The Theater and Its Double

As the ten movies nominated for Academy Awards this year are announced, I have to say something about two front-runners: the popular favorite Avatar and the critical darling The Hurt Locker.

I've had some unkind words to say about the first movie, in a blog post that might get me into trouble with Sarah Palin with its title.

The Hurt Locker speaks more directly to my critical interests. It's a movie that treats the subject of the Iraq war, digital simulation, and online media representation in ways that invite analysis from a Virtualpolitik standpoint. The main character on the bomb detonation squad gets right into the zone of most physical danger and avoids interacting with improvised explosive devices from the recommended position of a computer-screen spectator and operator of a mechanical robotic prothesis. Yet he also loves playing violent videogames that facilitate the detachment and disembodiment that allow him to do his work dispassionately. In the periphery we see Iraqis with ubiquitous communication and recording devices that can turn threatening. There is even a reference to wanting to shoot the person ready to put the squad's situation on YouTube.

But The Hurt Locker isn't really about technology. It's about masculinity. And in many ways I thought it was an inferior film to the movie that won critical lauds last year: The Wrestler. Both movies are about the subcultures of particular professions that both express and contain violence in a hyper-masculine discipline. Both contain an isolated hero who is unable to connect to his mate or to his family members, because he is inexorably drawn back into his high performance, high adrenaline, virtuoso, risk-taking specialization. In The Wrestler, this profession finally kills him, but in The Hurt Locker we have a charmed man who seems to be unkillable, even as he gathers collateral damage all around him with the men in his unit. What makes The Wrestler a superior film is the tight control of its point of view and its tolerance of silence and uncinematic routines.

Similarly, Avatar and District 9 constitute a kind of pair. The latter, more interesting film presents aliens who aren't noble savages however and who have a more complex and less romanticized relationship to technology. Although both stories involve a hero going native, District 9 makes this metamorphosis much more tortured and also much less complete, because this transition is set against the historical conditions of colonialism and globalization rather than a mythic past or a utopian fantasy.

Less Than 24 Frames

As a card-carrying feminist, I know that I am not supposed to like Bond films, given the spectacle of sexism and colonialism that they present onscreen. But I do like them, and I usually enjoy shelling out for the movie ticket and the popcorn for even the most mediocre of the Bonds. I like the art direction, the stagecraft, and the graphic sensibilities of the film series, which is why Quantum of Solace was such a disappointment.

Lacking in gadgets, Bond isn't even a particularly imaginative user of a cell phone, which has become so important as a plot device in many other big budget films. And the film itself is almost unwatchable, with its rapid-fire hyperactive editing style, in which a twenty-four-frame second rarely goes by in viewing time uninterrupted by a cut that contributes to the overall incoherence of character and plot.

I'm always interested in how government information-gathering and surveillance is depicted in the popular media and how agencies of the state are depicted as users of computational technologies. What one would learn from this film about the cultural imaginaries associated with British secret intelligence is that apparently MI-5 has After Effects or some similarly overly designed digital effects program that emphasizes fonts and graphic doo-hickeys rather than the verisimilitude of actually interacting with the contents of a computer screen. As "M" interacts with a Microsoft Surface-style table computer and a variety of wall displays, the viewer is struck by the number of unnecessary dingbat flourishes that are depicted that have little relevance to actual human-computer interaction.

Of course, as these screen shots show, MI-5 and MI-6 both have official government websites. Although both services use information graphics in their web-based appeals to the public, the general aesthetic is clearly subsumed by the functionalism of the day-to-day computer-mediated labor of data mining and information representation that is so critical to their intelligence missions and which seems to functions in the realm of quotidian realism.

Nonetheless, in real life, one can still be hired as an "artworker" with the following surreal job description:

In many ways, this is an artworking job like any other. But you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that the ultimate purpose of everything you do is to protect the UK. You'll also benefit from very high-quality training in your specialist skills.

We're sure you'll understand that as an organisation that collects secret intelligence, we can't tell you a great deal about what you'll be doing. However, we can tell you you'll use the skills you've developed to produce computer generated artwork for print, web and media. You'll also have the chance to rapidly develop your knowledge of pre-press and printing techniques in a fascinating work environment, within our friendly Design and Print team.

Articulate, customer-focused and helpful, you'll be the ideal addition - particularly if you've worked in a Mac-based environment using Adobe CS and Quark XPress.

I like the fact that even spooks prefer Mac over PC.

The Machismo Institute of Technology

Yesterday I attended the movie Iron Man, since -- like any good student of computer-mediated communication -- I feel compelled to see any and all big-budget films about cyborgs. Unlike Transformers, in which the camera did not linger on the physical union of man and machine, what was particularly striking about Iron Man was its focus on what a girlfriend of mine euphemistically calls "scenery" or gratuitous displays of a muscular male body, albeit the middle-aged body of the lead actor. Often the footage could have served as evidence for the theses of critic Klaus Theweleit in the second volume of Male Fantasies, where he argues that masculine self-image depends upon "the bounding and maintenance of the self" in which the ultimate goal is to be transformed into a "man of steel." Although the hero of the film has several epiphanies about his own lack of emotional connection to others -- particularly women, he continues to be more strongly attached to fast shiny cars and torpedoes than to any potential mates.

Also noteworthy was how the plot line strongly associated MIT with the brand of hyper-masculinity depicted in the film, since we are repeatedly reminded that our hero is a graduate of that Massachusetts institution of higher learning. Other recent Hollywood movies, such as 21, have similarly shown MIT students no longer as nerds but now as active agents full of swagger and bravado. In the case of the Iron Man film, part of this has to do with the transmedia incorporation of reality-TV elements from competitive robotics shows, which often feature MIT graduates, students, and faculty.

Finally, the use of the digital effects program After Effects (or a clone) was obvious from the opening sequence onward, and a number of stock plot devices associated with this software repeatedly appeared in the film. These included computer screen-replacement shots of downloads of secret documents, heads-up displays, news graphics, and mobile targeting interfaces, which were all basic projects in the introductory course in After Effects that I took last year. This fxpodcast explains how one of the interfaces was conceived as a "character" in the film, as it provided overlays of 3D space in a visual grammar that both superimposed and subverted the conventional logic of the fixed screen. One of the effects houses that worked on the film, The Orphanage, has actually released free plug-ins for After Effects in the past that are based on tools that they developed as extensions of this popular proprietary software package for movie work.

In the Wrong on Donkey Kong

Yesterday I saw the documentary about videogame championships, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, which was a great portrait of elite communities of videogame players obsessed with classic arcade games like Donkey Kong and Pac-Man.

Since the hero of the film is a suburban father and middle school science teacher, it obviously debunks the stereotype that videogames are for disaffected anti-social teens. It also chooses footage that suggests there may be a link between the best players and the pathology of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). However, as I indicate above, by choosing an illustration from a mid-eighties Newsweek parody, the film doesn't go far in exploring the dysfunctional gender dynamics to which it alludes. Although the movie includes an eighty-something female Q*bert challenger Doris Self, the central showdown between the two male characters takes place in the context of a multiple dramas of masculinity, including another face-off involving the electronic scoreboard organization Twin Galaxies and players affililated with its rival, the more obviously misogynistic "Mr. Awesome," Roy Shildt. (My collaborator, friend, neighbor, and fellow feminist Jenny Cool is also a former Ms Pac-Man champion in Hawaii.)

In the game studies there has been a lot of interest in classic games of late. Ian Bogost will have a new book on Atari, and at conference you often hear people like Greg Costikyan talking about the appeal of process-intensive games, where the aesthetic pleasure takes place in active and strategic game play rather than cinematically representational graphics that encourage passive reception. Among producers of content, the current vogue for virtuoso competition involving 8-bit music or 64K computer animation indicates that sometimes less can be more.

Heidegger Goes the the Movies

I think I can feel pretty confident in saying that I was the only one in the movie theater last weekend watching the new Transformers feature thinking "What would Heidegger make of this?" And since my U.C.I. colleague Paul Dourish is on sabbatical, I would guess this is an even safer bet. But there was a lot in the movie from which I couldn't help but think of the author of "The Question Concerning Technology" and the twentieth-century German theorist famed for his philosophy of fundamental ontology. Unlike Jaspers, Heidegger argued that tools were never neutral. He also cautioned against accepting what he characterized as an incomplete "propositional logic" based on the subject-object relation, which he believed was the intellectual legacy of the superficial Romans rather than the authentic philosophy of the Greeks.

What does this have to do with a summer studio film about plucky teens and secretive government organizations and big alien robots that unfold from human conveyances like cars, trucks, and airplanes into still bigger alien robots? A lot, actually, since "revealing" and "enframing" are key terms in Heidegger's essay. When our hero first sees his car transform in a junkyard into his true anthropomorphic shape, it is presented as a quasi-religious experience. For Heidegger, of course, this is largely the realm of poetry rather than technology, because industrial tools in the nuclear age "challenge" nature and treat it as "standing reserve." The Heideggerian warning that technology can "enframe" human beings is made manifest in Transformers when cell phones, Xboxes, and soft drink machines envelope their owners and keep them captive.

Yet because Heidegger characterizes technology as a profoundly human, I think he would have trouble with the movie's back story in which Herbert Hoover's administration reverse engineers a century of computerized progress by working backwards from an extraterrestrial automaton and its power source.

Of course, in many ways this is a movie about the relationship between science, technology, war, and security. The military's use of remote dehumanized technology like the predator aircraft and of disguised devices like the stealth bomber were depicted in the movie uncritically. It's interesting to note the similarities between the emotional dynamics of the teens with their androids and a recent article in The Washington Post, "Bots on the Ground," about the affection that develops between soldiers and their robots in the field. (Clive Thompson also has some thoughtful commentary about the WaPo article.) I also thought that the theft of top secret computer files from a government facility using a flash drive also suggested real-world correspondences that were not flattering to the government.

Given the terrible reviews for Transformers, I was surprised to find myself enjoying several sections of the movie that depicted common digital practices, particularly when the robots explain that they learned English from the World Wide Web or when one of the sidekicks confesses to his government interrogator that he downloaded songs off the Internet. However, I did find myself irritated by two aspects of the way that cultural difference was portrayed. First, I was bothered by the implicit double Eurocentrism of a scene in which a heroic band of U.S. soldiers in a welcoming village in Qatar is put on hold by a call center in India when they are under attack by the hostile aliens, even if there were other allusions to globalization from Finland to Japan that made me chuckle. Second, I'm getting tired of the stereotype about intelligent African-Americans who can only lead lives of significance through virtual means, so that they only can acquire social power or technological authority through videogames. (A group of urban teens playing Dance Dance Revolution suggests that such young people do everything virtually.) This has become such a cultural cliché that it even appeared in the parody movie Snakes on a Plane when a young, black man lands the jet based only on his knowledge of Playstation2.

It's also worth noting that I've seen my local landscape under alien attack many times, since Los Angeles is often a prime target for displays of urban mayhem, so it is hard to be impressed, even though it's my home turf. As I watched the movie, I wondered how many stunts were shot live on location and how many were done with digital effects and composited image information. Certainly, I thought about the potential intellectual property issues of the future, particularly now that Manchester Cathedral is claiming copyright authority over the architecture of its sacred spaces. Will the City of Los Angeles complain if some filmmaker of tomorrow destroys it without even paying a single permit fee?

On final observation about the movie's website: it's a classic example of what Henry Jenkins calls a "transmedia narrative" that expands cinema into the realm of online games because it encourages visitors to enter the site through one of two game-like portals "Protect" and "Destroy," even though -- unlike a videogame -- the movie never really encourages its audience to play from the opposite side.

Update: I also feel compelled to point out that Transformers also had its own area in Second Life. There isn't much to see now, other than a few figures on a bridge, but a review of the full build is here.

The Immaterial Has Become Immaterial

This line comes from the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which I went to see tonight. It's ironic to see a movie from the Disney company that heroizes culturally subversive pirates and tells a story about taking on a giant monopoly, the East India Company. The initial sequence, which shows a range of citizens of different races, ages, and genders being persecuted for their sympathy with piracy becomes particularly ironic, given the company's history. If you haven't already seen it, check out this mash-up of Disney films made into a tutorial on copyright and fair use by Bucknell professor Eric Faden.

I thought that the depiction of Asia as a place for disordered and lawless sociality puppeted Orientalist stereotypes and that the Yellow Peril-style caricature of sexual danger to white women from Asian men played right into racist ideologies. Personally, I'd pick Chow Yun Fat over Orlando Bloom any day. I wonder how much of this China-bashing was seen as permissible, given the region's well publicized disregard for Disney's intellectual property claims.

I know that some free culture advocates are using the release of the movie as an opportunity to educate the public. Free Culture and Defective By Design held an event at one of the theatres showing the film in Boston to highlight parallels with net activist interests. You can see photos here.

In this week's Los Angeles Times cartoonist Berkeley Breathed explains how his joke about the director of Pirates went unintentionally viral thanks to a blogger at a book signing in "Is Gore Verbinski really 'sick of pirates'?"

Update: There's also another great Disney mash-up that has been made up to argue for the stance of documentary filmmakers, who often need clips from popular movies to illustrate essential points in their visual arguments.

Hereafter Effects

It may not actually have been After Effects, but the movie 300, which I finally got around to seeing tonight on what was probably its last weekend in theaters, certainly manifests many of the features of what I call the After Effects Aesthetic. Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to make it to this Tuesday's meeting of the LA chapter of SIGGRAPH, where I could actually find out precisely how its movie magic was made. The virtuoso visual effects exploited digital layering technology in every frame, so that even the spurting blood looked like it was pressed between plates of glass.

It was a stunningly bad cinematic experience, so I was happy to have something to focus on other than the abominable script and acting. Having taught Homer for many years, it's striking to see how the great author of the ancients presented such a humanized vision, even of the enemy and even of monsters. In contrast, 300 is all about fighting the racial and polymorphously sexual Other with a little eugenics and misogyny thrown in for good measure.

See No Evil

If you live in a large, metropolitan area, try to catch This Film is Not Yet Rated while it is still in theaters. Much of the film's subject matter may not be a surprise: the way that the ratings system operates in secrecy with a board of supposedly typical parents, the fact that in practice this system discriminates against gay and lesbian film-makers and censors portrayals of homosexual life and female pleasure, and the generally poor historical record of the MPAA on civil liberties, collective bargaining, economic competition, free culture, and the prevention of violence, particularly against women.

What's original about the film is the literal detective work done to reveal the identities of the MPAA's shadowy group of "mainstream" moralists, which is led by a registered Republican and Jack Valenti appointee. I thought the resourceful PI hired by the documentary-maker is really the heroine of the film. Hilarity also ensues when director Kirby Dick submits his film to the MPAA to be rated, and the board discovers that their names and images have been leaked to the public. Although the section on "piracy," isn't well integrated into the film, there's also some good Lawrence Lessig footage as well. Unfortunately, the MPAA's own unauthorized copying of this critical documentary didn't make it into the cut I saw.

If you're still in a hating mood about censorship, you can also check out the much cruder FCC FU video that was plugged this week on IP Democracy.