Creative writing kills

Yesterday--finally!--the media coverage of the Virgina Tech shooting promised to get a little more interesting: Grady Hendrix posted in Slate a commentary on recent discussion around the striking similarity between one one of the images contained in Cho Seung Hui's self-prepared media kit (at least now we know what he was doing in those intervening two hours!) and Oldboy (2004), the second installment in Park Chan-Wook's venegence trilogy. Something of a cult film now--but also the Cannes Grand Prix winner that year--the latter follows its protagonist's efforts to find out who was behind his mysterious 15 year captivity. A formerly unremarkable Seoul salaryman transformed into a dangerous force of nature after his long confinement in a dingy hotel room, Oh Dae-su is relentless in his pursuit of answers, most famously taking on an entire hallway of henchman with a hammer and finishing off all of them, despite the knife awkwardly stuck between his shoulders by the end of this extended scene.

The pairing of the two images appears to have originated with the New York Times' blog, The Lede, which was "alerted of the similarity" by Virginia Tech professor--and apparently, connoisseur of Korean revenge flicks--Paul Harrill. No one has yet been able to confirm that Cho was at all familiar with the film; if so, he certainly seems to have chosen to forego Oh Dae-su's raffish post-imprisonment hairstyle. Nonetheless the predictable handwringing over the influence of violent films has commemenced, and it was with eager anticipation I turned to Hendrix's "Violent Disagreement: What Cho Seung-Hui got wrong about Oldboy" for a much needed debunking.

And indeed, the final paragraph begins by asserting that "Oldboy bears no more responsibility for the Virginia Tech shootings than American Idol" and ends with the suggestion that if there is a connection, it is one based on a commonplace misreading of the film as a celebration of revenge. For Hendrix, Oldboy and the rest of the trilogy are in fact all about depicting revenge "as the ultimate act of narcissism," and these are films which "urge the audience to question the thrills it offers." Unfortunately, Hendrix's rather interesting point here is wholly undermined by the most sloppy film criticism I have ever encountered:

By the time Oldboy is over there will be incest, impromptu dentistry, the ingestion of a live octopus, and someone will cut out their own tongue. But when our salaryman finally confronts his jailor he discovers that his life wasn't destroyed because of some political scheme, as in The Count of Monte Cristo, but as revenge for a petty high-school slight that he barely remembers. It's a movie that whips up a froth Grand Guignol in order to show that all the violence signifies nothing. The audience is left empty: All the fighting, all the melodrama, and all the histrionics were over an adolescent grudge? It's as if Rocky Balboa was motivated by the desire to win a pack of gum. What seemed cool at the start of the movie feels pathetic and futile by the end.

After reading this I began to doubt we had seen the same film. As I recall, the petty highschool slight involved the revelation of an incestuous relationship between Oh Dae-su's future tormentor and his sister and the subsequent suicide of the sister once rumors questioning her chastity started to circulate in the school, courtesy of a teenaged Oh Dae-su who happened to catch a glimpse of the siblings enjoying some afternoon delight in a deserted classroom. This hardly seems to me comparable to "the desire to win a pack of gum." Hendrix's glib summation is rhetorically convenient for him, but no less inaccurate than saying that King Lear is all about a real estate deal gone bad. In fact it is the juxtaposition of the banal (gossiping about a classmate, getting drunk one night, meeting a pretty sushi chef by chance) and the momentous (precipitating a suicide, getting abducted & imprisoned for 15 years, unknowingly having sex with your long-lost daughter) that makes Oldboy so harrowing. Its artistic achievement rests precisely on its depiction of the equal power that incidental events and terrible, deliberate acts have to trigger the the downward spiral of revenge.

Which brings me to my next point: why hasn't there been more analysis of Cho Seung Hui's unhappy brushes with creative writing as taught in university classrooms? Feel free to judge for yourself the two examples of Cho's creative work that are publicly accessible, the one-act dramas Richard McBeef and Mr. Brownstone. Incidentally, both provide ample evidence of Hendrix' contention that Cho's aesthetic is too narrow to encompass the greater subtleties of Oldboy, although the latter of the two pieces does demonstrate a combination of rage and scatology reminiscent of Jonathan Swift. The Lede offers further tantalizing hints of Cho's foray into the world of creative writing courses as taught at second- and third-rate colleges, reproducing a bizarre confrontation between Cho and his creative writing prof, Nikki Giovanni, in which she told him he could no longer write "intimidating poems" for her class:

“You can’t do that,” she told him, referring to the “intimidating” poems.
“You can’t make me,” he replied.
“Yeah, I can.”
Her next step was to lobby the department head, Lucinda Roy, writing a letter requesting he leave the class, she told CNN. And she was ready to go all the way.
“I was willing to resign before I would continue with him,” she told CNN. “It was the meanness.”

Frankly dealing with this woman--notably, declared by Oprah to be one of her 25 "living legends"--would be enough to make me go postal. "It was the meanness"???? Someone who purports to teach the craft of writing cannot come up with a better way to articulate what she found disturbing in Cho's demeanour? Further investigation did reveal that the latter bon mot only scratches the surface of the kind of eloquent expression of which this living legend is capable; one need merely consult her extensive body of work to find gems like this:

When I Die

when i die i hope no one who ever hurt me cries
and if they cry i hope their eyes fall out
and a million maggots that had made up their brains
crawl from the empty holes and devour the flesh
that covered the evil that passed itself off as a person
that i probably tried
to love

Maybe the work fueling Cho's fantasies of revenge wasn't Oldboy at all, but the poetry of Nikki Giovanni! There's also a further consideration: perhaps these acts of catacylsmic violence are less a matter of direct influence than the unforeseen consequence of the professionalization of the teaching of creative writing. That the prospect of having your own painstaking, crappy efforts at the next great American novel judged by a second-rate hack doesn't set off more school shootings is a source of constant amazement to me.

Let them eat cake

My learned friend over at The Felted Widget has recently taken it upon himself to "stop worrying and love the black man," in reference to the outrageous racial stereotyping evident in the figure of Augustus Cole, the resident big black badass of Gears of War. He concludes by essentially throwing his hands up in the air:
“I am at a point now where I am so overwhelmed with the political correctness of the scholarship surrounding gaming that I find myself losing touch with what is entertaining in the game by being tripped up by the occasional racial stereotype. While I do consider myself to be a sort of scholar of digital games, there are times when I really just want to enjoy the game on its own terms, stereotypes and all.”

As usual, I beg to differ. Frustration with PC pieties is wholly understandable. But I wonder if “oh, it’s just a game, let me just enjoy it as a game” can ever be a valid response to such challenges. In particular, should we wish to advance the claim that games are poised to make the leap in the wider cultural consciousness from trashy “popular entertainment” to aesthetically-significant genre, as movies and more lately, television, have done, then this line of argument is especially unhelpful. Why should we hold games to a lower aesthetic standard than other audiovisual media? Why should simply being "entertaining" be enough? Fantasy Island was entertaining, but we wouldn't have Lost if somewhere along the way tv audiences hadn't developed a taste for something a little more intellectual stimulating and a little less formulaic.

At the risk of sounding like a PC anti-racist ideologue, I must admit I also find the logic by which my esteemed friend absolves Gears of Wars somewhat bewildering. First he suggests that because race isn't central to the game (as I suppose one might argue it is in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, for example), the incidental racism is somehow less problematic: “the focus of the game isn't on race, its on liquidating aliens with strategy and reflexes.” He then goes on to claim that games which do focus attention on race as a defining feature of a character are not only inherently racist but crippled as games, because this self-consciousness draws attention away from what should be central, to wit, the game itself: “When race becomes something forced, we are drawn away from the organic construction of plot and we end up even more conscious of race than we were before." So racist stereotypes are OK as long as they are window-dressing, because the greater evil is a game obsessed with race. And that's bad, because it makes for poor gaming!?!

Strangely enough, I think he may be onto to something with that last point (see the rest of my argument below). But it's the invocation of Captain Planet as a supporting example for the latter point that really is a piece of rhetorical slight of hand unworthy of my worthy opponent. Because it at this point he cleverly shifts the argument away from the more contentious issue of whether the use of racial stereotypes is objectionable to the question of whether mandating an inclusive rainbow-palette of characters is desireable: "If Gears of War attempted to accommodate all possible races, all that would be accomplished is that even more races would feel objectified." There is no question that paint-by-numbers PC multi-culti casting saps all the energy from a narrative. One only need recall Katz and Dog, that execreble Canadian-content CTV sitcom of the early 90s which shoehorned every possible minority group into its cast, an impulse which found its apotheosis in the Asian guy in wheelchair. However, race is most often a defining feature of character precisely when it appears "accidental." Furthermore, I fail to see how the awfulness of "positive" representations of racial minorities legitimizes the use of negative racial stereotypes. And the argument that race-neutral characterization would raise the charge of "white-washing" does not seem to me a validation of the use of outrageous stereotypes. Nor does the assertion that stereotyping in games is equal opportunity--"It is a great leveling ground of culture, everyone and their mother is stereotyped"--mean that this is but a harmless quirk of the genre.

Now where the harm comes in is what I want to explore further. Because I don't think the worst racist stereotypes in a game are going to have much of an impact on the real world, in which racism figures large for much more intractable reasons. I think it is the video game as a genre that suffers the most. Racial stereotypes--positive or negative--are in most cases nothing but the lazy writer’s shortcut to characterization. Show me one game that is smart and aesthetically interesting in addition to being fun to play that rests on this kind of crappy characterization. In fact I think the Augustus Coles of the gameworld point to the fundamental weakness of most games on the market today—the writing still doesn’t count for much. Although most gamers are completely unwilling to accept anything less than state of the art visuals, poor writing doesn’t even raise an eyebrow in many circles. I don't believe there is anything intrinsic to the genre to prevent good writing, although it is undeniable that the ever present exigencies of game design have an impact on how games are written. However, there are many examples out there of thoughtfully constructed narratives: think, for example, of the 1,001 Nights-style metafictional twist underlying the first Prince of Persia. By the end of the game everything you have achieved is not only wiped out by the reversal of time, but also revealed to be but a part of the retrospective narrative hinted at in the voiceover and the opening cut scene, so that you the player are simultaneously positioned both as the Prince and as Farah, as actor/author and audience of the tale. And it's still fun to play!

My learned friend suggests that “we must recognize that Gears of War is an unfair representation of race and move on.” But surely, those of us who fall outside the 12-18 year old male demographic and prefer more artistically-crafted games might find a better strategy than simply “moving on”? I am one of those optimists who actually believes that games have the potential to become the next major art form of the 21st century. Why not respond to subpar writing critically—not stridently, through boycotts and so forth, but subversively. Why not use irony?

Gil Gerard is the shit!

I was recently reminded by someone who thinks deeply on all manner of topics of the wonder that was Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. One of several sublimely campy futurist/sci-fi TV shows of the late 70s/early 80s that featured gloriously hairy male leads, a shattered humanity searching for its remanants in a post-apocalyptic setting, and excessively tanned white-haired father figures, it has left its mark on the psyche of a generation. Thankfully, no one has yet dared to approach this masterpiece with heretical thoughts of a remake, the fate to which Battlestar Galactica has now been consigned.

Back then, men were men, robots were robots, and the women were uniformly outfitted in spandex jumpsuits, zipper agape according to their degree of sluttishness. Sure, humanity was screwed--the entire continental United States turned into an uninhabitable dustbowl by Buck's near descendents--but the path to salvation was clear: never listen to the advice of the old scientist dude, but do whatever the big dumb guy from 1987 suggested. Because at least he knew how to fly a spaceship and use a pistol.
Buck singlehandedly revitalized a culture languishing under the dominance of stroppy women like that space-slut Princess Ardala and slightly fey scientists like Dr. Huer (I'm not even going to talk about the outrageously gay Dr. Theopolis and his catamite Twiki). Even the relentlessly competent Col. Wilma Deering soon started wearing more midriff-baring "leisure" uniforms under the influence of his irresistible masculinty. In fact Ardala made several vain attempts to make Buck her mate, finding him to be "the most perfect male." And truly, who else but Gil Gerard could pull off outfits like these? OK, probably Dirk Benedict.

With the appearance of the Hawk at the end of season one, Buck was no longer the only man's man in the 25th century. The Hawk, like Buck, was one of a kind: all of his people had been hunted down by less enlightened humans. Once his wife had been "accidentally" dispatched by Buck they were free to roam the galaxy together in search of adventure.

Even the gay robots were more manly than our more recent incarnations of mechanical lifeforms. For despite the constant nattering presence of the mechanical brain to whom he was enslaved, Twiki suffered none of this wussy Data-esque identity crisis that all cinematic robots seemed to have developed at some point in the early 90s. It's unclear if this raw and gritty depiction of the post-1987 American landscape, both psychological and cultural, can be matched by any present-day auteur striving to enter into a modern intellectual dialogue with the polite violence of a radically feminized culture. We can only watch and wait.