Friday, October 16, 2020

Human Sacrifices and Stripteases: Conventional Evil in Media and Why "Human Rights" are No Excuse for Censorship.

Every modern art form has had a Golden Age, and the most brilliant content produced within the medium has been the most controversial and provocative. Film, literature, music, theater, and the pictorial arts have all “pushed the envelope” with regards to their subject matter and its presentation.

Video games have notoriously been no exception to this, and attempts to censor them have been as diverse and inane as any other. Yet for all the best efforts of the medium’s founding members, it seems that no one could have predicted where the most dangerous threat would emanate: from within the Audience.

Gamers and designers have, by and large, “sold out” with regards to the normalizing tendencies of the millennial marketplace. We live in such an era wherein creativity must bow before commerce, and the laws of commerce have been worked out with such daunting bureaucratic accuracy that they have come to act as surrogates for ethics. This puts us in a precarious position indeed, for while we might be tempted to pride ourselves in “how far we’ve come” and departed from the “archaic” religious superstitions of previous generations, this has only made us susceptible to more absurd and arbitrary control schemes.

What are the effects? Most immediately: we see something which might be called a tendency towards making things “family friendly”. Whenever any art form becomes commercialized in the mainstream, it tends to become gentrified, sentimentalized, and made palatable and “wholesome”. There is, of course, nothing intrinsically wrong in such an aesthetic, and it certainly has its place, both therapeutically and socially… yet it has its limits, and to confine an entire art form to such limits is to put a tiger in a box.

Attempting to reach the “widest possible audience”, we initially target nuclear families. “Children’s films” become “family films”; cartoon animals are set against the backdrop of a narrative that not only inherits adult subject matter but that would be most recognizable only to the adults of the target generation of parents. Disney and Pixar’s Finding Nemo had no such nonsense; its genius was in its appeal to a primordial sense of wonder that is timeless and does not wither with age: the Oceanic State. DreamWorks’ response Shark Tale is another matter. Hardly as subtle nor as profound as its predecessor Shrek, a truly inspired take on faerie tales, many of whom were originally quite gruesome on purpose, Shark Tale was a shameless attempt to cash in on the undersea market in an iconically DreamWorks fashion, complete with the voices of Will Smith, Angelina Jolie, and, of course, Martin Scorsese. The famed director of gritty, brutal crime films lends his unmistakably high-pitched voice to a comical pufferfish who navigates an underwater crime world that, in large part, is modeled unsubtly but tactfully after Goodfellas and Casino, as well as old-school rival The Godfather. How is this a “family film”? Because to kids it appears to be a “children’s film”; to parents, it makes light of DeNiro’s darker moments.

Already we can observe the dangers of the “family friendly”. Even in targeting the nuclear family, producers of popular media are all-too-often tempted to substitute adolescent defiance for childlike wonder, pretending the former to be more mature than the latter simply because it follows in biological chronology, as adolescents are also often tempted to presume. The consequence is that the films we show our kids, often the films we watch alongside them, always have an element in the background of that depravity which is typically sequestered to the mature rating.

The problem is aggravated when marketers observe the modern family. It’s become a matter of common horse sense that a large, probably growing faction of the market does not conform to the tradition of the nuclear family. The adult animated series BoJack Horseman uses this to both great commercial and artistic affect; Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s postmodern fable uses animals and people to illustrate the lifestyles of unwanted children, sexual deviants, chronic divorcees, and the infertile, often poking fun with that heavy hand (hoof, or paw) that only the sufferers themselves brandish. Yet what spurs BoJack Horseman’s genius is its brutally honest attempts to buck the jockeys of modern media: Political Correctness.

The “Politically Correct” is essentially the “family friendly” for grown-ups. Most significantly, its target audience is a class of “disenfranchised consumers” (a paradox peculiar to countries with prosperous economies) who seldom reach the conventional standard for psychological maturity, owing to various extenuating circumstances. Thus, the game becomes to pretend that such a standard is nonexistent or illusory, to coddle the outlier and to make the target audience feel “safe” and “included”, “respected” but not “understood”. Upset any one of these prerequisites, and the curtain falls, the illusion of inclusion shattered. So essential is this strategy to contemporary commerce that it has even become an expectation, so that any sort of majoritarian marketing is ostensibly tantamount to Fascism.

No generation has bought into this as completely as the youth of the present day, and the media of the new millennium has been so saturated with this tendency, one that has haunted the backgrounds even more menacingly than the mobster references in Shark Tale, that we have by and large come to regard it as (though it were) an ethic. There’s hardly a popular form of media alive today which does not bend to the demands of the “underrepresented”: the all-too-common outcast.

So what’s the problem? In order to summarize the dangers, we must return to my generation’s most treasured art form: the Video Game.

When I first played the original God of War on PlayStation 2, I was not entirely sure why. I hadn’t played any hardcore hack-and-slash combat platformers since EA Games’ acceptable Lord of the Rings games, which at least had the advantage of incorporating elements of Tolkien’s books that had not made it into Jackson and Walsh’s film franchise (upsetting the prejudice that Electronic Arts is just a bunch of Nazis with no sense of respect for tradition). Truth be told, Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time had its fair share of fighting, but it was just choppy enough to render me averse to the genre, and were it not for Prince’s time-based puzzle gaming, I would not have endured it. The main quality that drew me towards God of War was a nostalgia for ancient Greek culture, most significantly its timeless mythology and that style of drama we call “tragedy”, which everyone from the Florentine Camerata who invented opera to Friedrich Nietzsche, Stanley Kubrick, and Brad Pitt have tried to recreate.

To put it in Spartan terms: this God of War did well. The story of Kratos was gripping, captivating, devastating, exhausting, intriguing, grueling, and fundamentally cathartic. None of this could have been achieved were it not so brutal, though perhaps Roberta Williams of King’s Quest would give Sony’s Santa Monica Studio a run for its money. What I knew to expect going into it was what I’d grown to expect from some of the imagery in Prince of Persia and The Lord of the Rings: “puzzles” would be less akin to Tetris and Bejeweled and more akin to positioning a human sacrifice for execution.

What I had not gleaned from reading the reviews was that game reporters would often expose the most damning plot details without a spoiler warning. With regards to that “human sacrifice”, it ended up being as significant for character development as some of Walt’s most unforgivable moments in Breaking Bad. The human sacrifice was far more than a mere ragdoll on a string, his execution far less “family friendly” than falling from a cliff in Wile E. Coyote fashion or, as DreamWorks had managed, getting conked on the head by an anchor. (Not to be confused with Newswoman “Katie Current”.) Before my eyes I watched one of Kratos’ unsuccessful predecessors get pushed up a slope in an iron cage, begging, whimpering and screaming for mercy, with each step coming inches closer to a device designed to burn him alive… and I was doing all the pushing and the immolating!!

How did Sony Santa Monica get away with this? It was obvious: God of War was a game for adults who loved Greek mythology and war games. Kratos had to be the sort of guy who would light a “loser” on fire just to “honour the Gods” and to advance himself; he was a Spartan warrior with a vendetta again Mars Himself. We’d already seen the remains of Kratos’ other predecessors decorating both the entrance and the interior of the gauntlet. We know that this will be our hero’s fate if he does not progress, surviving at all costs, including the lives of those he meets along the way, however harmless and friendly. The Gods demand it, and those Rationalists who are snide enough to challenge Divine Command Theory would do well to read a bit of Greek mythology before they spite a Greek Deity’s Will. On top of all of that: the deceptively convoluted series of death traps and challenges is quite linear. When the time comes for Kratos to light that guy on fire, he has no practical alternative; there are no side-roads, and this road goes only one way.

Thus we see the three core ingredients in edgy game design that pushes the envelope, heightens the Art, and makes our stomachs squirm: Cultural Context, Machiavellian Rationalization, and a Mature Rating that, like a good fence, a harness, or a dog leash, empowers to the same extent as it restricts. Already, too, we see the dangers inherent in this: boys who hear tell of these M-rated games get the distinct impression that this is “okay for adults” but “not for kids”. To the same extent as they wish to be “grown-ups”, they might play with matches and toy with the idea of arson, however flippantly. They recognize that “mature” material is “really bad”, but they also internalize the notion that it is considerably MORE bad than that which they see on Tom and Jerry. Lighting someone on fire is only “okay” in the context of Reservoir Dogs; dropping an iron or an anchor on someone’s head is relatively acceptable.

Thankfully, we need not busy ourselves with too much dispute about the effects of media upon the mind of the child, for most children operate under a significant amount of supervision. Yet what about those aforementioned “disaffected” adults who are stunted in their psychological development? When media becomes censored, a veil is cast over it. The stoppering of progress is akin to the shutting of a hatch, especially when a leak has broken out within its chamber. We were content to tread water as the water level rose, but now that the ceiling has been sealed we are to drown.

God of War, to my mind, was never intended to promote violence, nor even to glorify it, though Kratos’ fate does raise some questions on that point I shall not address herein. Like most games notorious for their “graphic” depictions of violence, (“graphic” by the standards of the Sony PlayStation 2 console) God of War produced a sense of release, achieving that sort of catharsis that Greek tragedy was known for, meeting its artistic goals. By pushing the envelope, it shocked us into a state of vulnerability; reminded of the brutality of history, we were pacified and grateful for modernity.

Yet what happens when that envelope is stopped? All of a sudden, that depraved, Dionysian psyche which is seeking new forms of shock value must content itself with trails already blazed. Producers begin to mass-produce those forms of evil which are proven to sell, given a long and growing blacklist of those forms of evil which are too “triggering” even for millennials. The shock wears off, as does the talk, but the material remains, getting recycled, over and over and over again, like the “consumable T.V. violence” of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. For want of new, ingenious forms of catharsis, developers repeat the same old tropes: immolation here, hanging there, et cetera. All of a sudden, the new generation comes to regard THESE things as being “normal”. The modern adult is in the position of the aforementioned boy: so long as one believes one’s self to be indulging in a “permissible” evil, one worthy of an audience, one not QUITE “as bad as” a less conventional evil, one can content one’s self in feeling “normal”.

Most people, clinically, make decisions MORE based upon projections of normalcy and abnormality than they do off of Good and Evil, especially when the latter distinction is so difficult for modern scientists to quantify, whereas the former is all too easy. It is for this reason that practices such as mob lynchings and dragging men behind pickup trucks were so prevalent for so long in the United States (though let us not forget that equally violent forms of anarchist protest against Police Brutality are no better, by the same token). Even in fighting evil, we commit conventional evil, and most often it is against the unconventional evils that we express our own evil impulses. Ergo, the rapist is everyone’s favourite scapegoat, the racist following closely.

That which is a marginal danger for the boy becomes an imminent problem for the adult. Because we KNOW that we are adults, we are less likely to suspect our own susceptibility to suggestion. If I produce games, those limits which I must observe in publishing are presumed absolute. A boy aspiring to play his older brother’s fighting games is not in the same position; he understands the relativity of restrictions based upon age. Yet such a sense of relativity disappears in a globalized marketing standard that might very well be enforced by the United Nations as a Human Right. If I cannot put rape into my game, though I can put immolation, the line I observe is presumed to be absolute; if NO one is allowed to see the former but the latter is acceptable, I internalize and outwardly affirm this ethic: rape is absolutely bad; arson is relative. What is to stop a vigilante, then, with my same, universalized conviction, from setting an alleged rapist on fire? Not much, and let us not pretend that human beings do not have a history of burning people alive under suspicion of evils that are not conventional by accepted moral orthodoxy.

It is this combination of forces – a stagnating form of generic tropes on one hand and a patronizing imposition upon the adult conscience on the other – that poses the greatest threat to the millennial Zeitgeist. The irony would not be lost on the great critics of modern media such as David Lynch and Raphael Bob-Waksberg. When Diane tells BoJack that television “normalizes” behaviour, this is only partially true. Media in itself does not normalize behaviour, until media itself is normalized. So long as media remains a forum for free expression, it keeps innovating ways to shock us into our catharsis. Yet the moment that it is met with a bureaucracy which treats its marketing interests as moral imperatives, having won a generation of loyal consumers who act as a mob ready to lynch anyone’s career, (or worse) media collapses in on itself, and that which was previously “daring” and “provocative” becomes the new “normal”. This is aggravated by the peculiarly millennial tendency for forgetfulness.

Critics in defence of political correctness might cuttingly contest that normalcy is nothing new in itself, that even the classic Greek plays reused tropes, yet “society” continued to “progress” and “mentally healthy adults” were not afflicted. That would be well and good, but for several bugs: in the first place, those who were NOT regarded as “mentally healthy” all too often saw a side to their “healthy” social superiors that those same “adults” would have been loth to see within themselves, hence the scapegoat gives the “tragedy” its name. Furthermore, to speak of “society” as though it were one entity and “progress” as though it were culturally universal is a conceit only imaginable to modern Westerners. The integrity of Greek “normalcy” lay in its adherence to tradition, one peculiar to a Greek society. To be born Greek was to live Greek; Kratos makes his deal with a Greek God (one indigenous to Greece, apparently, for Kratos later meets the Norse Gods in Scandinavia) in the context of a war against the “barbarian” non-Greeks (some of whom were likely those same Scandinavians).

Yet this is not our current “society”. The globalist culture can no longer accommodate the nationalism or communalism of earlier societies established upon peculiar traditions, and all such traditions become secondary to “Universal Human Rights”. To be born American in the nineteen-nineties is not the same as to live American in the year 2020, and few of us will be able to repeat the sins of our fathers nor to attain those goals we set out to attain as boys (though perhaps the girls will adopt new dreams to make up for the boys’ loss, since these dreams may be won at the latter’s expense).

Political correctness operates not like a temple but like a marketplace, for it was within the market itself that this disease was born. It is an ethic for consumers and those wishing to sell to them. In sales training, we learn that people like to buy but not to be sold to. The most effective sales agencies are those who manage to sell your desires TO you, and if they should disappoint you, it is because you are no longer the target demographic, and salespeople go where the money goes. Millennials who preach Human Rights and Political Correctness are simply the most pious consumers of conventional evil, and their enemies are simply those whose evil and whose virtue are too abnormal to be advertised. So long as traditions are the preferences of an older demographic and a regressive society unfit for the global market, we do not question the Present.

By and large, the universal rating used by Designers to regulate one ANOTHER is “N.S.F.W.”: “Not Safe for Work”, a fitting slogan for a generation of corporate guinea pigs turned into automatons on a production line devoid of either voice, dignity, or imagination. The implication is that nothing is too “mature” which is permissible and “correct”, yet it may not be the sort of game that your boss would want to catch you playing. (Perhaps supervisors would rather see you spending company time on Tetris?)

One game Not Safe for Work (or Home, probably, though when has that stopped anyone?) is House Party, a raunchy dating game set among a group of young singles wherein the male protagonist (female coming soon!! No puns intended.) manipulates nonplayable characters, mainly women, into various sexual and suggestive acts. Several times, voluptuous girls presumably in their twenties are exposed to the elements by avenue of blackmailing and deception.

None of these achievements further the story, usually. By contrast with God of War, the game is very admirably nonlinear. No Divine Authority mandates a sacrifice of clothes or dignity; the protagonist rarely needs to compromise another character in order to “advance” towards a teleological destination. One might therefore suggest that the sexuality in House Party is “gratuitous and male-gazey”, as Gina Cazador says of her own role at the start of BoJack Horseman’s fifth season and the first season of the show-within-a-show Philbert. Yet it is precisely BECAUSE these indulgences accomplish nothing that they are so tempting, so reflective of the mind of the player, and so cathartic for players who would NOT do such things in Actuality but who might harbor a vendetta against those who do, a vendetta which is often irrational and subconscious, much like Diane Nguyen’s media crusade against Hank Hippopopalous.

Most of us would sooner have our flesh seen than seared; there ought to be no doubt that lighting someone on fire is worse than coercing that person to take off her pants. It is precisely BECAUSE God of War rationalizes acts of utter depravity that it seems relatively noble, and it is precisely BECAUSE a striptease is an indulgence which more civilians enjoy that we invent so many rules for its proper context and we harbor such antipathy to those who overstep those bounds; they mirror our own perversions, as the success of games like House Party evidences beautifully. Yet even if one evil were tantamount to the other, (by extremely puritanical standards) what is most important is that BOTH be allowed to exist, to perform their respective dances, and then to waltz offstage in the manner of the BoJack Horseman penultimate episode. Each form of shock, however gruesome or uneasy, serves a vital human function, both psychologically and socially, and so long as it does something new for the medium it furthers the Art. Place even one expressive form in a cage, and the Art ceases to be an upward striving and degenerates into a brutal, fatalistic sacrifice.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]

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