Rudhraigh

Sadly, a lot of people look at a film like American Beauty and it kind of passes them by. They watch the whole thing and think that it was “overrated”.

You know, I really don’t understand these people. In fact, I think they have for some reason by stating this, abdicated their humanity. They have become faceless, soulless, mindless minions of mediocrity. This is not an exaggeration. I don’t mean this metaphorically. In my mind these people are iterally no longer people.

I’m not kidding when I say that if I were an “evil” me, and as a result inevitably crowned Emperor of the world’s first truly Global Evil Empire of Eternal Darkness, these are the only people who would have to fear mass genocide*. Not due to religion or political belief, not due to race, nationality, sexual preference or cultural stock, I know in my heart that the only thing that’s keeping people who think American Beauty is “overrated” alive, is my hard-wired moral fibre. They’re alive because of my utterly complete”goodness”. Because of the sad fact that I’m either all good, or all evil and nothing in between. And I’m not all evil. Yet.

So, when I was about 16, I saw this film and it probably had more of an impact on me than any film ever had to that point. Maybe even ever since, although it’s hard to compare the possible level of impact now that I’m a cynical twentysomething to when I was a wide-eyed teen. In order to understand why, you need to understand the point of the film and why its message resonates in the heart of so many of us super entitled, upper-middle class white people with no “real” problems, only “theoretical” ones.

Now, the film deals with the problems of a white, middle-class, suburban man and the problem with this is that yes, that the world has really, really awful things in it. War. Rape. Starvation, Murder, Drug Addiction, Mindless Hatred, Mindful Hatred, The Works. And the problem is also that to the incredibly lucky minority in which I and Lester Burnham live, these are all things that probabliity say will never affect us in our entire lives. So our entire life experience is on a pain scale that is theoretically so below the pain scale of millions of people with “real” problems that their problems are always going to be “theoretical”. And that is an amazing blessing that we should thank the entirety of existence for every single second of every single day that they can’t conceive of “reality”.

The problem is, however, that being constantly thankful is basically not in humanity’s makeup. Literally, our society almost deifies the individual who somehow manages to be genuinely happy with their lot in life, content and in a constant state of genuinely heartfelt happiness. These people are almost guaranteed to be able to get multi-million dollar book deal if they’re any good at writing bullet points and can come up with a snappy name for their system. Due to the modern feeling of estrangement from the moment, the day to day life of these blisshogs is almost legendary because with a simplistically happiness centered approach they apparently live their lives in the mystical “now”, in a state of perpetually open appreciation of the joy inherant in every moment. Or something.

So, regardless of whether you liked the plot, or the actors, or the music, or the cinematography, you can’t deny that American Beauty is about a man who’s gone from column “A” to column “B”. It’s about person who lives in this perpetual state of near mindless apathy brought on by having only “theoretical” problems for so long that his life is completely unreal. This causes him to have an epiphany that makes him become a person who casually allows himself to be touched by transformative power inherent in a twin appreciation of the need for some level of chaos in his life as well as the need for a connection to the fundamental reality of beauty. In a kind of hokey metaphor, Lester Burnham is like a man who has experimental eye surgery and sees for the first time, the difference is that the powers of vision described in the film aren’t part of the traditional “five senses”. Even though the movie makes the point that they really, really should be.

I think that it’s because a lot of people don’t have this sense that they will look at this film and think “Whatever, that plastic bag scene is fucking gay”. And you know, that’s kind of okay because these are also the people who quite ironically will probably never have the kind of epiphany detailed in the film without having some sort of horribly “real” thing happen to put their lives in context. Some people aren’t capable of overrideing a lifetime of programming without forcibly wiping everything first. In a world of twentysomethings with mid-life criseses, isn’t it at least important to ask questions that will result in people ordering their lives around the possibility of being “real” in their happiness?

I think so.

*That the “good” me can formulate of. I suspect “evil” me might have a better imagination in this regard.

Let me get something clear from the getgo, I was NOT a nerd when I was young. No sir. Not even slightly.

Allright, maybe SLIGHTLY. But even then, although I spent about 90 percent of my time engaged in pursuits that many labelled nerdy, I was NOT a nerd. And that is literally undebatable.* I was actually just one seriously forward thinking individual. A trend setter. An early adopter.

By this I mean that today, if you know a thirteen year old kid that spends 14 hours at a stretch playing computer games, you basically know a normal thirteen year old kid. But back in 1993 however, the populist democracy of console addiction was years away from the levels it is today, so my PC computer game addiction was something fairly odd and uncommon. Something nerdy. Something dirty. And the problem is that with regards to addictions, if you’ve already embraced something that’s kind of dirty, it’s always tempting to keep just keep going and get absolutely filthy.

So when you apply this to my thirteen year old self, I could have naturally gone deeper into the realm of nerdery. I could have been hardcore. And in nowhere was the temptation better illustrated than in the tension between the awesome of the classic PC game Rogue and temptation of embracing the source material behind it, D&D. And to put this in perspective, if you don´t already know, D&D is the crack cocaine of nerdery. You don´t just ¨kind of play D&D. It’s a lifestyle as much as taking heroin makes you a smackhead. You can give it up, but for for the rest of your life you will always be a nerd, as much as giving up heroin means you will always be a smackhead.

D&D stands for Dungeons and Dragons and was kind of the proto role playing game of the seventies and eighties. It basically consisted of a couple of guys sitting in a room, one of them describing an adventure loosely based on a book of rules so detailed and complex that it required something approaching a PHD in Astrophysics to really care about the nuances. Sadly, the rules both described an incredibly imaginative world of loot and monsters that different types of adventurer could prosper and conquer, and also a recipe for high functioning autism. As such, since Rogue was based on the adventuring aspect of D&D, the fun, non rule obsessed part without the stink of mansweat and virginity, there was always a weird fascination for me of this assumedly awesome world of pure and imaginative adventure. At least until I realised that going into D&D wasn’t so much an undiscovered country as a bridge too far. And thank god I did.

So, I only went as far as Rogue, which is a dungeon adventure game with one of the most incredibly basic graphical elements of any game ever. It was a slight step up from a text adventures, and in no manner is this better illustrated than by the fact that all the graphical elements were basically differently styled versions of the letters, numbers and symbols that could be found on a normal keyboard. You controlled a little guy that was basically a larger version of the “@” symbol and his job was to explore a randomly produced dungeon full of monsters and treasure. The random element of the maps was a real selling point in terms of re-playability, and a part of the reason that even today, Rogue is a pretty incredibly enduring adventure game. The larger part of that reason however was the appeal of the purity of the D&D, it´s siren song that sounded like a lot of guys arguing over whether a Magic Missile spell could be cast within a ring of silence if it was associated with a ring, rather than vocalised. And again, I have to say, thank god I never got into it.

The real fun of the game centered around trying to find awesome weapons and armour, finding the staircase to the next level and not getting killed by the little monsters that populated the level. The awesome part of the weapons of armour was the mystery associated with them because there was only two ways of telling what magic was connected to them, to use them or to use a very-hard-to-find identify scroll to tell you. This meant that when you found a mace that you were hoping was a +4 Mace of Monster Wounding it may well be a cursed Mace of Slow. You also knew that until you found an identify scroll you always had the option of just trying for the best and hoping you weren’t gonna die. Which you did. Frequently. And actually, the strange thing was that dying was actually a kind of oddly satisfying part of the game too, because you got this awesomely serene graphic of a gravestone, describing the manner in which you bought it, and there was STILL a high score board you could try and dominate.

Another awesome element of the game was the monsters themselves. In an incredibly clever piece of game design, the monsters were simply represented simply by the first letter of their name. This meant that seeing an “R¨ run across the screen at you meant that you better watch out for that Rattlesnake, or the ¨I¨ meant you had a gnarly Ice Monster to deal with. As the game went on, you always met some incredibly rare beast, such as a ¨W¨ (Wraith) or a ¨D¨(Dragon), which almost always spelled your death, unless you were my brother.

My elder brother was much better at Rogue than I was, an element that certainly fuelled my need to be competetive and play it a hell of a lot and get better than him. This never happened. Tragically my brother was just basically better at computer games than I was for most of my childhood and it may or may not be this which has fuelled my adult obsession with winning competitions. The near constant reminder of my mediocrity in the form of his superior types of death, and even the time when he actually finished the game by finding the legendary Amulet of Yendor and getting all the way back to the top will on some level result in my turning a subtle blind eye to when my kids beat up his, years from now.

Rogue was one of the first graphical adventure games around, even because of that it´s worth looking at. The fact that on top of that it´s actually an incredibly easy to play, immersive and enjoyable game means that if you haven´t looked at it, you should go back to snake on your phone. Embrace it for what it is, a fun, fairly random adventure that will eat happy hours of your life if you let it. Just stay away from the D&D.

*Literally.

I am quite nostalgic for the time where people weren’t continually defining themselves by the particular flavour of their nostalgia. It pisses me off that things I loved as a kid and really want to get enthusiastic about as an adult have been co-opted by a generation of people who apply the five second surface love to the world, mining the past for retro statements of pseudo-geekery. And yes, I’m aware of how inescapably I am encapuslated by my own hatred, incapable of differentiating myself from all the other people who make exactly the same claim. I am also aware of how completely central the concept of purposeful self-loathing is to the dickhead internet hipster movement and how the very existence and need to express this to the world basically seals my fate. Or whatever. At least it gives me shit to put on my blog.

Back in 1985, things were different. America was still the out-and-out darling nation of the world, the Coca Cola Corporation were still onto a possible winner with New Coke, whatever that is, Ronald Regan was still the President and I was still embroiled in daily life-or-death struggles with my older brother who was soon to scar me forever by breaking the wings off my beloved X-wing fighter. I was also still in the rather unfortunate position of having not yet seen Michael J Fox take on stuffy 1950s America with a skateboard, a time machine and his loveable smirk in Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future.

For me, this regrettable circumstance lasted for about eight years until I finally saw it when I was 12 around 1993. Today, in 2010, I’m looking back to then, at what should have been a pretty confusing experience for a 12 year old, because nowhere in the entire movie did the future as I saw it at the time actually figure. For me, the future was 1994, not 1985. To my current thinking it should have been called Back to Eight Years Ago.

You’d expect this to be confusing to a 12 year old. It’s puzzling now and I’m 28. But at the time it actually wasn’t confusing at all. The one thing you realize in watching Back to the Future is that time doesn’t matter at all when you have a time machine, and one thing that this movie does do well is present a clear window into the recent past.

This is because as far as Back to the Future goes, time has stopped. It’s so good that it continually manages to defy all attempts to make it seem dated. Watching this movie I clearly remember being twelve, living from day to day, running everywhere, eating everything, talking to everyone. I have a better recollection of the period because of it. Even today, I can watch Back to the Future and be absolutely enthralled by it in the wide-eyed manner of a 12 year old. It romanticised America to the point where my parents had to stop me from trying to set the tires on their car on fire. Every time my father went past 90mph in the car I would secretly hope we would go back in time. This is because the story is pure unmitigated, simplistic genius. It’s one of those stories that seem obvious, but only because the movie has become part of our cultural tapestry.

But what makes this movie truly great are two simple things: the absolute perfection of its casting and the simple accessibility of its storyline, two things Robert Zemeckis specialises in. Zemeckis’ drive for perfect casting even went as far as to re-cast Michael J Fox as Marty weeks after production had actually started, replacing Eric Stolz because he didn’t think Stolz was hip enough. He wanted Fox because he knew he’d be the best Marty and he was right. Apparently he wanted the part so badly that for the entire production he went on about two hours a night of sleep because he was still filming Family Ties by day.

In Back to the Future, Fox plays a young teenager called Marty McFly from a small American town who has to put up with loser parents and a world that doesn’t appreciate his obvious Rock music virtuosity. He has an off-beat friend in local eccentric inventor Doctor Emmet Brown (flawlessly played by Christopher Lloyd) who rings him up late one night and tells him to meet him at a local Mall. Upon his arrival he discovers that Doc Brown has made a working time machine and plans to go back in time to explore the past. Through a series of fantastically genius plot-twists Marty is accidentally sent back to 1955, using up the only plutonium fuel rods he has and upon arrival he accidentally prevents his parents from ever meeting thus stopping himself from being born. Thus the premise of the film is established: Marty has to get “Back to the Future” and at the same time make his parents fall in love so that he will continue to exist.

That might seem cool, and that’s because it is. One of the best things about this movie is how the plot continually supports the smooth development of the characters. Marty is given ample opportunity to reinforce all aspects of his personality and there are countless moments where you get a genuine sense of who Doc Brown is. By the end of the film the characters seem to be alive in your mind, and you feel like you really know them. Of course, this is largely down to the stellar performances of Lloyd and Fox, but combined with the weird combination of 80s excess and 50s Americana, the film sticks in the mind as having a flavour all its own. An American flavour. And it tasted good.

It helps that almost every element of the film is, in some manner, iconic because Zemeckis was very aware of the importance of icons to the many rebellious teenagers who were his target audience. So the whole thing is very heavily branded, packed with obvious product placements. But weirdly enough, instead of cheapening the film as you would expect, it actually supports the general feeling of consumerism in the 80s: The use of the DeLorean for the time machine (If you’re going to make a time machine, why not do it with style?) the Calvin Klein references, the way Marty keeps ordering Pepsi Frees and Tabs, even in the fifties when they didn’t exist! From the theme music—which is one of the most instantly recognizable themes ever—to the Back to the Future graphic, the whole production screams “franchise!” And with Steven Spielberg as executive producer it’s almost impossible that this movie wasn’t going to make squillions.

It did. Back to the Future was the top grossing movie of 1985 and went on to have two supremely lucrative sequels. But behind all this peripheral crap, it’s really just a truly great movie. It has cool, well shot action sequences that are refreshingly understated by today’s standards. It has fantastically dynamic plot elements that end up running into and around and behind each other. It features great music, cool special effects, as well as Christopher Lloyd! You really can’t go wrong with this film.

If I had use of the eponymous time machine and I had the necessary 1.21 Jigowatts to power it, I’d ramp it up to 88 and leaving twin trails of fire behind me I would go back to 1985 when I was four and hadn’t yet seen the movie and cut those eight years of Back to the Future ignorance in half by showing myself this movie four years before I actually did. I pity myself for those four years of ignorance. I lament their loss. And if you have not yet seen this movie, I lament that last twenty years of your life. I really, truly do.

Guybrush Rampant.

What is it about the totally subjective nature of existence that so petrifies mankind? Why is it that we all have to continually obsess about the true and objective nature of the infinite? Can’t we just accept the inescapably vague nature of our existential crisis? If the pop-philosophy lessons of the likes of The Matrix have taught us anything, haven’t they taught us that we should just live with the fact that our absurdly non-specific and internally justified conception of reality is merely one of many infinite possibilities?

I have, and look how happy I am! It’s what allows me to choose my own preferred reality, which is periodically living life for fifteen to twenty-three hours at a stretch as a wise-cracking pirate called Guybrush Threepwood, solving voodoo puzzles throughout the Caribbean in Lucasarts’ classic game Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge.

Massive existential questions aside, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge is simply an awesome, awesome, awesome game. To me it’s a fantastic illustration of why people hate change; when something works well it shouldn’t change, it should stay the exactly the same yet still somehow manage to stay totally new and fresh by continually producing improved versions of itself.

This plainly irrational desire comes from the reality that Monkey Island 2 is a fictional creation of such calibre that just makes people plain irrational. It’s so good that it proves that a certain mythical level of excellence is attainable and, as such, it makes you feel like demanding that its producers provide you with the identical level of excellence every single time they even think of attaching the same name to any product.

So why is something like this so good? The problem with answering this question is that it isn’t just about the game elements that we habitually we ask about today, the graphics, the sound, the gameplay; it’s about us and how we view quality fiction as entertainment. The emergence of contemporary technological standards hasn’t totally changed everything, we don’t all just automatically like stories with massive explosions and amazing special effects and dislike things without them, these elements might enhance an experience but they don’t make the experience.

The really good stuff is simple; it’s the stuff with a really good story. The reason Monkey Island 2 is so good is also simple: it’s in the writing, it’s because every single element of the game screams of the talent and passion and commitment of its creators. It belongs to an elite cadre of games that have truly, truly excellent writers with a common vision behind them, something that many more modern games lack in a big way.

In Monkey 2, Guybrush’s arch-nemesis LeChuck has returned and it’s up to Guybrush to put things to rights through a mixture of treasure hunting and riotous voodoo idolatry. Humour-wise, the effect is like if Jerry Seinfeld had created a Point and Click RPG or if Charlie Kaufman decided to write one-liners for Lucasarts, Monkey Island has a genuinely coherent, desperately funny and completely absorbing story line with in-jokes-a-plenty and moments of true hilarity that make you proud to be affiliated with the human race.

The graphics are an example of the height of a style particular to Lucasarts’ point and click adventures of the time, cartoony yet beautifully stylised they perfectly illustrate the great character of the storyline. The delightfully drawn and eclectic game art ranges from hilarious renditions of a Pirate Weenie Shack to a Pirate Dry-Cleaners perfectly illustrating the world of Piratey jingoism that the creators were going for. It’s funny; for a fifteen year old game you’d expect the graphics to seem dated, that you’d continually have to make tired accommodations for the fact that it’s an older game and that the graphics aren’t as good as we’re used to today, but because the graphics have that cartoonesque flavour they’re effectively timeless. They’re great because even by modern standards – cartoons are still cartoons; it means that you can play the game even today and it still looks beautiful.

The sound was another arena in which Monkey Island 2 truly stands out from the crowd. While the sound effects were pretty regular and there is an absence of speech—which I quite like—it was the music that really went a long way to defining the game. The Monkey 2 theme music makes you want to throw it all in and just become a stand-up comedian slash pirate because it epitomises everything that is funny about pirates.

The in-game interaction within the game world is one of the things that made it so incredibly playable and made the puzzles so simplistically confounding. The point and click interface means that you have a list of actions such as “Pick up” or “Talk to” and when you held your cursor over a character or object you could “Talk to Largo LeGrand’ or “Use crazy straw on yellow drink”. But to be fair and balanced I could see how these sort of (partially) trial and error puzzles wouldn’t appeal to everyone. The vast amount of possible combinations makes for some bizarre possibilities and some infuriatingly oblique solutions to puzzles. While I for one love the trial and error of trying different approaches, the many sleepless nights, the hours of walking around one room in the game desperately trying every conceivable possibility to solve a puzzle, I realise it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

It’s important to realise that at the time, these sorts of adventure puzzle games were the best-selling games around. Nothing surpassed them in terms of sales and now hardly any of these games are released because today, things have changed.

Why is this? Because at the time, it took me about four years to complete Monkey Island 2. Back in the hey-day of the adventure game, the no-effort answers to the questions that were driving you insane weren’t always five seconds and a Google search away. I finished Monkey Island 2 through painstaking work and trial and error, every single thing in the game, and as such, sad or not, I felt an amazing feeling of accomplishment for doing so. I also got to know the character of the game in a way that I wouldn’t if I just strolled through it with the solution. Even though you can choose to play an easier version of the game at the beginning with more simplistic puzzles, it’s still hard to resist the lure of the quick and easy answer.

So, unless you possess the iron will required to ignore the Internet’s siren song, you’re not going to enjoy this game on the level that I did when I played it, because at some stage you’ll get sick and tired of trying to figure out how to get the last part of your LeChuck voodoo doll and just look it up on the Net. I don’t see this as a limitation – while the puzzles are genuinely difficult and at many times the answers are seemingly random, the internet isn’t Lucasarts fault. It’s a pity though, Monkey Island 2 is a truly great game but in a way it’s kinda like Playboy magazine, a paradigm example of a great genre the Internet left behind.