The Wonder Unicorn
Faced with headlines like this, the world is ready, I believe, for a story about a unicorn, and a little girl, and a hat, and a circus.
Dad is not the only storyteller in the Alcott family. This is by Kit (5). As difficult as it is for me to wrap my mind around the idea that my daughter, when, given the chance, thinks up stories about unicorns, little girls, and hats, and circuses, I cannot argue with the sweep and punch of the results.
Hollywood studio executives will no doubt note Kit’s grasp of the surprise twist ending. Not content with one, she here supplies us with two. Or three. Take that, M. Night Shyamalan!
UPDATE: Fox has just called regarding the rights to The Wonder Unicorn. They’re thinking of Queen Latifah as a streetwise, sassy unicorn and Evan Rachel Wood as the little girl.
some thoughts on why I’m doing this at all
scooterjockey writes:
“I understand this is a blog about the story of films – but for some reason with Spielberg movies, the movie can’t be judged on story alone. Obviously visuals are the cornerstone to every film (otherwise, we’d be satisfied with simply reading the stories) and few can match the perfection that Spielberg brings visually.”
The main body of Mr. Jockey’s comment is about the importance of John Williams’ music in Spielberg’s movies, but his preamble set off a chain of reasoning in my head that became too complicated to be confined to the comments margin.
There is no mysterious “some reason” that Spielberg movies can’t be judged on story alone. No movie can be judged by story alone. A screenplay is, as they like to say in story meetings, only a blueprint. The “meaning” of the movie may be consonant with the blueprint or it may comment on it, or contradict it. Visuals can compress, expand, redact, re-arrange, re-value, devalue and undermine whatever is in the script. The screenwriter is helpless before the primacy of the visual, and the smart screenwriter finds a director who more or less shares his vision and lets him do the job of bringing the screenplay to visual life — which involves changing things. As John Logan said about writing The Aviator (I paraphrase) “I learned that a crease in Leonardo DiCaprio’s brow says more than a page of description.”
Movies are, of course, about the visual. Spielberg’s movies, with their stunning images and masterfully choreographed action, tend to be more about the visual than others. (The reader will note that he is not putting his hand to his ear in the above photograph.) The visual fluency of Spielberg’s movies is so abundant and seductive that I can easily get caught up in a compelling camera move, a bit of editing, a spectacular effort of production design, a dazzling piece of choreography, and lose track of the blueprint entirely. The purpose of this series is to track the protagonists of Spielberg’s movies through the narratives of their respective movies, relying as much as possible on their simple actions, that is, “what they do” as opposed to “how they are shot” or “what is the cumulative impact.”
(Or, for that matter, “how is the music.” And let me just say right now that I’m sick and tired of people who are sick and tired of John Williams. What position for a composer to be in — his talent and sensibility are so well-matched to his director that people take him as a given and pretend to disdain him — “Ho hum, another score by John Williams.” Where would Spielberg be without Williams? More to the point, where does Spielberg end and Williams begin? That’s how closely married their sensibilities are, you can’t imagine Spielberg’s movies without Williams’s music and you can’t hear Williams’s music without seeing the visuals they accompany.)
(One thing I’ve learned, for instance: the “three-act narrative” has become such a rule of Hollywood development that anything else is looked upon with suspicion or dread, yet few of Spielberg’s movies have a three-act structure. His most popular movies have four, and some even have five.)
The purpose, for me, of this Spielberg series is specifically to examine the blueprints of his movies and figure out how they’re designed and built — before the dazzling visuals come into play. Since the dawn of my moviegoing days I’ve known that Spielberg’s movies work, now I want to know why they work.
Spielberg: Empire of the Sun
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Jim Graham is a boy living a pampered, sheltered life in a rather unusual circumstance — he is the son of well-to-do Britons in the suburbs of Shanghai in the 1930s. When the Japanese invade Shanghai in 1941, he is separated from his wealth, his privilege, his nationality, and most important, his family. His identity stripped away and his sense of self shattered, Jim looks desperately for an authority figure who will take the place of his family — in short, something to believe in, a leader to follow.
The structure of Empire of the Sun goes something like this:
ACT I (0:00-27:00) We see Jim in his environment, among the wealthy, transplanted Britons and their strange, insulated lifestyle. We know that their days are numbered, and if we don’t, Spielberg lets us know by sending Jim to a Christmas costume party where one grownup comes as Marie Antoinette and another comes as Death.
Jim, we see, like Donna Stratton in 1941, has a fetish for warplanes — he admires their power. We will come to find that Jim admires power for its own sake — part of Jim’s story how he learns to survive, like the ancient Italian whoremonger in Catch-22, by surrendering to whoever seems to be in power at any given time. Aircraft, for Jim, are always a symbol of a greater power — this he shares, of course, with Roy Neary in Close Encounters.
At the close of Act I, in Spielberg’s most sophisticated crowd-mayhem setpiece yet, Shanghai is invaded by the Japanese and Jim is separated from his parents and his lifestyle.
ACT II (27:00-1:02:00) This multi-part, complicated act involves Jim’s journey from wealthy British expat to prisoner of war. Separated from his parents, he returns home, assuming they will meet him there. Instead of finding his parents, he finds his servants looting the place. When he challenges them he receives a slap in the face. He stays in his house until he runs out of food, then ventures into the city as the Japanese occupation takes hold. He tries to surrender to the Japanese army, who laugh at him. He is chased through the streets by a teenage orphan boy, who is unnamed but who isexactly the right age to be a grown-up Short Round from Temple of Doom.
(Most of the direction in Empire of the Sun is fresh, daring and a new page for Spielberg, although he does occasionally overstate a beat or rely on his fluent shooting skills to turn an action beat into a visual gag. In Act I, Jim doesn’t just have one or two plane hanging from his bedroom ceiling, his room is festooned with model planes, and they all move in the breeze. In the brilliant Shanghai sequences, when Jim is chased by Short Round, Spielberg cannot resist an off-tone do-si-do on a crowded street of rickshaws. And when Jim walks past the local movie theater, they are, of course, showing Gone With The Wind.)
Jim tries to find other Brits, is refused by the Japanese and is threatened by the locals. He is eventually found by Frank and Basie, a couple of American black-marketeers. He is, at first, seen as valuable for sale or trade, and Jim embraces his status as commodity in this new reality as eagerly as he embraced his status as rich-kid. Jim, in his desperate search for authority, has an unerring eye for figuring out who is in charge. If heartless capitalism is in charge, well then, he’ll be a happy commodity and strive to be a worthy commodity.
The locals don’t want to buy Jim as a slave, and Basie is about to cut Jim loose when Jim, facing another loss of an authority figure, quickly sells out his birthright, advising Basie to loot his home in the suburbs. His home, in his absence, has been taken over by the Japanese and he, Basie and Frank are taken prisoner.
Jim is relocated to an internment camp, where he meets the Brits he knew in the suburbs now reduced to refugees. They are shattered, but Jim, taking his cues from wily capitalist Basie, learns how to live in this environment. When it comes time to be transferred to a larger camp, Basie is ready to give up Jim in a flat second, and Jim has to figure out a new way to scam a ride.
And somewhere in this part of the movie I jotted down in my notes “fiercely committed performance from Christian Bale.” Indeed, you watch Bale’s performance in this movie and you have no trouble imagining the man who will eventually go on to do American Psycho, The Machinist and Batman Begins.
ACT III (1:07:00-1:37:00) At the Soochow Internment Camp, adjoining a Japanese airfield, we see Jim mastering the system, playing every conceivable angle to ensure his survival. He steals, trades, gambles and gets by on pluck and charisma. This, in his mind, makes him an American. The Brits we focus on, a doctor and Mr. and Mrs. Victor, the despairing couple with whom Jim shares a room, are too wrapped up in their cultural identity to bend much with their new circumstances. They refuse to bow to their Japanese captors and wilt under the humiliation of their reduced lives. The Americans, meanwhile, are full of energy and vigor, brimming with optimism and plans.
Meanwhile, across the street, so to speak, Jim is lured by the lives of the Japanese pilots, who might be flying off to their deaths, but at least they are committed to what they see as greater power, a fate Jim sees as ideal.
Jim also witnesses Mr. and Mrs. Victor making love, an early Spielberg stab at shooting an adult, realistic sex scene.
At the climax of the act, Jim negotiates a supposed minefield to capture a pheasant for Basie. The pheasant goes uncaptured and Jim survives the errand thanks to a fellow plane-crazy adolescent from the Japanese airfield, but Jim’s skill in negotiating minefields is already well established by this point in the narrative. For his survival skills and wiliness, Jim is granted admittance into the American barracks.
ACT IV (1:37:00-1:57:00) No sooner does Jim gain admittance into the American barracks than his father-figure Basie falls from grace. Caught stealing the camp commandant’s soap (that Jim stole for him), Basie is beaten and hospitalized, his possessions stolen by his fellow Americans — a clear argument against the limits of capitalism. When you’re on top, everything is great, but when your employees sense your weakness they will become your competitors and rip you off without a second thought.
Against this, the Kamikazes training next door seem more honorable and enticing than ever to young Jim. His teen pal from the airfield is getting ready to go on a bombing run when the American Air Force shows up, and Jim’s allegiance instantly shifts again to the force with the superior air power. He’s ready to embrace the attacking airplanes even if it means getting blown up. At the height of the American bomb run, the British doctor snaps him out of his delirium and Jim suddenly realizes that he doesn’t remember what his parents look like — his search for an authority has erased from his mind the most basic authority of all.
ACT V (1:57:00-2:25:00) The war over, the again-homeless Jim heads back the British barracks and the sad, tired Victors. His experiences have left him utterly confused about what is important — family, country, ideals, home? (It’s telling that Jim, born in Shanghai, has never seen the Britain everyone tells him is his home.) And it’s to Spielberg’s credit that he doesn’t offer an easy answer — every solution to Jim’s problem comes with its own difficulties.
The camp commandant flees, the teen Kamikaze next door can’t get his plane off the ground, Basie vanishes and the British trudge like sheep toward the city. Jim throws the suitcase that bears his name, and contains all his identity, into the river. None of the authorities Jim has pursued have turned out to be up to the task.
The Brits arrive in an abandoned stadium, where all their precious belongings are being stored like a ruling-class yard sale. Jim finds his family’s limousine and camps out there with the ailing Mrs. Victor. Mrs. Victor dies in the night and Jim awakens to see the flash of the atomic bomb — the ultimate authority in this conflict, which Jim mistakes for Mrs. Victor’s soul ascending into Heaven. In that moment, Mrs. Victor, who symbolizes Britain, Mother and sex object for Jim, is consumed by death, fused in his mind with the unanswerable power of the dawn of the atomic age.
His identity annihilated and with nowhere else to go, Jim heads back to the internment camp where, unexpectedly, supply canisters drop from the sky and Jim finds himself in a world of plenty. In a mirror of Act II, Jim, at home in this place of homelessness, rides his bike around the deserted camp, picking up chocolate bars, cans of milk and cartons of cigarettes. He meets up with his Japanese Kamikaze friend, who is killed by Basie, who has come back to loot the camp and move on. He tries to bring the Kamikaze back to life, assuming, for a moment, the authority that he’s been searching for throughout the movie. Soon the American army shows up and Jim gratefully “surrenders” to them.
Shortly thereafter, Jim is reunited with his parents at an orphanage. They don’t recognize him at first and he doesn’t recognize them at all. What would ordinarily be a crushing Spielberg moment of reunion is undercut, both by Jim’s loss of identity and by his newly-won skepticism. Confronted with his mother, he inspects her, rather like one would inspect a gift horse, touching her lipstick, scrutinizing her hair.
At the end of this, Spielberg’s most complex, most ambitious, most daring, least sentimental movie yet, Jim is restored to “his place,” as the son of a wealthy British family, but in another sense he will never be the same, and the final shot is of his suitcase, still adrift, in the harbor of Shanghai.
Strange things found on YouTube
My monologue “Television” continues to burrow its way into universe in strange and unpredictable ways.
some more thoughts on video games and their relation to other media
My son Sam (6) is a natural-born movie buff, and that is a good thing. His younger sister, Kit (5), not so much. Sam wants to know how movies are made, how effects (both narrative and special) are achieved, how “they get it to look that way.” Kit is attracted to characters.
I’ve tried to carefully manage my kids’ exposure to movies, not so much to keep them ignorant of subversive material but to present a canon: Star Wars movies are good, Barbie movies are not. Justice League is good, The Wiggles is not. Pixar is exceptionally good, other studios require a more project-by-project assessment. The purposed end result of this cultural editing is that, when they become old enough to choose their own entertainment, they will be able to recognize quality over crap. I also want them to have an understanding of movie history and be able to appreciate older movies (like, you know, Raiders of the Lost Ark).
(And while I’ve stopped, let me just add that, by and large, our kids have developed very good taste. Left to their own devices, they have chosen Wonder Pets, Spongebob Squarepants, Jimmy Neutron and Fairly Oddparents as their televisual entertainment, all of which are pretty good shows.)
Here’s the thing: as we move into the 21st century, an idea is, increasingly, no longer being conceived of as “a book” or “a movie” or even “a TV show.” Instead, an idea is a piece of “intellectual property” that can begin as almost anything and is not deemed worthy of widespread distribution by major media outlets unless it can be a movie, preferably a series of movies, a TV show, a video game, a website, a children’s book, a theme-park ride, a line of toys, a brand of furniture, a clothing label and a school of architecture.
This has been happening, of course, since the beginning of time. I’m sure that soon after a caveman drewa picture of a mammoth hunt on a cave wall, another caveman copied the images and printed them up on cheap t-shirts. The rule seems to be, it doesn’t matter what the origins of the idea are, if an idea is worthy it will eventually find its proper expression and that expression will dominate the public’s understanding of the idea.
An example: Gone With The Wind was a huge bestselling novel when David O. Selznick decided to turn it into the most popular movie of all time. But how many people who went to see the movie had also read the book? One in five? One in ten? And in the ensuing 70 years, of all the untold millions of people who have watched Gone With The Wind, how many have read the book? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? Say “Gone With The Wind” to people, and the image that comes to mind is not this but this. The same could be said for Jaws, The Godfather, the James Bond series, Mary Poppins and The Bourne Identity. They were popular books before they were movies, but the movies made were so definitive that it’s hard to imagine someone reading the books and not seeing the movie playing in their head while they read. The movie adaptations have supplanted the source material in the minds of the public.
Superheroes present another interesting aspect of the adaptation question. Superman, for instance, was a huge hit right out of the box on comic-book racks, but the radio show was also a huge hit, and many aspects of the character, including the “faster than a speeding bullet” line, were written for the radio show, not the comic book. The Max Fleischer cartoons lent more aspects to the character, then the George Reeves TV show, on and on, until one would be hard-pressed to find the “original” Superman — is Superman, in the minds of the public, a comic book, a daily strip, a radio show, a series of animated shorts, a live-action serial, a TV show or a movie series? When the average person thinks of “Superman,” do they see Joe Shuster’s squinty-eyed drawing, or George Reeves, or Chris Reeve, or Brandon Routh, or one of the other dozens of Supermen who been drawn by various DC artists down through the decades? A similar question arises with Batman. At the word “Batman,” do you see Bob Kane’s Batman, or Neil Adams’s, or maybe Jim Lee’s? Do you see Adam West, Michael Keaton, Christian Bale? (And how many people think of George Clooney? I mean as Batman?)
About a year ago, I showed Sam Star Wars and he became an instant fan. And almost immediately he was able to play the Lego Star Wars video game. And after a hundred or so hours of playing the Lego Star Wars video game, he would watch one of the Star Wars movies again and find himself in an occasional state of mild cognitive dissonance because, well, the movie diverged from what he knew from the video game. On some level he understands that Star Wars was a series of movies “first” and that the video game sprang from the movies, but at the same time he doesn’t necessarily accept the movies as the “official” version of the story.
And Kit? Forget it. She’s too young to grasp the video game and she’s gotten her Star Wars history piecemeal and out of order. She’s watched Sam play the video game quite a bit more than she’s watched any of the movies, and as far as I can tell, she sees no reason to differentiate between the two. They’re the same characters, presented differently, with different “looks” to them, but I honestly couldn’t tell you if, when I say “Darth Vader” Kit sees this or this.
I’m not really fearful that Star Wars will be supplanted in the public’s imagination by its video-game spinoffs (or James Bond, or The Godfather), but I dare say that, at some point in the future there will be some movie that works okay in its own right but works like a motherfucker as a video game. And the title will then be remembered that way. And I think that event will come to pass, honestly, before the opposite happens. That is, I think that the gaming business will develop a video game that presents a better expression of an idea than the original movie sooner than Hollywood will figure out how to make a half-way decent movie out of a video game.
Take Doom, for instance. Great game, and seemingly made for cinematic adaptation. A foolproof conceit — a man alone in a terrifying scenario, a kind of I Am Legend in space. When I first played Doom back in the late Cretaceous Period, I heard they were planning a movie starring Arnold Schwarzeneggar and my heart raced with the enormous possibilities of such a movie. But the eventual movie of Doom, starring the better-than-Schwarzeneggar-ever-was The Rock, was a dramatic non-starter — it utterly failed to establish its own identity as a property — that is, to take the idea of Doom and make it its own. It got across none of the game’s visceral terror and it added a bunch of crap on top of it that had nothing to do with anything. And I would say the same for Mortal Kombat, Tomb Raider, Street Fighter, Resident Evil and, yes, even Super Mario Bros. So while Half-Life is a great game, by any standard (I just played it again — ten years later it still kicks ass), the only thing Hollywood could hope to do with Half-Life is shorten it and give it slightly better production values.
In other words, weep not for the troubled Halo project — it’s just going to be a bad movie of a great game. But keep an eye on, say, Juno, the Video Game.
iTunes Catch of the Day: Portishead
Portishead has a new record out.
The reader will be forgiven for one of the following responses:
1. Portishead? What the hell is Portishead?
2. Portishead? They’re still making records?
3. Portishead — I think my Mom listens to them.
4. Portishead, yeah, I remember liking them — when Bill Clinton was president.
Twelve years is a long time to go without putting out a record. But one of the things I’ve always liked about Portishead is that they don’t seem to give a rat’s ass about being successful. And it’s one thing for bands to stay “indie” by downscaling their operations and staying closer to their (limited) audience, but it’s something else again to simply refuse to play the game, to pack up ones samplers and go home. In a way it’s kind of the ultimate cred move — smooth move, Portishead, playing the “integrity card.”
Anyway, Portishead has a new record out, and it’s called Third, and it’s wonderful. It’s quickly becoming my favorite record so far this year (step aside, Raconteurs, R.E.M., Rolling Stones, et alia).
A band that takes twelve years between albums would be forgiven for becoming irrelevant, dusty, twee or marginal in the lapse (I’m looking at you, XTC) but Portishead simply picks up where it left off and moves forward. The record everything one would want from a Portishead record, and then more. It is startling, eerie, moody, catchy. It is simultaneously more “live” than their first two records and more artificial, more contrived. (Am I the only one who prefers the live versions on their Roseland NYC album to the studio versions?) The arrangements are more adventurous (a mandolin even pops up on one tune, with Gene Autry-style cowboy harmonies), the tempos more diverse, and there are some stylistic experiments so surprising that I’ve had to stop several times to make sure that what I had heard was intentional and not some download glitch. The tension between the druggy electronic backgrounds and Beth Gibbons’s keening vocals is as alive and disturbing as ever. If popular music has moved on from where Portishead was in 1996, well, I was never too interested in popular music anyway.
Note: while this post is filed under “iTunes Catch of the Day,” I actually downloaded Third from Amazon, where it was two dollars cheaper. This was my first time downloading from Amazon, and I am happy to report that the Amazon download program is fast, efficient and problem-free — unlike eMusic, which is cheaper but is, frankly, is a pain in the ass.
My Iron Man
After working on Astroboy and Wonder Woman, for many years I was “on the list” of writers consulted for every comic-book movie that came down the pike.
When the Iron Man people asked me for a take on their then-aborning project, I took a jaunt to my local comic-book store to look for source material. This was quite a few years ago now, and, as hard as it is to believe, there was almost no Iron Man material in the stores. The only readily-available collection was The Power of Iron Man, an important, ground-breaking story arc that dealt mainly with Tony Stark’s alcoholism.
So I said “All right, whatever you say. Alcoholic superhero. Let’s go.” This is the pitch I came up with:
Tony Stark is an arms manufacturer. He’s a heel and a creep, but somewhere deep inside he’s still human. He brings death and destruction to the world, and it’s beginning to corrode his soul. He turns to alcohol to dull the pain. Caught in the jaws of the capitalist beast, he can only press forward and continue producing death. He has responsibilities to his corporation to keep moving forward, but he’s cracking under the strain and alcohol, he thinks, will hold him together.
His alcoholism progresses to the point where he starts having blackouts. What he doesn’t know is that, when he is blacked out, he becomes Iron Man. Iron Man is, essentially, Tony Stark’s conscience, fighting against the very machine that Tony operates in his non-blacked-out hours. Iron Man works as hard to dismantle Tony’s company as Tony does pressing its agenda. Tony even gets the idea to create War Machine, a “waking Tony” creation designed to fight Iron Man, never realizing that he is, himself, in fact, Iron Man.
So I thought “Well, an alcoholic superhero, I don’t think we can sell that to an audience, but a superhero who is his own supervillain, we haven’t seen that yet.” And I pitched my take to the producer who had sent me The Power of Iron Man and his instant reaction was “Are you crazy? We can’t make a movie about an alcoholic superhero!” And that was the end of that.
(The idea of an alcoholic superhero, of course, didn’t seem so outrageous to the producers of Hancock.)
So they went and made an Iron Man movie without me, and it turned out very well. Tony drinks a lot in the movie, but they never point to it as a “problem,” which I think is the correct approach. The plot coincides with my pitch insofar as it hinges on Tony’s growing realization that he is not making the world a better place by manufacturing ever-more sophisticated weaponry. He doesn’t become schizophrenic, rather, he fights Obidiah Stane, his corporate officer and gets bounced out of his own company. It’s a lot of the same ideas, but more elegantly and organically presented. As far as superhero movies go, it’s pretty sophisticated stuff and a cracking good time. It is both a geek-fest and a good “entry point” movie: it’s filled with Marvel in-jokes but also manages to stake out its own identity. This is all very hard for a hugely-expensive movie to do, which makes Iron Man all the more impressive.
The crowd for the screening I attended was more pumped for this movie than I’ve heard a crowd be pumped for a movie in a long time. They hooted and hollered, shouted and sang as the lights went down. The only thing that got them more excited than Iron Man was the trailer for The Dark Knight which received cheers and a round of applause. Iron Man completely delivered to this crowd, a movie about a gearhead, made by gearheads, for an audience of gearheads. I mean that as a compliment.
I would say to be sure to stay until after the ending credits, but if you’re the sort of Marvel Geek who is rushing out to see the movie today you probably already know that.
Wonders never cease
click to enlarge.
Who doesn’t like chocolate? Not me! I love chocolate!
Who doesn’t like bacon? Nobody, that’s who! Everybody loves bacon! Pigs love bacon! If I was a pig I would regularly undergo belly surgery so that I could have an endless supply of bacon.
From the dawn of civilization, people have eaten chocolate, and also bacon. Why, oh why, has it taken from then ’til now to put the two together?
My wife brought home this curious artifact today, “Mo’s Bacon Bar,” described as containing “applewood smoked bacon, Alder wood smoked salt, and deep milk chocolate.” My son Sam (6), who sees absolutely no reason why bacon and chocolate should not commingle, dove right in and rushed to be the first to try this new confection. I followed suit, and Mom, more out of curiosity than craving, took a small piece.
It’s seems odd to say it, but it tastes exactly like bacon, and chocolate. As though you had, perhaps, a piece of bacon and then a little square of chocolate. Or perhaps a thin square of chocolate, then a thin slice of bacon, then another thin slice of chocolate on top, a little chocolate-and-bacon sandwich. Neither flavor overpowers the other — you don’t say “You can really taste the bacon!”, it’s actually rather subtle. And chocolatey, and bacony.
On the back of the package is an essay by the treat’s inventor, explaining herself. As well she should.*
For more information on chocolate and bacon, consult your local library. Or go here.
*Thanks to
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
for pointing out that, although the name “Mo’s Bacon Bar” led me to believe the inventor was a man named Mo, the inventor of this confection is, in fact, a woman. Named Katrina. Go figure.
Story structure: it’s not just for movies anymore
It is 1995 and I have purchased my first PC.
A friend of mine tells me about this game Doom that is the wildest, scariest, freakiest, most addictive thing he has ever encountered. I happen across a free shareware version of the game at Staples and think “What the heck, I’ll try it.”
The next 24 hours or so are a blur. I’m aware afterward that my arms hurt from working the keys so frantically for such an extended period of time, but otherwise it’s just me and the game.
Shortly thereafter, the folks who made Doom also make Quake, a game where you play, um, some kind of soldier, again trapped in some kind of weird science-fiction world where hideous, stomach-turning monsters wait for you within ingeniously-designed castles and laboratories and whatnot. Quake is somewhat more imaginative than Doom, features monsters ranging from angry knights to exploding blobs of blue protoplasm, has weapons like a nailgun and some kind of lightning-shooting thing, and a dense, suffocating score by Trent Reznor. Again, you’re given no explanation as to who you are or why any of this is happening. Again, you’re on your own, abandoned, left to figure things out for yourself. Instead of getting to a room with a button, you move from “slipgate” to “slipgate,” a kind of teleportation pad that takes you to the next level. Somewhere in there it’s mentioned that this “slipgate” technology is the key to the whole situation: some military scientists (I think) have developed this teleportation device to transport equipment from place to place and in the process have accidentally opened a portal to another dimension.
And time goes on, and Doom and Quake have many, many sequels and spinoffs and ripoffs and imitations and I enjoy playing a lot of them.
Then along comes Half-Life. It’s only a few years later (1998) but it feels like a hugestep forward in gaming. After five minutes of Half-Life, Doom and Quake and their progeny feel crude, silly and pointless. In Half-Life, you fight your way through recognizable spaces with specific purposes, offices and hallways and research labs. The creatures you’re fighting are just as horrifying as those in Doom or Quake, but there is an unnerving psychology to them — they don’t merely attack, they think and scheme, lay traps and panic. You have friends and allies, clear goals and specific, logical destinations and a complex motivation.
Half-Life is hugely involving, much more so than the earlier games, a whole world to get lost in, and I am playing it for two weeks before I realize that it has, essentially, the exact same plot as Doom. You’re on Earth, sure, and you’re a scientist instead of a soldier, but otherwise the games are the same — hideous monsters appear out of nowhere because, yes, scientists have developed a teleporter that has accidentally created a portal into another dimension.
I am dumbfounded — the two games are conceptually the same to the point of copyright infringement, but feel completely different. How has Half-Life managed to do this?
The difference, it will not surprise readers of this journal, is story structure. In Half-Life, you’re not an anonymous grunt, you’re a specific person with a specific purpose. You’re not in some formless, pointless structure, you’re in a detailed, recognizable space, one you can relate to, a place with filing cabinets and worn linoleum tiles and a dropped ceiling and soda machines and telephones. This makes the monsters more disorienting and terrifying — they seem to be as frightened of you as you are of them, the difference being that they shoot lightning out of their hands to defend themselves.
You work your way through the thrilling, terrifying, underground, Area-51-type research lab known as Black Mesa with only one goal in mind — get upstairs. You are repeatedly told that your only hope for survival is to get to the surface. The drive to move ever upward becomes paramount, and the suffocating sense of being trapped in an underground complex with these horrible creatures becomes unbearable.
Finally you reach a freight elevator that will take you to the surface. Marines are there to rescue you — hooray! You made it! The game is over!
Except it’s not. No, it turns out that the marines aren’t there to rescue you, they’re there to kill you — they’re there to kill everything in Black Mesa. And they may not look as scary as the monsters from the other dimension, but they’re twice as smart and they don’t get confused.
And you realize — the difference between Doom and Half-Life is that Half-Life has a genuine plot, an ever-unfolding mystery that gets weirder and more frightening as the game goes on. Doom is a great game, but Half-Life is a great narrative. It’s like a movie and you’re in it, influencing the plot and at the center of the action. There’s a sense of unspooling narrative that simply isn’t present in Doom, and every time it seems like the drama cannot escalate any further, it does, in frightening and unexpected ways. The other characters have differing personalities, the fights have different structures and brilliant choreography.
You fight marines and monsters on the surface and through the labyrinthine passageways of Black Mesa, and finally you come to the secret of the catastrophe, the teleporter complex that started it all. For the second time, just when you think the game is ending, it takes another unthinkable twist — you must now go through the teleporter, alone and unarmed, to the alternate dimension to destroy whatever intelligence is sending the monsters through. Youthink this might be a single “boss” level, but no, it turns out it’s a whole new world that goes on for another whole third of the game. And you realize that Half-Life has, in fact, a classic three-act structure. Act I is “get to the surface, help is on the way” Act II is “help is your enemy, you’re on your own,” Act III is “stop running and face the evil.” The “twists” are a-line action-movie caliber, and there’s even an end-of-Act-II “low point” where you realize you have to leave your dangerous-but-recognizable world to fight monsters in an alien landscape with its own rules and physics.
I walk around in a daze after playing Half-Life and I realize I’m living through the birth of a new medium. Just as movies began as novelties shown before “real” entertainment, or as nickel entertainments in amusement arcades, well, that describes the early days of gaming as well. Movies went from Train Arriving at a Station to The Great Train Robbery in twelve years and from the 15-minute Great Train Robbery to the maximum-opus Birth of a Nation in seven. Gaming started with Pong and Pac-Man in the 70s and got to Doom in the 90s, then Half-Life a mere four years later. If Half-Life is the Birth of a Nation of gaming, that means that the Gone With the Wind of gaming is still in our future, and the Godfather of gaming as well.
Young screenwriters take note: you may be working for the wrong medium. Apply your storytelling skills effectively to the medium of gaming and the world will appear at your doorstep.
As for me, my gaming education pretty much ends here. I’ve played the staggering Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 and Quake 4, but I don’t own an Xbox or Playstation or even a Gameboy. I suppose as my children age that situation will change. I invite my gaming readers to educate me in my future choices.
Spielberg: The Color Purple
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Celie, the impoverished, helpless protagonist of The Color Purple, begins the narrative by having her child is stolen from her by a cruel, oppressive man. By the end of Act I, her sister is driven away from her by a different cruel, oppressive man. Celie, like the protagonist of The Sugarland Express (and hardly alone in the Spielberg canon), wants her family reunited. Unlike the protagonist of The Sugarland Express, Celie is not only reactive, she is oppressed, beaten down, fearful. She can’t even open her keeper’s mail box, much less leave home in pursuit of her lost family.
The structure of The Color Purple goes something like this:
ACT I (0:00-28:30): This act could be called “Celie’s Family Torn Asunder.” Celie’s child is taken from her (and we hear of an earlier child who was similarly taken), she is traded by her father to a local farmer, who beats her mercilessly and treats her like dirt. Her sister Nettie runs away from home, away from her and Celie’s father, to be with her. The farmer, “Mister,” sets his eyes on Nettie, but when he attacks her she retaliates, and he drives her from the house. She leaves, reluctantly, promising that nothing but death can keep her and Celie apart.
ACT II (28:30-45:30): Many years pass. Celie grows from girl to woman. Mister’s son Harpo brings home a woman named Sophia. Sophia stands in contrast to both Celie and Nettie. She’s bossy, proud, short-tempered and unbendable. Celie, seeing an opportunity to get back at her tormentors, sparks a conflict between Sophia and Harpo. Her plan backfires and Sophia leaves Mister’s farm.
ACT III (45:30-1:24:00) Shug Avery, a colorful blues singer and an old flame of Mister’s, comes to stay on Mister’s farm. Shug, like Sophia, also stands in contrast to Celie. She is both weaker, in that she is drawn to men’s power, but also stronger, as she seems to move independently of them and has learned to use them to her advantage. Both Mister and Celie are obsessed with Shug. Shug initially calls Celie ugly and laughs in her face, but as she gets better (it’s not explained why she’s ill, but some sort of substance abuse seems likely) and gets back into singing (at Harpo’s backwoods juke-joint) she warms to Celie, writes and sings a song for her and even makes love to her. Shug then tries to enter the local church, but is rebuffed by the minister. She leaves Mister’s farm. Celie tries to go with her but loses her nerve. This is Celie’s low-point.
ACT IV (1:24:00-2:07:00) Sophiamouths off to the wrong person and ends up pistol-whipped, jailed and turned into a servant to a white man’s idiot wife, Miss Millie. Shug returns, now married to a grinning showboater, Grady. Mister and Grady bond over their mutual lust for Shug while Shug goes to the mailbox and discovers a letter to Celie from her long-lost sister Nettie. While Mister is off drinking, Shug and Celie discover a whole cache of letters from Nettie, where she outlines her life as a missionary in Africa and tells Celie that her children are alive and well and living as Africans. Now that Celie knows that she has a family elsewhere, she leaves Mister and goes with Shug to Memphis. Sophia leaves Miss Millie and returns to her home.
ACT V (2:07:00-2:30:00) An act of forgiveness and reconciliation. In Celie’s absence, Mister’s farm devolves into chaos as he staggers around in an alcohol-induced haze. Celie’s father dies, whereupon she learns that her father was actually her step-father and her real father has left her the family house. Now an empowered, independent landowner, Celie opens a pants-making business and prospers. Shug returns and takes up singing at Harpo’s again, but then repents and leads a crowd of sinners to the local church, where we learn that the minister is also Shug’s father. Meanwhile, Mister, having bottomed out, turns over a new leaf and secretly helps Nettie return to the US. Celie is reunited with her sister and her children.
NOTES: Spielberg, obviously chafing at the limitations of genre, steps way outside his comfort zone with this, his most complex narrative yet. The Color Purple has a protagonist who is frustrated in her desires and incapable of action until well past the two-hour mark. When her want is rewarded it is without her direct action. There is something Dickensian about the narrative, a life-spanning story of the poor and helpless suffering at the hands of brutal oppressors. But there is also something Capra-esque about it; Celie reminds me a lot of George Bailey, who longs to get out of his small town but is tied there by family obligations. George wants to get away in spite of his family, Celie wants to get away to find her family, both are stuck, both are incapable of action, and both are rewarded in the end in spite of their inability to leave town.
There is also something Capra-esque about Spielberg’s direction. As with It’s a Wonderful Life, The Color Purple is a story of extreme sadness and frustrated desire, yet the direction of each emphasizes the warmth and comedy of the narrative instead of the bleakness and despair. The performances in The Color Purple are sometimes startlingly broad — some of the scenes would absolutely not look out of place in 1941. Spielberg’s typically fluid, seamless direction doesn’t feel like it matches the material and leads to hyperbole and cartoonishness. Everything is overdone — Harpo isn’t just a poor carpenter, he’s a bumbling oaf who repeatedly falls through rooftops. His juke-joint doesn’t merely leak in the rain, it becomes a veritable indoor shower. Miss Millie isn’t merely a poor driver, she’s a caricature of a hysterical, swerving madwoman. Mister’s farm doesn’t just fall into ruin, he ends up with goats in the kitchen and shutters falling off the windows on cue. Shug doesn’t merely refuse a poorly-cooked breakfast, she hurls it across the hallway so that it leaves primary-colored splatters on the wall.
When the scenes don’t move as broad comedy they move as suspense — there are several sequences that would fit comfortably into Hitchcock. What the scenes do not work as is moments of genuine human interaction, which feels like a loss to me — the action feels like it’s all choreographed for the camera instead of the camera happening to witness moments of spontaneous behavior. Which is to say, I feel like Spielberg took a bold step forward by choosing this very non-genre narrative to shoot, but then shot it as though it were a genre piece anyway, relying on his sense of rhythm and his ability to manufacture suspense and emotional involvement to propel his largely plotless story forward.
Spielberg softens the brutality of the narrative in other ways as well. The antagonists of The Color Purple are all foolish, stumbling blowhards. Mister is a threat to Celie, but we never feel like he’s a threat to us — we can see he’s a petty tyrant easily bested. Likewise, Mister’s father is a muttering old codger and Miss Millie is a squealing, bug-eyed idiot. This helps us forgive them and aids Act V’s motions of reconciliation (which are not in the book), but it robs the story of drama. How effective an antagonist would Mr. Potter be in It’s a Wonderful Life if, at the end of the movie, it turned out that he was the one who brought Harry Bailey home and donated the money to get George out of debt?
The more I think of it, I’m not at all sure what to make of Act V of The Color Purple. Mister redeems himself, but does not announce it. Celie finds out that the man who raped her as a child was not her father but her stepfather, and Shug Avery begs for forgiveness from her own estranged father. After two hours of telling us about the horrors visited upon women by men, it’s like the story, in the end, pulls its punch — Mister isn’t so bad after all, Celie’s father is not only innocent but a benefactor, and Shug is all too desperate for the approval not only of her father but of the patriarchal church he represents. None of this is motivated by plot — it just sort of happens out of the blue. Celie even seems baffled herself: she accepts her father’s house but tells the previous owner she still doesn’t understand how she got it. The previous owner’s explanation doesn’t help very much.
It’s well known that The Color Purple is the only Spielberg movie that is not scored by John Williams, and yet I’d be hard-pressed to tell you how what Quincy Jones does here is very different from what Williams would have done. There is a lot of musical heartstring-tugging, and a good deal of Mickey-Mousing as well. Which is a shame, because there is a little shadow-movie within The Color Purple that is related to O Brother, Where Art Thou, a movie about the history of southern black American music that could have been fascinating. (The Color Purple is now, of course, a musical, so I suppose it’s not too late.)