Teenagers play piano and video games before committing mass murder in Elephant
1 2014-09-03T09:16:18-07:00 Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805 3025 1 A first person shooter game creates a direct link between screen violence and real world violence plain 2014-09-03T09:16:18-07:00 Critical Commons 2003 Video Elephant 2014-09-03T16:06:02Z Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805This page has paths:
- 1 2014-09-05T14:17:07-07:00 Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805 Media Chronology Steve Anderson 23 A chronological gallery of all media included in this project structured_gallery 2014-09-09T07:35:30-07:00 Steve Anderson 3e015d75989f7e2d586f4e456beb811c3220a805
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- 1 2014-09-04T14:21:52-07:00 Violence 24 plain 2015-01-14T08:01:59-08:00 Game violence and diegetic violence The cinematic trope of depicting hyperviolence in video games is often linked with violence that takes place in the diegetic world of a film or TV show. This linkage of game violence with the violent film and TV narratives in which they are embedded may serve to reinforce the causal relationship that many opponents of video game violence presume to exist between games and the real world. In using games to signify or underscore the violent tendencies of its own screen characters, Hollywood cleverly distances itself from responsibility for the violent images they themselves are, in fact, creating. Two examples from television series that have otherwise systematically located the roots of violence and criminality in social and economic circumstances offer particularly troubling cases in point. In a season 4 episode of The Wire titled "Soft Eyes" (2006), the son of an incarcerated drug dealer, Namond Brice (Julito McCullum), retreats from the criminal activities he is expected to participate in on the streets of Baltimore, taking sanctuary in his room. Here, he reflexively turns off a television news broadcast about educational reform in order to play the first person shooter Halo 2 (Bungie 2004), sinking into an expressionless trance that signifies his escape from the world outside. Within the narrative of the show, Namond is otherwise characterized as being overly sensitive and ill-suited for the ruthlessness and violence required for success in the family business of street corner drug dealing. Namond's choice to play Halo 2 within the safety of his room heightens the ambivalent relationship he otherwise exhibits toward street violence. Does playing Halo 2 constitute a form of "practice" for when he will eventually be forced shoot real people or does it signify the hopelessness of his situation where the only form of domestic escape available to an otherwise redeemable character lies in screen violence? A similarly ambivalent scene occurs in the AMC series Breaking Bad at the opening of the season 4 episode "Problem Dog" (2011). In an extended sequence prior to the opening credits, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) plays the hyperviolent, first person shooter game Rage (id Software 2011), the game play of which consists of simply blasting one attacker after another on screen. While video game violence is most often used to implicate players in an amoral economy of violent actions on screen, this scene serves to highlight the moral conflict Jesse feels about having murdered one of his accomplices in the manufacture of illegal drugs. In a series of fleeting flashbacks, Jesse bounces between using a video game light gun (not an actual option in Rage) and the real-world gun he used to kill his partner, while the in-game attackers he is shooting are subliminally replaced with flashback images of shooting his former partner at point blank range. The primary role of these scenes in "Problem Dog" is to highlight Jesse's tortured conscience about the murder, but it also suggests a direct continuity between the hair trigger violence of the first person shooter genre and the televisual act of shooting another person in the head. Elephant (2003), Gus Van Sant's controversial, cinematic treatment of the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 refused to "explain" the motivations of the teenaged shooters, but it offered some enigmatic domestic scenes with the two kids before the shooting takes place. In this scene, one boy demonstrates virtuosic skill at classical piano playing while another shoots unarmed video game characters on a laptop computer. Van Sant's inferred indictment of video game violence is backed up by extra-diegetic knowledge that the Columbine shooters were indeed avid video game players in the real world, but it fails to contribute substantively to ongoing debates over the purported linkage between screen violence and real world violence. Elephant's ostensible commitment to presenting a multiplicity of opinions (each segment of the film is uniquely devoted to a single character's perspective) is meant to suggest that a simple explanation for the Columbine tragedy will ultimately prove elusive. Van Sant also implicates the internet and television as potential factors in the shooting, with a scene showing the two boys surfing gun websites and watching a television documentary about Hitler while waiting for their mail order assault rifles to arrive. A similar tactic was followed two years later by the controversial video game Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (2005), which also attempted to deal with the tragedy by suggesting multiple explanations for the shooters' motivations. Compared with the fictional first person shooter game that appears in Elephant - an all white landscape in which the player simply shoots a series of walking figures in the back - the game play of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! comes closer to the ostensible goals of the film in terms of resisting a single, reductive explanation. In the end, it is the culture and aesthetics of video games that is most insistently evoked by Elephant. Each of the character-based segments of the film includes at least one protracted following shot that is unmistakably composed to resemble the perspective of a 3rd person video game. At one point during the assault sequence, the camera even shifts to momentarily place audiences in a first person shooter perspective before quickly shifting back. In spite of the filmmaker's attempts to suggest the complexity of potential motivations for the tragedy, the visual rhetoric of video games that is referenced throughout the film provides an overwhelming association between games and gun violence. Gavin Hood's Ender's Game (2013) is anomalous in the history of games on film in reversing the generational condemnation of games and violence. In this case, it is the teenagers in a military academy who remain morally centered during wartime, in spite of - or perhaps because of - their exposure to video games. Although strategizing and playing simulation games constitutes a majority of the film's screen time and narrative drama, this otherwise innocuous scene exemplifies the generational reversal when the main character Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) takes a break from his studies to play a video game. The game appears to be a simple puzzle game with a mouse who is invited by a giant to make a choice resulting in death or success when choosing a cup to jump into. Instead, the boy chooses a third path, knowing his actions are being observed and evaluated by his trainers. In Ender's Game, cadets are implanted with sensors allowing officers to see through their eyes via a surveillance monitoring system as they cultivate skills in military simulations, interpersonal conflicts, and ruthless competition that would be considered sociopathic under any other circumstances. Ender shows that he has acquired a meta-knowledge of the goals and methods of the academy - in other words, he has learned to "game the system" of the academy - when he uses his diminutive mouse avatar to attack and kill the giant by burrowing into its eye socket, purposefully demonstrating his capacity for ruthless violence. In the end, however, Ender is the lone voice of conscience, who expresses horror at having unknowingly commanded a military campaign against a rival species that results in genocide. Although games are used throughout the film as an integral part of military strategy and training, in Ender's Game, they prove most effective not for adults to diagnose the psychological state of children, but by children to exert control over their own moral development.
- 1 2014-09-03T09:46:59-07:00 Games of the 2000s 17 plain 2014-09-04T13:05:12-07:00 Game violence and diegetic violence The cinematic trope of depicting hyperviolence in video games is often linked with violence taking place in the diegetic world of a film or TV show. Because the relationship between these two realms is not always obvious, this investigation is best served by specific examples. In The Wire episode "Soft Eyes" (2006), the son of a drug dealer Namond Brice (Julito McCullum) retreats from the criminal activities he is expected to participate in, taking sanction in the home. Here, he turns off a television news broadcast about educational reform in order to play the hyper-violent first person shooter Halo 2. The deliberate hyperviolence of TV's Breaking Bad (AMC 2008-13) pales by comparison with the first person shooter game played by Jesse at the opening of the season 4 episode titled "Problem Dog" (2011). While video game violence is most often used to implicate players in an amoral economy of violent actions on screen, this scene with Jesse playing the FPS game Rage is used to highlight the moral conflict he feels about having murdered one of his accomplices in the manufacture of illegal drugs. Elephant (2003), Gus Van Sant's controversial, cinematic treatment of the school shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 refused to "explain" the motivations of the shooters, but it offered some enigmatic domestic scenes with the two kids before the shooting takes place. In this scene, one boy demonstrates surprising skill at classical piano playing while another shoots unarmed video game characters on a laptop computer. A later scene shows the two boys watching a television documentary about Hitler while waiting for their mail order assault rifles to arrive. Sexual repression After violence, the most common trope in cinematic and televisual depictions of games and gamers deals with game content that is sexually explicit and characters who are sexually repressed or immature. Of course, similar critiques could be directed at much of the history of film and television and, indeed, games often serve as an excuse for bringing titillating narratives to the screen. A dotcom era computer genius and budding entrepreneur simultaneously plays first person shooter games and watches a sorority house shower webcam. In Wayne Wang's The Center of the World (2001), a dotcom era computer genius is unable to relate to women except through computer screens or compensated companionship. On the verge of his Los Angeles based technology company's IPO, Richard Longman (Peter Sarsgaard) takes off for Las Vegas with a stripper (Molly Parker) under strict rules of engagement. The two may or may not fall in love with each other for real as Longman's company IPO makes him impossibly rich ($20 million). The question, which is presumably also operative on a metaphoric level, remains whether money can buy him the love of a stripper with a heart of gold? In The Big Bang Theory episode "The Dumpling Paradox" (2007), four CalTech graduate students are so absorbed in a multiplayer game that they miss the opportunity for casual sex. Gamer (2009) The process of avatar selection for the game "Society" portrayed in the movie Gamer (2009) perpetuates grotesquely exaggerated and singularly mean-spirited stereotypes of gamers as sedentary, debauched, immature and prone to violence. In War Games 2: The Dead Code (2008), a rogue government created female-coded supercomputer AI named RIPLEY seduces teenagers into engaging in mass murder via videogames. This depiction of games on film is typical of the 2000s critique, in which games serve as a catalyst and point of convergence for societal ills. Tron Legacy (2010) • fascist kitsch / robotic cybervixens Trainers in a military academy can see through a cadet's eyes via a surveillance monitoring system as they cultivate skills in video games, violence and social ruthlessness that would be considered sociopathic under any other circumstances. Ender's Game (2013) is anomalous in the history of games on film in reversing the generational condemnation of games and violence. In this case, it is the teenagers who remain morally centered during wartime, in spite of - or possibly because of - their exposure to video games. Social normativity What I have termed here "socially normative" depictions of games and gamers differ from the conventions of "negative stereotyping" seen in the preceding examples of addiction, violence and sexual repression in cinematic games. Social normativity refers to those depictions of games and gamers that serve to suppress the transformative potentials of interactive entertainment, framing them instead within a reassuring context of containment and continuity with existing gender relations and social order. Although they may indeed sometimes be understood as "negative," these depictions are most important to understand as being trivial, with a scope of consequence that is limited to a single relationship or insular social milieu. Games, in this context, are rendered impotent and irrelevant as potential agents of social change or civic engagement. Released in 1996, Doug Liman's Swingers prefigures a genre of cinematic treatments of games that came to fruition in the 2000s when console games were fully integrated into the domestic lives of the twenty-something generation. Vacuousness, profanity and homophobia are characteristic of these twenty-something gamer dudes, for whom the trivial banality of game worlds is coextensive with the real world. Swingers also represents the introduction of the paradigmatic gamer-dude character coined by Vince Vaughn, which would reappear with only minor variations in subsequent romantic comedies The Breakup (2006) and Couples Retreat (2009). The Breakup (2006) Vince Vaughn chooses video games over his girlfriend in The Breakup. In a battle between the sexes among a couple in the process of breaking up, videogames exacerbate the divide between men and women. A generation earlier, this scene would have played out over the image of a loutish male watching TV rather than paying attention to his partner. Couples Retreat (2009) Vince Vaughn continues to typify the quintessential video game obsessed dude, whose homosocial bonding takes precedence over his heterosexual romantic relationship. This scene also continues a long tradition of cinematic depictions of showcase game play sequences that directly incorporate game aesthetics but provide little narrative exposition. 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) This extended sequence crystallizes many of the social tensions that surround depictions of video games on film, when stereotypical gamer dude homophobia is intercut with attempted heterosexual romance. This scene brings together multiple tropes in the representation of video games on film and television: hyperviolence, homophobia, social awkwardness, introversion, antisocial behavior, linkages between sex and violence, etc. The implicit critique of video games and the derogatory use of "gay" in gamer vernacular speech is muddled by the film's ambiguous attitude toward games and other artifacts that question the main character's masculinity. Basically, this film's politics are a mess and most of the reasons for it are evident in these scenes.