The Westmount Review

Fanfic Saturdays: Postscript to Memento

(A word of warning: the following text was written in a state of sleep deprived stupor, and the author wishes not to be held accountable for the obvious lapses in taste that run through it.)

***

Memento is a hell of a film. It is - and I don’t think I’m exaggerating here - a genius meditation on the question of identity and memory, a filmic thought experiment that rivals the ancients in its audacity and thematic breadth.

It is overflowing with thought. It asks difficult questions that it never pretends to know the answers to. It gets down and dirty with phenomenology. What films deal with phenomenology? (A lot, actually).  But how many of those films have Carrie Anne Moss in them? (Four). But what films are this good? (The Matrix is arguably a better film.) 

Still: Memento is a great movie.

But the ending leaves a few too many questions unanswered. For one thing, the end is technically the beginning. And the beginning - actually the end - doesn’t leave us with much in the way of hints as to how Leonard Shelby’s life will turn out now that his long quest has reached its end. Now, smart viewers will argue that we ought not care for Leonard Shelby, for he is less of a human being than a monstrous engine for vengeance. They might simply also argue that I am missing the point, for whatever follows the beginning of the film does not at all matter in light of what is established at the end. But dumb, curious viewers like myself do not much care for such argumentative circumlocutions, and would very much like to know what Shelby has won for himself now that his struggles are over (or are they??).

So, in an attempt to make this Saturday pass more quickly, I’ve written out two additional scenes for the movie that would play as a postscript, after the film has ended. I think readers will agree that they lend the film some sorely needed closure. Without any further ado:

***

Scene 1 opens ten years after the beginning (a.k.a. the ending) of the film:

A bed. My bed. Honey? Her side of the bed… it’s cold. Footsteps! Coming from the bathroom! These are not her footsteps. These are heavy? 

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me. Your wife.”

“You’re not my wife. Who are you??”

(New wife steps in to the bedroom. She is grotesquely fat and quite ugly.)

“Your wife. For Christ’s sake, Leonard! You remarried after your first wife died and you lost your memory.”

“No I didn’t. I don’t believe you. How do I know what you’re saying is the truth? Also why would I marry someone who is grotesquely fat and quite ugly?”

“Do you think someone more attractive would put up with this every twenty minutes? Anyway, just look at your left forearm, will you?”

Left forearm? What is she talking about? A tattoo!

“Fact 7:

You have a fat wife.”

…

“Fact 8:

She’s allergic to shellfish.”

***

Scene 2 opens 2 years after Scene 1.

“Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery…”

What is this I’m reading? What book is this?

Ulysses

by James Joyce

Holy fuck! Joyce! How long have I been reading Ulysses? 

I’m on the 228th page. Holy shit. I’ve read 227 pages of this.

I don’t remember reading a single page. Also, I don’t have time for this! My wife is dead, and I have to avenge her murder! 

… Polaroids. Where are my polaroids?

(Shelby pulls out of his pocket a picture of Ulysses by James Joyce, the very same book he just threw across the room out of agitation. He turns it over.)

“Your wife has been avenged. You should really read more books now that your wife has been avenged. Also there are Pillsbury cinnamon buns in the oven. They should be done in like five minutes.”

Pillsbury cinnamon buns? Oh my god the oven!

Leonard Shelby runs to the kitchen. Fire is coming out of the oven, threatening to engulf the entire house. But he quickly forgets this, and gets swallowed by the flames.

The End??

***

On the whole, a much more satisfying ending. 

About 981,000,000 results (0.14 seconds)

My internet connection has been unacceptably slow recently. Among other things, it has made it tremendously hard to download the past 23 years’ worth of HBO television -  to the point of seriously making me consider quitting. Forget looking at pornography – I can barely check my e-mails. Quitting smoking wouldn’t be nearly as hard if cigarettes had loading times. Smokers would inevitably experience a moment of volition-induced doubt. “I don’t have to do this!” they would tell themselves. Just like I am right now, staring at a half loaded Facebook screen.

Some more judicious peculiarities have sprung from this occasion, however. Frequently pages will come up half-loaded, and perhaps it is a sign of my self-identification with the internet that I look upon these with the same sort of involuntary revolt as I would a nasty disfigurement. The Atlantic’s website short of a banner looks roughly like what I remember of that guy’s pulverized face in Irreversible. Google half-loaded looks like… well, actually Google comes out looking pretty much the same no matter what part of it is missing. Except some things stand out more. Like this:

“About 981,000,000 results (0.14 seconds).”

This is something I usually never notice. It’s pretty irrelevant, to me, how long it takes for Google to look up “age of capital hobsbawm amazon.” . So what is it, then, that compels Google – a massive conglomerate! – to conserve this archaic element of their page design?

Considering the bizarre, shrewd logic at the heart of many of their initiatives, I’m inclined to include it in with the other exhortations of their “Google is friendly and idiosyncratic!” refrain, which we see in their logos, in the April Fool’s jokes, which some London Review of Books writer rightfully explained as – and I’m misquoting out of memory, out of laziness, here – “conveying a glimpse of their ambition without frightening off its users.” Except in this case, it’s more like they want us to know what all these servers get us. What all the petaflops are worth. Why exactly they see fit to install a server bank in the Arctic ocean. As though we might be rooting for them. As though we’re all in this together – this being shortening the length of time necessary to search “age of capital hobsbawm amazon” down to 0.13 seconds.

Whether this is it, or if it’s just a cleverly roundabout way to dispel worries about cloud computing’s viability, it reeks of the idiotic technological optimism that we refer back to as justification for continued GDP growth in spite of continued GDP growth getting us smaller apartments and more expensive food. “Sure, this isn’t the best of times. Millions are starving – but could Louis XIV get 981 000 000 results in 0.14 seconds??” This is the same kind of thought pattern that makes people think that placing LCD TV screens in the metro is a good idea. Which it isn’t. It’s a terrible waste of TV screens, and resources more generally.

This was too ambitious a post for me to start at 1:00 a.m. It is now 1:27 a.m. I need to go to bed. So let me get to the heart of the matter: we’ve bargained out of our individual imperatives to embody as much of our culture as possible by instead embarking on a collective quest to see how far we can make our world resemble the science fiction settings of novels and movies. And that was good when there was much progress to be made, but the fact is that most of what we cheer on these days as technological growth is just smoke and mirrors. While we think we’re going forward, we’re effectively going backward.

I’ll return to this theme in the future. I have more elaborate, developed thoughts on it. But for tonight, this will do.

On coming to see Bob Dylan like grandma

The opening moments of post-collegiate life pretty quickly yielded a reshuffling of all the motivations I ascribed to human beings for their actions.

This is something I realized today, sifting through the small booklet I took out of the Kimono My House jewel case shortly after I popped the disc into my CD player. My reaction to band pictures – those carefully planned shots used by record labels as promotional material for new releases – has changed in such a bizarrely radical way that I have to assume it is reflective of a new understanding of humanity itself. What else could it be? Whereas I once treated musicians with endless admiration – one part human being, two parts pure beams of light – I can’t help but merely see them now as bros who figured out an excellent way to pass the time during their twenties. The ridiculous poses in the photos: this is an act they’re pulling, I think to myself now. This is their way of alleviating adult boredom. How did I ever see it differently?

It’s a lens that drops, one I wasn’t even aware was there, but equal in distortive potency to the logic of early childhood, when you looked at adults as infinite beings, benign mediators between you and a dangerous world of unascertainable dangers. At five, grandma seemed infinite, which is something that at twenty you’ll look back at embarrassedly, unaware that the same thought is now applied to Bob Dylan. That grandma is merely grandma and Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan doesn’t make the thought any less ridiculous. They’re both human, they’re both fallible; one is not driven by forces more godly than the other. But for some reason, short of certain formative experiences – most notably, that of being “out in the world” – I was incapable of seeing that.

It’s a thought that fits best when applied to our idols, but you can carry it everywhere: when the floor gives from under you, your old reasons for engaging in your pastimes almost seem inappropriate – as though conclusion B doesn’t follow from argument A anymore. You still spend money on food, but now more begrudgingly than before. You still drink, but now there’s a whole art to selecting the right occasion. You still play videogames, but for reasons more instrumental, less intrinsic. Neighbourhoods get coloured differently. Even girls don’t seem the same, now that the stakes are a lot higher.

On the whole this makes the whole world seem bleaker. But there’s an upside: the sharing in of the suspicion with the grown-ups who once gave me that you don’t get it look; the gaze I can now cast onto my successors, the ones who don’t get it. Armed with that fatal piece of knowledge, the world may appear free of all mystique or surprise, but at least you won’t get duped.

There’s more to be said on this specific topic – in particular, whether my old tendency to ascribe a character of inscrutable nobility, or at least intrinsic difference to musicians and artists is owed entirely to my own naivety, or rather if it’s a societal inclination, perhaps installed for the benefit of shrewd business-y types. But I’ll hold back for now. There’ll be endless opportunities to give the topic the Adam Curtis treatment in the future. 

On the narrator of Bastion

The old guy in Bastion: interesting gameplay conceit, but pretty terrible as far as representations of old people go. Here are some examples of what I’m talking about: he’s tough sounding. He’s passively confident. He consistently keeps his train of thought. These are traits you’re not liable to find in an old guy. He sounds like a black dude. This you’re also not likely to find. This is some pretty egregious misrepresentation. I can’t recall a single instance of absent-minded rambling or plaintiveness in the entire game.

So I get the sense that the head writer of Bastion maybe didn’t know an old guy. I also get the sense that not everyone on the Bastion development team knew an old guy, because otherwise they might have said something. This is not an outrageous presupposition: some folks never get to know their grandparents. Grandparents, let’s not forget, have a strong proclivity toward death.

But most likely, one of them has a granddad, and that granddad has friends. So the way I envision how the Bastion writing process went is that they all got together one afternoon and played solitaire and drank gin. Then, they all went back to the studio and set writing the old guy. You’ll excuse me if I don’t feel that that’s an adequate basis for forming an impression of an entire age group. The way you’re setting it up, a lot gets left out.

So my suggestion to Supergiant Games? Find more old people. Do more research. This is not difficult: go to a mall, and there should be a few sitting down on one of the benches next to the combination garbage cans/recycling bins. Listen in on their conversations, and jot down every observant or pithy thing that comes across in their narration. How many times they employ a proper turn of the phrase. The length of time they stay on topic. Etc. My guess is that they don’t do very much of those things. My guess, actually, is that they don’t do any of those things.

To all the game designers out there, for future reference, here’s how I prefer my old guys. They’d occasionally tune out, and you’d have to shake them back into shape. They could also fall asleep sometimes; in that case you’d also have to shake them. The Xbox 360 doesn’t come with motion controls, and shaking old people isn’t something you want to teach kids anyway, but you could still implement some left/right trigger stuff easily. That would do it.

Bastion, otherwise, is a pretty alright game.

Edit: Having better wrapped my head around the combat in the hour or so after I wrote this, I can start to see what earned Bastion such high placement on so many critics’ year-end lists. The game stores more depth than I initially thought.

On Game Criticism

If there is a governing impulse behind this blog, it is the wish to get involved in the current discourse on videogames. This, as far as impulses go, is a bizarre one – especially from the imagined perspective of serious people, doing serious things in the world – but as a young man who occasionally has elaborate thoughts on videogames, I’ve made my peace with it. Certainly, I entertain such thoughts on a great many things that deserve being written about, but that medium is one of the few where I consider my background to confer onto me some authority, and the only I feel I may make a meaningful contribution to. How unfortunate, then, that the more I read of this serious discourse, of what considers itself elevated discussion, the more I find myself repulsed.

Take this, for instance – a piece I came across while researching a pitch for Maisonneuve magazine. In it, Tom Bissell – a highly sought-after writer on matters relating to games, who has published in the New Yorker, and also a college English professor – attacks another member of Slate’s 2010 gaming club, Seth Schiesel (of the New York Times). In the midst of defending his opinion on which of 2010’s gaming releases were the best (a serious matter, to be sure), he says: “Look, I don’t imagine it was easy writing those early reviews for theTimes, and I know you have the highest-profile reviewing gig in, well, the known universe, but you’re dead wrong that “fun” is the point of video games. No, I say. It’s not. That’s a fallacy that grows out of this unfortunate etymological ensnarement the medium is stuck with. Games, for me, are supposed to be interesting or engaging, and can arrive there in any number of ways. But fun? Who cares about fun? This “fun” shibboleth is so often used to validate games’ overall lack of ambition.” And elsewhere: “Please, though, commentators, stop using Metacritic as the metric by which you demand we talk about something. It’s a scourge, emblematic of everything that is wrong with the world generally and video games specifically, and it must be stopped.”

I, as a rule, tend to avoid engaging in spirited polemics on matters where nobody’s life is at stake. I think this is a good rule. Let the topic be the foundational principles of liberal democracy and, ok: I’ll scream a few things, shoot a few glares – walk out maybe. But a discussion of videogames and their merits is inherently subjective, and incidentally trivial. This, for me, informs the debate to a significant extent. Had I, in this instance, been Tom Bissell, I would have approached the matter of responding to Mr. Schiesel differently. Perhaps something like: “Dear Seth, I appreciate your take on the shortcomings of our discourse. I respectfully disagree with much of what you say. While fun is certainly a crucial aspect of videogames, I do not feel the word encapsulates the whole range of feelings and experiences that the medium can, either already or potentially – with the help of our persistent nudges – convey.” But then, I happen to agree with Seth Schiesel’s arguments.

Impressions of Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

If I did not fully enjoy Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, it was not for lack of enthusiasm. I was once quoted by friends as saying that MI4 might force cinematic history onto a different track; that the era succeeding the movie would be incalculably different from the one that preceded it. It was going to make the Industrial Revolution look like last year’s Grammy awards. In light of the way the movie turned out, these statements now appear a bit foolish.

My blame rests on the disjointed narrative. Watching the film, I got the impression I was watching four or five episodes of a 60s serial, stitched together, with one of the middle episodes ending a season. You can almost overhear the script writers’ disagreement over the Jeremy Renner character, who at one point gets his personality made over. This, however, happens shortly after he pours himself a glass of scotch, so it’s conceivable that I merely misinterpreted what was in fact the character being drunk for the rest of the movie.

Still, the movie was good enough to keep me soundly entertained for roughly one hour and thirty minutes, and pleasantly bored for another thirty. I recommend people see it.

Random observations:

- Tom Cruise is no longer of Movie Star age, and nowhere is that clearer than on his chest. There’s something perverse about these saggy, shriveled pectorals of his that makes them impossible to ignore. You keep looking, like you would at a car accident (more on car accidents later). They are seen through t-shirts; they are seen in broad daylight, on a street in Moscow, completely exposed; they are seen repeatedly when Cruise is standing up, but they can be spotted sometimes when he is laying still. Most peculiarly, Cruise steps aside during the movie’s central set-piece, ceding the stage to the shriveled pectorals. They do very well, and I look forward to seeing them in Ms. Doubtfire 2.

- The abundance of car accidents, and the conspicuous absence of any car deaths. It has come to my attention, though, that this may merely be a trope of some kind. But a child reared on this film, Spike TV’s Crash Test and Modern Warfare 3 would come to believe that the safest place in the world is a car accident.

- The numerous iPads and iPhones, who deserve some place in the billing. The Apple product placement also lends itself very well to a drinking game. A word of warning: more seconds in the film featured an Apple device on screen than without. So consider beer half-shots.

- The bizarre last scene, in which the star’s messiah complex makes its grand entrance, as he  repeatedly bequeaths approving, holy glances onto the supporting actors, recruiting them into what could either have been just another mission, or Scientology. Could plausibly have been a mission to walk into a Scientology recruitment center.

- Again, the postscript, in which Cruise recruits his teammates into Scientology. Holy shit. Provokes the chilling thought that all future movies bearing a Cruise production credit will append its equivalent to their endings as well.

Erratum: A friend has pointed out to me that two people do indeed die inside a car over the course of the movie. But they are shot.

On Modern Warfare 3

Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is, nominally, about massive interstate conflict in the present day. This is true, in the same way that the 2012 GOP primaries are a respectable political process involving honest political figures. The game depicts the Third World War as fought between the United States and Russia, on a mostly Western European battleground, waged using bleeding edge military technology that mutilates terrain and renders individual combatants hopelessly diminished and humiliated.

You, the player, see this conflict unfold from the perspective of four individual combatants who are for the most part unexceptional, except that they are neither hopelessly diminished nor humiliated.  They, in fact, influence world events a great deal, more so than the politicians who run it. But even they do this mostly thanks to circumstance and an unexplained ability to regenerate bullet wounds and survive helicopter accidents.

The former device is narrative in nature, and frequently used in popular fiction in order to engage the spectator in what he is witnessing; its use is for the most part understandable. The latter fact – slightly less acceptable – is a gameplay conceit, implemented as a corrective for the level design, which has a knack for placing you in impossible situations: specifically, the kind that would be impossible to survive without such extraordinary abilities.

Presumably opposed to adjusting their missions to fit the limits of believability, the developers at Infinity Ward prefer straining the player’s suspended disbelief, especially when it means upping the game’s bombast. They insist that the game needed all those helicopter accidents, all those explosive near-misses, and all of those absurdly mismatched confrontations in order to be effective – bizarre, as the best entry in the franchise, Call of Duty 4, did just fine without too many of them. So in practical terms, this means that over the course of the game’s 15-20 levels, players will have learn to ignore such bizarre discrepancies as enemy soldiers placing several shots into their body, falling over after you’ve leisurely placed one or two in theirs. Some concessions are made to reality: crippled by the shots, your combatant must rest for a few seconds. But you are then fully healed, and could feasibly compete in the Olympics.

In the context of what the game aspires to be – visibly not so much Bad Boys II as The Wire – such lapses in realism are jarring. We forgive such excesses in games such as Gears of War 3 because they are about such things as football players in the far reaches of space, fighting off invasions of football-player sized subterranean monsters. The key fact is that these are not human football players, so their ability to regenerate bullet wounds may merely be a part of the game’s mythology. But in games whose appeal hinges on evoking reality – the Call of Duty franchise acceded to its present prominence in the videogame industry after changing its setting from WWII to the present day, and carving fictional missions that mirrored then-events in Iraq and Afghanistan – it has the unfortunate effect of repeatedly pulling players out of the game world, directing their attention to frustrating aspects of the game mechanics.

And frustrating they are. Frequently arbitrary, almost always manipulative, the game mercilessly slaughters players until they deduce what the developers intended them to do – which of the many pieces of nondescript debris to take cover behind; which of the completely extraneous buildings to duck into. What surface resemblance the game has with Doom – the classic first person shooter that set off many of the genre’s constants – is minimal compared to its inheritance from such quarter-crunchers as Dragon’s Lair ­– a game necessitating little of the player’s involvement as a series of animated scenes play out, occasionally resulting in the protagonist’s death, clueing the player in to the fact that some button press was required there. Then in goes another quarter. At least Infinity War is more forgiving: in place of a quarter, they offer players one of a handful of quoted truisms, pulled from the dregs of 20^th century aphorisms.

Unconfident in their audience’s ability to execute covert ops manoeuvres or navigate modern battlefields – or in their game’s ability to entertain without constant movement and distraction – the game puts you in the shoes of a more capable soldier’s subordinate, who instructs you when to cover, when to attack, and where to place explosives. Replace “cover”, “attack”, and “explosives” with “eat lunch”, “work”, and “the printer”, and you get an idea of what this feels like. Not so much a game as a carefully guided tour of 3D set pieces, Modern Warfare 3 is less enjoyable to play than stupefying to watch.

A concession: at a time where independent games are lauded for crafting intricate experiences that prioritize atmosphere and emotion over playability, it seems unfair to criticize Infinity Ward for doing much the same. What they accomplish with Modern Warfare 3 certainly outranks these games in terms of sheer spectacle; indeed, at one point the Eiffel tower explodes.

But Modern Warfare 3 doesn’t bring players to care about the Eiffel tower’s collapse. It, like all of the game’s events, happens because it was necessary for it to happen; there would be no Modern Warfare 3 otherwise. In other words, the game is plotted along its set-pieces: one imagines that the developers started with a small laundry list of landmarks to blow up, and then set about writing techno-babble to tie the explosions together. The plot reflects this: the geopolitics are nonsensical, the treatment of war is superficial, and the main characters even a little repugnant. Over and over again, the plot shifts in ways that would only makes sense if the world’s emergency diplomatic meetings were sponsored by Bacardi, and the law of gravity occasionally got tired and took breaks.

Driving the nail into the coffin, the explosive payoffs are never worth it. Players are forced to endure too many repetitive, poorly paced, humdrum action sequences. In the case of the Eiffel tower: a few bland skirmishes with Russian army grunts, a couple humvee chases, and some death-from-above bloodshed. Finally, a car accident - which provides a moment of comic relief when one of your co-combatants pulls your miraculously still-breathing target out of the wreckage, and repeatedly punches him in the face. Not content to leave well enough alone, the developers immediately throw you into another firefight.

In conclusion: is it fair of me to have expected a subtle or substantive treatment of war in the postmodern era by COD: Modern Warfare 3? No. But when one is dabbling in themes as rich as worldwide conflict; as war in an era of porous state boundaries, of weakened national identities, of state power undermined by a transnational capital class; of emasculated domestic authorities, drained of their powers by the impositions of international trade organizations; of fractured and disjointed reality, where causes previously thought worth dying for are revealed to be but shallow, unsupported beliefs generated by a specific communication and transportation infrastructure – an age of shattered illusions, of forms indulged in spite of their remove from reality – we can safely say that an opportunity was missed, and a few dollars were misspent.

Verdict? Meh.

(Note: I did not play the multiplayer.)