yeah, that was kind of too short, too B-grade.

BETH It was dismissive, in a way.

BROOM It’s weird! Doesn’t the New York Times realize that…

ADAM That we’ve been doing this project for five years? More than that.

BROOM Eight.

BETH So what’s the next Disney release?

[we look it up]

BROOM 56: Moana, November 23, 2016.

BETH So Thanksgiving.

BROOM And 57: Gigantic, March 9, 2018.

ADAM I guess King of the Elves has been put on ice.

[Conversation continues very loosely. Too loosely to represent here. Then we decide to close it up.]

BROOM It had a lot of great stuff in it. In some ways it was a very satisfying movie.

ADAM I would recommend this, Madeline. Madeline will have already seen it by the time she gets around to reading this.

BROOM None of my reservations are reservations about the watching of this existing movie. They’re just about whether the existence of this movie is the ideal state for society. But guess what: here it is. It’s Zootopia folks! We’re livin’ in it!

BETH You could say that about so many things, though. Should this have been made? Should anything have been made?

ADAM The next one is the prequel, about the Zootopia civil rights movement. Which is actually much more serious; a lot of dead bunnies in that movie. Maybe the predators eat soylent, or something.

BROOM That’s it! They eat people! Where are the people? They’re being ground into meat.

BETH The fox was really into those blueberries.

BROOM Foxes do like blueberries, right? They must eat more than just mice.

ADAM I mean, what did Robin Hood eat?

BETH Everyone was really into that pie.

ADAM It was like a vegan paradise.

BETH I think that’s what we were meant to believe, that they all just eat vegetables.

BROOM It was made very clear to us in the nudist scene that they have no genitalia, so we know that things work very differently in their world. Maybe they all only exist, like, inside a computer, in a virtual reality, like in The Matrix. That would explain all these inconsistencies. All right, thanks, guys. See you again in November.

disney55-end-temp

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March 10, 2016

Game log 3/10/16

I’ve decided that I stand by the conclusion reached at the end of the previous entry, that writing in depth about videogames is like dancing in depth about architecture — which is to say: an interesting enough project for every now and then, but not worth cultivating as a habit.

However, I do like marking my progress — like getting my summer reading sheet stamped at the library! — and letting my fans and biographers see what I’ve been playing. So the most superficial and least interesting part of this habit is, for the time being, going to persist. Like, subscribe, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.

I’m putting all the video trailers on the page, so to keep things compact, I’m making them small. You can zoom ’em up or not, as you like.

5/24/13: Humble Weekly Sale: Alan Wake, $1.00. (I already owned and had played Alan Wake, but was interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff in the bundle, which included the sheet music from the orchestra recording sessions.)

• Alan Wake (2010): Remedy Entertainment (Espoo, Finland) [~ 20 hrs]
• Alan Wake’s American Nightmare (2012): Remedy Entertainment (Espoo, Finland) [5 hrs]

I’m listing the original game here because I found myself replaying it in its entirety (including the DLC, which I had skipped on my first go-round back in 2012), in preparation for playing the follow-up game.

I enjoyed and admired Alan Wake a lot more this second time around because I played it on a harder difficulty setting. This surprised me, since I have a tendency to choose “easy” mode on games where I’m more interested in the story than the challenge of the gameplay. It turns out that once the gameplay gets hard enough, the center of gravity shifts, and this can lift up the whole experience. Alan Wake aspires, unabashedly, to deliver the dramatic content and atmosphere of a TV miniseries, so my original instinct had been to treat it like a TV miniseries that happened to have a game in it. But viewed that way (i.e. played on “easy” mode), the drama is a no better than clumsy, dorky, fannish imitation of its models, and the gameplay is a tedious and repetitive routine that clogs up the narrative flow. Whereas when the gameplay is turned up to the highest difficulty level, it becomes a weighty thing-unto-itself, no longer inherently repetitive (because if something requires one’s full attention it never seems repetitive) — and the drama, by receding to the status of window dressing, becomes the most lavish and delightful window dressing imaginable (a Macy’s display with a moving train and animatronic teddy bears). By treating the game less like a storyteller it became a much better storyteller.

So that’s a lesson I’m going to carry with me. No more “easy” mode, at least not until I’ve played a game for a while on “normal.”

Alan Wake’s American Nightmare is just the stump of a canceled sequel, not really a full-fledged thing, but hastily dressed up like one, and artificially prolonged, to make it salable. There are good ideas implicit here, and the combat gameplay is still pretty good, but clearly nothing is at its final stage of development and I couldn’t help feeling that my time was being wasted.

(The developers are Finnish, but the character Alan Wake is an American and his whole life has taken place in America so the title is pretty funny.)

5/28/13: Humble Indie Bundle 8, $7.00. Eleven games, many of them interesting. A great deal. Prior to this past month I had already completed:

• Little Inferno (2012) [fascinating for being a satire on time-wasting games that attempts to transcend satire into earnestness — but none of that changes the fact that, at heart, it’s kind of a time-wasting game]

• Thomas Was Alone (2012) [a memorable gimmick if nothing else: a thoroughly unremarkable “get the rectangle to the goal” game given a strange meta-poignancy by absurdly incongruous anthropomorphic narration and emotional music]

• Dear Esther (2012) [experiential tone poem, walking around a richly atmospheric Hebridean island rendered in meticulous detail. Tremendous sense of place was enough for me; I was perfectly happy to disregard the soggy boggy narration and needless scraps of story]

• Hotline Miami (2012) [ultra-brutal killing spree game in loving imitation of the movie Drive. Fetishistic “80s-sleaze-nightmare” atmosphere, very well done but I can hardly approve. Nonetheless I surprised myself by getting drawn into the well-balanced split-second gameplay.]

• Proteus (2013) [another experiential tone-poem of wandering around an island, but this time a transportingly unreal pixelated one, rendered with dreamy simplicity. There’s really hardly anything to it and yet this feels to me like an important piece of latter-day videogame art. It somehow gets directly at one of the basic moods.]

• English Country Tune (2011) [this is as good and as hard a pure puzzle game as any ever made. I consider myself something of an aficionado of pure puzzle games, and this beautiful, merciless piece of work is at the very top of the heap, clearly made just for aficionados like me. I also really like the title, which is offered without comment; I take it to be a reference to Michael Finnissy and/or the general tradition of serious composers doing sophisticated takes on traditional melodies, just as this game is a sophisticated take on the indelible folk melody that is Sokoban]

The bundle also included Awesomenauts (2012), but I’m skipping that one because it’s online multiplayer only, and I don’t play that.

So, remaining to be played this past month were:

• Capsized (2011): Alientrap Games (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada) [abandoned after 2 hrs]
• Tiny & Big in Grandpa’s Leftovers (2012): Black Pants Studio (Kassel, Germany) [4 hrs]

Capsized is one of the countless games “with physics” where the imprecision of the physics means there’s no distinguishing between struggling with the game’s challenges and struggling with the game itself. To me that’s a vital distinction. After two hours of insufficiently specific frustration, I quit.

Tiny & Big has a lot of art-school verve in its aesthetic, and is built around a clever and promising mechanic: slice the environment, then push and pull the resulting pieces around. But then it doesn’t really develop, as a game or as a story. Its scope and duration felt like an indulgence rather than an idea. But it was still short, so why complain.

• Intrusion 2 (2012): vapgames (= Alexey Abramenko) (Ufa, Bashkortostan, Russia) [7 hrs]
• Oil Rush (2012): Unigine (Tomsk, Russia) [abandoned after ~ .5 hrs]

Intrusion 2 is another “with physics” game, but this time it works completely. The chaos of contending with the physics is always part of the fun; the character is easy to control and thoroughly responsive — he’s just up against a world of mayhem, of increasing zaniness. Where the crazy cartoon inventiveness of Metal Slug always felt slick and commercial, this has a certain gleeful childlike abandon such as only a one-man indie project can have. And I’m no great enthusiast of boss battles but even I can tell that these battles (especially the final one, which took up a third of my play time) are something really special, carefully crafted with deep and obvious affection for all things boss-battle-y. Definitely my favorite game ever from Bashkortostan.

Oil Rush is a real-time strategy game, not really my cup of tea to begin with, and one where absolutely nothing about it is appealing. The wretched writing and voice acting was the first straw; the fact that simply pointing the camera where I wanted was infuriatingly counter-intuitive was the second. I allotted it half an hour to give me any glimmer of a reason to soldier onward, which it resolutely did not.

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February 19, 2016

Stacking (2011)

developed by Double Fine (San Francisco, CA)
designed and written by Lee Petty

Third of the three new games I bought in the “Humble Double Fine Bundle” on May 7, 2013.

Almost all 3D games have elaborate menus for adjusting the graphics, but I generally ignore them. At restaurants when asked how I want meat done, I tend to say “however the chef recommends,” and that’s how I feel about graphics options. I come to an artwork to see what someone else has to say, so it seems wrong that I should make any of the aesthetic decisions. The only times I’ve tinkered with graphics options have been when my low-end computer can’t handle the defaults, so I have to dial it all down. If need be, I can make do without high resolution, or fancy reflections, or fog, or being able to see far into the distance. That’s the price I pay for not constantly buying new and expensive computers, and it’s a very fair price. I still get to play the games, right?

Maybe that’s not a rhetorical question. I’m expressing a pretty contradictory attitude here. On one hand, I don’t dare touch my pinky finger to the options because I only want to receive official, canonical aesthetic experiences, straight from the chef. On the other hand I take proletarian pride in being so unpicky as to accept whatever degraded version of the game my crummy old hardware can manage. This despite the fact that graphical degradation has an enormous impact on the “feel” of a game, which, as I’ve said many times before, is the game.

I think the hypocrisy arises from my completely polarized attitudes towards “art” and “life,” attitudes that I would probably do better to reconcile. My instinct has always told me that “art,” being constructed and artificial, can be held to ideals, whereas “life,” in all its slippery irrationality, cannot. The fact that sometimes I have to turn down the graphics quality because I have an old computer seems like a necessity of life, to be accepted with grace; whereas the question of whether I might tamper with the default settings merely to suit my personal taste seems like an issue of art, to be determined by high principle.

Not the healthiest way to go through life or art, I think. Having come to believe that everything in the world is subjective, nothing is objective, I probably could stand to change settings whenever it strikes my fancy; or rather, I could probably could stand to allow myself some fancy in the matter. In this as in anything else.

How this relates to Stacking.

I played Stacking through to the end, and felt a kind of subtle visual uneasiness throughout. The game is populated by matryoshka dolls and takes place in diorama-like sets, with detailing that suggests bits of cardboard, playing cards, crayons, etc. etc. In keeping with this dollhouse aesthetic, the graphics are subjected to a gentle shallow-focus blur effect, to give a miniature impression. While playing, I thought this effect was aesthetically cohesive, admirable in principle, but also a bit alienating or disorienting at some level. Somehow I never felt quite as comfortable in the space as I wanted, and I felt certain it was because of the shallow focus.

Then when I was done with the main story, I went online to browse through discussions about the game, and came across the comment that the PC version, which had been converted from a console original, hadn’t had its default field of view (“FOV“) properly updated. What this means, briefly, is that too narrow a wedge of the world is visible on the screen: the effect is somewhat like looking out through a porthole rather than standing in a field with full peripheral vision.

(The reason this needs to differ between consoles and PCs is because console games are generally played on a TV while sitting across the room on a couch, and thus take up significantly less of the player’s visual field than a computer screen does when one is seated only a couple feet away. Looking out at the game world “through” a TV across the room, it seems spatially correct to be able to see only what’s directly in front of you, whereas looking out “through” a computer screen close at hand, one intuitively expects to be able to take in a lot more of the surrounding world.)

So it turned out that my spatially alienated feeling, which I had attributed to the the “miniature effect,” was actually a settings problem. Sure enough, when I went into the graphics options and widened the field of view, suddenly everything about the space felt friendlier, easier to wrap my head around. But now it’s too late! I already had my experience with this game and developed a feeling about it.

The fact that that feeling turns out to have been based on “settings” rather than “the thing itself” is something I’m uncomfortable with. If I complain about that queasy feeling that was such an important part of my game experience, who is my audience? What kind of communication is that, if it’s about a completely unshared phenomenon? Just me checking in with myself.

But that’s what we all do. That’s certainly what I’m doing here, as always. Am I right folks? (You know you are!) Yeah! Thanks!

Stacking is nice.

(In middle school or thereabouts, I was inculcated with the opinion that the word “nice” ought never to be used because it’s too weak to convey anything. This was, I believe, part of general encouragement toward striving for mots justes when writing, rather than settling for reflexive patterns and cliches. “Nice” was given as a universal counterexample, le mot injuste no matter the occasion. But like so much of my education, this received wisdom is something I’d now love to be rid of. My writerly tastes need to be my own, developed through my long personal sojourn in the kingdom of words. I’ll decide what I think of “nice,” thank you very much. And I’ve decided it has an opportunity to make a real contribution, here and now.)

Stacking is nice. It feels like playing with toys, which is surely the intention. The dolls make the proper clacking sound as they toddle around. The low level of investment demanded and the very mild-mannered puzzles — each of which has many possible solutions — keeps alive a sense that one is just goofing around, lying on the floor. The basic gameplay conceit, that the smallest doll can temporarily possess the shells of the larger dolls so as to benefit from their particular traits, comes immediately and intuitively, and the storytelling is silly enough that one doesn’t need to ask any of the questions about how this world works (i.e. why am I the only one who has this ability). It’s just so.

Playing with toys always had the Buzz Lightyear existential threat hanging over it: what if these little guys notice that they’re on a living room rug and over there is a mind-bogglingly enormous wall? Why in fact wouldn’t they notice immediately? To play with toys one had to be comfortable with the uncertainty. This game, despite taking up 6 hours of your attention, remains cheerfully vague about what any of this could possibly be or mean. It’s very simple: you’re that little doll and these are the other dolls you can jump inside. You’re trying to save your family. Done.

Part of what I mean when I say the game is like playing with toys is, specifically, that it offers that hovering existential uncertainty, which for me brings back warm memories of spending many floating childhood hours on the wobbly shore where imagination laps against reality.

When you’re, say, “on a boat” in this game — a real full-fledged 3D game space, with a sky and waves and stairs and rooms and different decks that you spend a while bopping around in — there is, for me, a heady, humming feeling of impossibility. Where does this boat full of dolls possibly come from or go? Where the hell am I really? My gut knows something is very wrong here. But it’s also fine and friendly. That’s a basic and desirable kind of disorientation, the disorientation of dreams.

Gripes include:

1. Hyperemphasis on meta-play: collecting, completing, doing everything all five different ways, exhausting each area, and building up a meaningless trophy case. Though I suppose it’s less meta- than it might be, since the main storyline doesn’t carry as much weight and priority as in most adventures. These are simply some other suggested forms of play, with this toy. But still.

2. Less than professional writing. There’s a flippancy to it all that at times feels like actual flippancy rather than artful lightheartedness. For example, there is, rather conspicuously, an awful lot of stinky farting in this game. Far from seeming like pandering to children, it seems like the designers sincerely amusing themselves, at a primitive level that to them feels “mischievous,” which doesn’t match the inherent sophistication of the toybox world as a whole. Similarly, the “old-timey” dialogue is written with too amateurish and superficial a grasp of the idiom.

3. The interstitial scenes all run about four times longer than the player wants.

4. Etc. Perhaps this is all best summed up by noting that this is a game designed and written by an art director. It plays and reads and feels that way. Visual artists have their characteristic strong suits and blind spots, and the product here is more or less in keeping with my stereotype.

It’s nice though. The shining painted wood and the clacking noise are really at the heart of what’s being offered, and they are spot on. The rest hangs off of that.

(Yes, and I also played the DLC. It too was nice. Better than the last level of the real game, in fact.)

Charm can’t be achieved by force; it must simply happen to be so. This game obviously intends to be charming and that does tend to weaken its charm. But perhaps that’s for the best, since actually being a child and playing with one’s toys isn’t at all like being “charmed” by them. How effete and adult the whole concept is. “Playing” means honestly taking part in whatever is there in front of you. There’s no judgment involved, no “appreciation.”

Video games have that going for them: you’re forced to get your hands dirty and actually play with them.

Engaging with the world is far preferable to evaluating it, and in a way they’re mutually exclusive — one has to do deliberate mental work to generate “opinions” about things that one has actually done. It takes a certain bending of the mind. I think I’m attracted to talking about video games because I’m still attracted to trickiness, the particular hardness of the work involved in generating words from such a fundamentally wordless place.

But I know better than that now, and god knows I’m tired from constantly over-bending my mind. So maybe I’ll stop and just play my games in honest wordlessness. It’s been a year of these entries and I don’t feel I’ve particularly carved anything out for myself, by repeatedly taking on this tricky work. I just accrue more pointless collectibles for my pointless trophy case. Whereas actually playing the games has been rewarding in odd inner ways that my entries here can’t remotely capture. So maybe enough.

Maybe. I’ll think about it.

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February 11, 2016

Costume Quest (2010)

developed by Double Fine (San Francisco, CA)
project led by Tasha Harris
designed by David Gardner, Tasha Harris, Gabe Miller, and Elliott Roberts
written by Elliott Roberts and Tim Schafer

Second of the three new games I bought in the “Humble Double Fine Bundle” on May 7, 2013.

The idea here is that cozy Halloween trick-or-treat nostalgia is the perfect subject for a video game: it’s a ritual process with role-playing, and prizes, and delicious menace and mystery. And huge sentimental significance. This is a good insight! It’s true. In fact it’s so true that even with gameplay as bland and rudimentary as it has, Costume Quest still manages somehow to seem fun. The fact that it’s so manifestly a great idea for a game carries the player along.

Well, for a little while, anyway. Then its arms get tired and it sets the player back down. To play a bland and rudimentary game. Luckily, by the six-hour mark, the point when it finally dawned on me that I ought to stop playing Brütal Legend, I was at the end of Costume Quest. Saved by the bell.

Basically: another exceedingly well-meaning production from the exceedingly well-meaning people at Double Fine.

The game is in three sections, each of which took me about an hour and a half to get through. I found the first section quite charming, despite recognizing that as game design it was shallow and monotonous. The important thing was that it felt right; it invited the same attention I would cheerfully bring to a middling network Halloween special, and rewarded it with the same kind of vague carpeted comforts. I was willing to disregard what I was actually doing (namely: almost exclusively busywork and padding) and just roll with it for its sweet naturedness and exemplary Holiday Branding Compliance. I got at least an hour of that kind of satisfaction, for real, which is to say at least two half-hour TV Specials’ worth. Not bad!

The problem, for me, was that the subsequent second and third sections were — quite unabashedly — just recapitulations of the first section. Liked trick-or-treating in the suburbs? How about trick-or-treating some more at the mall? And now how about trick-or-treating some more in a rustic village? Yeah… okay, I guess.

It’s the economy approach to game design. I can respect taking an economy approach to production — I certainly respect Double Fine for scaling down their ambitions and putting out something modest and cute. I just wish they had allocated more of their little budget towards refining the design until they honestly believed it merited six hours of play. I would gladly have given up a few animations and map areas for that.

Despite its relative brevity, this game still felt like a slog. But let’s acknowledge that sometimes slogs are games. For example, I recently witnessed Beth playing all the way through “Slog Sandwich: The Game” (my gift to her!). I can absolutely respect a slog every now and then. On the other hand, Beth’s game was about building an actual skill — the things she was doing as a player on her last day would have seemed outlandishly difficult on her first day. That’s a process that inevitably takes time and practice and patience, and offers real rewards for it. (Yes, real rewards: I strongly believe that genuinely learning something new is an inherently healthful experience — especially when the thing learned has the purity of being utterly useless and burdened by no social significance. It’s like roughage; it keeps your mind regular, present to the world.)

Whereas Costume Quest is an RPG, a genre I have always considered philosophically dubious, because (as I’ve complained before) it’s all about phony skill-acquisition: you are told that you’ve “leveled up,” but of course so have your enemies, so what you’re doing remains exactly the same, just measured in larger numbers. The player needs no skill or understanding at the end that isn’t already available at the beginning. The only difference is, essentially, how much Halloween candy you’ve gathered in between. Since in the context of the game, that’s a completely make-believe task, there’s no good reason why it ought to be a repetitive six-hour slog.

(Well, except for the obvious reason: that game purchasers are really purchasing invented obligations, to delay the necessity of returning to their own unpleasant feelings, so the more invented obligations per purchase the better. Any slog is a good slog.)

Anyway, whether -advertently or in-, this game is sloggish. You’ll notice that they punch the word “Collect!” in the preview. Yup! There sure is a lot of collecting to be done.

After finishing the game, naturally, I immediately played the DLC (“DownLoadable Content”) despite its being none other than: one more area in which to do all the same stuff again. I guess I didn’t want to return to my own unpleasant feelings yet. I’m not embarrassed to say it.

DLC is an awkward fit for the notion that games are an “art form,” because long after the window of time in which selling DLC for a given game is good business, the DLC continues to live on as a weird satellite to the game itself, occupying some formal gray area. Is it part of the work or is it not? Usually it gets lumped in to a “Complete Edition” (or, as has hilariously become industry standard, a “Game Of The Year Edition” or “GOTY,” basically the video game equivalent of “World Famous Pizza”) such that the form of the game that heads off into posterity is one with a barnacle or two clinging to it. The main menu always has to ask: do you want to play “The Game Itself” or “Inconsequential Cash-In, Previously Sold Under The Title ‘The Unmissable Final Chapter Of The Game Itself'”?

In this case I played it. I knew I would get through it one sitting and I did.

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