Giving the People What They Want

So I haven't beaten Far Cry 3 yet, but I've made a good amount of progress with it. Enough to already get the central tension that the game is structured around. The setup goes like this: you, Jason Brody, and a few other of your rich white friends are on vacation, but when you go skydiving over the Rook Islands, you all end up captured by Vaas and his merry band of human traffickers. You and your brother manage to escape, but your brother is killed in the process. Now it's up to you to become a super badass in order to bring down Vaas and save your friends, which is mostly accomplished through copious amounts of tribal tattoos and drugs.

"I haven't done sambuca since I was twenty!"

The key element here is that you aren't supposed to project too much onto the player character. Jason Brody has a voice, a bit of a backstory, and a clear motivation which he frequently brings up, as would most people in a similar situation. So as you transform into a killing machine, your friends notice it. They comment on it, and they aren't awed by your presence and skills. They're deeply disturbed by it. An awesome car chase after you rescue your girlfriend, Liza, where you blow up pirates with a grenade launcher is seen by Jason as just that, an exciting experience. But all his cries of "Awesome!" and "Did you see that?"are met by Liza (the driver) recoiling at how he could find any of this fun. For her, this is a nightmare. For Jason you, this is a thrilling set piece with a brand new toy that gets you a bunch of experience points for new skills.

Again, I haven't beaten the game, so I can't say if there's a satisfying payoff for this conflict. I might have to revise what I say here if it manages to somehow mess it up beyond belief. But in any event, the fact that this is the defining conflict at all made me realize something. Though it might not be all the rage, deconstruction is very in vogue when it comes to popular entertainment. Two of the most popular game franchises, Assassin's Creed and the bro-iest of bro shooters, Call of Duty, use their latest installments to question what drives the people the player is fighting for. ACIII featured the most sympathetic bad guys of the series, and by the end of the game, the main character Connor is thoroughly dissatisfied with the way things have gone, but finds there's pretty much nothing he can do about it. Whereas the first Call of Duty: Black Ops felt mostly like a scenic tour of the Vietnam War, Black Ops 2's missions in the late eighties feel much more like a highlight reel of questionable American foreign policy decisions. Rather than pegging the villains as an amorphous blob of evil Russians, we're given a legit antagonist, who has pretty clear motivations and is sympathetic to boot.

The "bad guy" and his burned, crippled sister

To be sure, there are plenty of works that comment upon themselves, usually for the sake of comedy, and it isn't like deconstruction is anything new when it comes to fiction. But when you start talking about pop culture, that's where things get interesting. Because as I see it, the last year has seen a startling amount of self-aware works, pieces of fiction that attack themselves or even the viewer. Obviously, Spec Ops: The Line comes to mind, but it's definitely not the only thing, or even the most visible thing, to partake in this trend.

I haven't seen Cabin In the Woods, and before you start, yes, I know I should, but that isn't the point. I have read up on the plot and what it does, though, and that's enough to make it clear that the movie is almost explicitly about confronting the demands of the audience. A group of teenagers are herded to a remote spot in the woods to get offed one by one in order to satiate the demands of the Old Gods who will tear everything down if they don't get what they want. (Hint: That's supposed to be us, watching the film). The movie, which got a wide release and was fairly popular, was all about critically examining why we like horror movies and what we get out of all the slaughter. As good ole Film Crit Hulk puts it, "JOSS WHEDON AND DREW GODDARD JUST DROPPED THE FUCKING MIC ON THE HORROR FILM".

Django Unchained was a very interesting movie, and though I don't think it was Tarantino's best, it definitely isn't a bad film by any stretch, or even a mediocre one. And it doesn't resemble any of the other period pieces of the civil war, which try to present a more nuanced version of events. In this movie, you could count on one hand the number of white people in the cast who end up doing anything remotely noble. Every member of the aristocratic, slave-holding class is presented as an avatar of excess that uses genteel language and customs hand in hand with absolute brutality. And by the end of the movie, the black hero gets to kill them all in a rain of blood, tearing down the whole structure without regard for offending anyone's sensibilities. From what I've heard of it, Zero Dark Thirty, rather than simply glorifying the members of Seal Team Six and their actions, delves into how we got to that raid, and the numerous grey areas we had to go to morally to get the information. Rather than bland, easy heroism, it strives to depict a vision of reality.

As far as I can tell, the reasons for why this trend was so much more widespread last year than in years prior are twofold. First, we live in an age of unparalleled media saturation. Thanks to Netflix, direct download services like Steam and iTunes, and our good friend online piracy, it's now easier than ever to simply immerse yourself in stories, and doing this is enough to get one intensely familiar with the tropes and techniques writers employ time and time again. These works are successful because now so many people are familiar with them that the audience can be that much more responsive when someone decides to comment on them in depth. Going back to Tarantino, you could argue the roots for this were laid down with Inglourious Basterds, a film that took America's go-to bad guys, the Nazis, and used them to examine how violence in cinema can make us demonize entire swathes of the population and how war can bring out the worst in everyone, even the supposed "good guys".

Second, there's the fact that people now just aren't as responsive to the standard good-vs.-evil conflict as they used to be. In her review of The Fellowship of the Ring, the Nostalgia Chick points out that the movie, coming out on the heels of 9/11, presented audiences with a brand of escapism that was in very high demand. The good guys all look pretty, while the bad guys are genetically engineered to be evil. Fast forward ten years. Rather than the monumental struggle between the enlightened forces of good and the "Islamofascists" that Rumsfeld and Cheney were prepping for, we got to experience a slog, where the enemies didn't wear uniforms and the fact that we did just made us vulnerable. There was no caricature we could slap onto a poster and label the enemy. And it turns out we were willing to torture our captives too, not to mention engage in the same sort of bombing campaigns we were initially afraid of being subjected to. It's not hard to see how doubt could creep into the picture, and once those attitudes become imprinted upon the culture, it's not surprising they would seep into our entertainment as well. The world is a very different place from the way we would like it to look, so naturally, we're starting to get movies and video games that reflect that, that dare to ask why we'd even want it to look that way in the first place.


So naturally we're led to the next logical question. Why? What has led all these creators to produce works that are so much more self-aware and critical? I don't think you can just peg it down to cynicism, because that's not quite what we're experiencing. Rather than simply wanting to get to the core of these experiences just so they can conclude they're full of shit, all these films and games seem to be more concerned with getting to the roots of these genres and stories so that we can engage with them more meaningfully. They're a way of criticizing the culture from within, of indirectly asking what sort of people could find all this bloodshed entertaining on such a massive scale. They're a reaction to a reaction. The easy escapism offered by works after the attacks of September 11th was by no means unwarranted or even necessarily a bad thing. But it has become so widespread, and so easy to simply embrace it all the time without seeking more nuanced alternatives, that it's only natural that it would produce a backlash.

It's entirely possible that these movies and games are just another step in a cycle. Escapism will probably come back into vogue at some point, because there's always going to be room for giant robots punching things. But these works have come in such a dense concentration, and have been so unflinching in defiling the proverbial sacred cows of their genres and mediums, that there's reason to hope there will be a more lasting effect produced from all this. Maybe I'm still just playing my role as the eternal optimist, but I find it hard to believe that the democratization of information and creative tools could somehow lead to a dumber public, one less willing to appreciate nuance in their entertainment and culture.