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Bad Object 2.0: Games and Gamers

Fascist iconography in The Hunger Games

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Bad to Worse: TV + Games Although Hollywood films posed a consistently disparaging view of television and its audiences based on susceptibility to political and ideological orthodoxy through the 1970s, an even more devastating critique awaited the cinematic vision of TV when it became linked to games beginning in the 1980s - both literally in the form of consoles connected to TV sets in the home and metaphorically, as in the case of TV game shows and reality TV competitions. In two films from the early 1980s, Videodrome (1983) and Poltergeist (1982), the domestic TV set -- which in each case is perhaps not accidentally connected to an Atari game console -- becomes a conduit for sinister forces to enter the home. Both films were also produced shortly before the video game industry crash of 1983, when home gaming systems showed their first signs of posing an economic threat to the film and television industries. The addition of game consoles to the domestic TV screen in these two films signifies overindulgence in commercial media at the expense of traditional domestic values. Videogames may thus be understood as amplifying and extending the bad object-ness of television as a feature of American households. Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist focuses on the television set as a conduit by which evil spirits are able to violate the domestic sphere. Although games do not feature prominently in the film, the presence of an Atari game console on top of the TV set suggests the technology's complicity in the invasion, which takes place after conventional broadcast signals have ceased for the day. In David Cronenberg's Videodrome it is the television signal, not the physical apparatus, that is responsible for undermining a viewer's connection to the real world. The Videodrome broadcast contains subliminal signals that trigger hallucinations in viewers whose actions may then be controlled. Looking closely at the television console in this scene, we see that, in addition to the beta tape deck, the TV is connected to an Atari game console, which figures prominently, along with several game cartridges, when the television set appears to come to life. From Games to Reality TV "game shows" are notoriously inexpensive to produce and and readily integrated with the marketing strategies of network sponsors. They have also been consistently associated with the worst contributions of television to popular culture. In 1961, U.S. Federal Communications Commission chair, Newton Minow's famed "Vast Wasteland" speech specifically called out "a procession of game shows" as evidence of television's unrealized potential. Films about TV have often featured the conjunction of TV and games as resulting in an even more vile and unredeemable form of mass entertainment. Prominent examples include Robert Redford's Quiz Show (1994), which revived cultural memories of the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, highlighting the lack of ethical standards among ratings-obsessed network executives and their sponsors. And in 1987, long-time TV actor Paul Michael Glaser (best known for his role as "Starsky" on the ABC series Starsky and Hutch) directed The Running Man, set in a dystopian sci-fi future where a hyperviolent game show blood sport has taken over the role of prisons. As the genre of reality TV gained popularity following the Writer's Guild of America strike of 1988, these shows, which thrived on sensationalism and spectacle, provided filmmakers with an easy target for critique. Daniel Minahan's Series 7: The Contenders (2001), for example, combined the reality TV game show and blood sport premises of Death Race 2000 (1975) and The Running Man (1987) to portray a television show in which ordinary citizens are supplied with weapons and pitted against each other in a televised fight to the death. Although it was originally conceived as a weekly TV series, Series 7: The Contenders constitutes a particularly blunt example of the cinematic critique of television, drawing aesthetic inspiration from both game shows and reality TV to create a hyper-violent mashup that portrays both television and its audiences as lacking in moral and ethical standards. Mark Neveldine's Gamer (2009), in turn, created an explicit bridge between the hyperviolence of televised blood sports and the world of videogames. This expository sequence from the movie Gamer is equally condemning of tabloid style television and the gaming industry. Michael C. Hall plays Ken Castle, the creator of "Society'" a Second Life-style multi-user virtual environment in which users control human avatars instead of computer-generated ones. Interviewed by a tabloid journalist (Kyra Sedgewick) on a live TV infotainment interview show, Castle describes his new project, "Slayers," which places "volunteer" death-row inmates in real-world life-and-death combat situations where their bodies are controlled by middle class teenagers. This scene is remarkable for its technical explication of the "Slayers" system as well as its preemptive trivialization of a broad range of ethical concerns, based on repeated assertions of individual choice and agency for participants. The broadcast is ultimately interrupted by a radical group of hackers known as Humanz who speak directly to the TV audience, opposing the technology of "Slayers" and advocating a return to organic human existence. Gary Ross' film version of the popular young adult novel The Hunger Games (2012) extends the premise of televised blood sports to take place in a dystopian fascist future society in which teenagers must fight to the death as part of a televisual strategy for maintaining order among the masses. The fascist kitsch that adorns the opening ceremonies of The Hunger Games resembles Leni Riefenstahl's documentation of Nazi rallies and Olympic games, drawing a clear link between televised pageantry and totalitarian government. The individual agency available to participants in the games continues to be a central source of narrative tension throughout the film, as is the potential for mass rebellion against an oppressive social order. Arguably, this aspect of the narrative logic of The Hunger Games represents a dramatic shift in the conception of television audiences from the passive dupes and morons of A Face in the Crowd and Being There, as well as the impotent rage of Network, to pose a viable threat to the social order if it can only be catalyzed by the virtuosic survival skills and personal integrity of a teenage girl.
Bad Object 1.0: Television Games are not the only object of derision in the history of Hollywood. Movies have long posed pointed critiques of television and its viewers. Conventional wisdom attributes this antipathy to the direct economic impact of television on the film industry in the late 1940s. Following the introduction of commercial broadcast television in 1948, cinema attendance dropped precipitously and has never achieved anything close to the market dominance it enjoyed prior to World War II. In the digital era, however, the brunt of cinematic vilification has shifted from TV to video games, producing an echo chamber for familiar moral panics about violence, addiction and anti-social behavior. These damaging tropes of games and gamers may be viewed in relation to the historical lineage of computer hacking and generational anxieties about “new technology” in general, but it is important to acknowledge the historical continuities with Hollywood's critique of television. This is relevant both because it prefigures the industry's antipathy toward games and gamers and because it demonstrates that games are not alone as the "bad objects" of popular culture. In addition to briefly sketching the history of cinematic critiques of television, I will suggest that dedicated game consoles, as distinct from games that are played on general purpose home computers, have been more consistently associated with anti-social behavior on screen. More than a decade before television had achieved its first commercial broadcast, the idea of the technology had been denounced by the film Murder By Television (1935). A low-budget drama starring Bela Lugosi, Murder By Television was freighted with protracted dialogue scenes and an implausible storyline involving a murderous identical twin (Lugosi) who transforms an experimental television signal into a "death ray." In this climactic scene, Lugosi explains the technology behind a remote murder committed by transforming an international television broadcast signal into a "death ray" by bringing it into contact with an interstellar frequency. This film, which long predated the advent of commercial broadcast television offered a prescient glimpse of the extreme anxieties that attend new technologies. In 1957, Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (ironically starring future American TV icon Andy Griffith) articulated a sociological critique of the dangers of radio and television for mobilizing mass social movements based on a cult of personality. In this scene, a TV personality advises a politician to reform his personality and public persona to appeal to the lowest of the low: uneducated simpleton TV viewers. The mise en abyme structure of A Face in the Crowd allows the filmmakers to present a devastating critique of TV and its audiences, while distancing the movie viewers from similar concerns. John Frankenheimer's Death Race 2000 (1975) focused on audience complicity in the production of a hyperviolent spectator sport in which street race drivers score points for running over civilians in a day-long, televised extravaganza. Just a year later Sydney Lumet's Network (1976) portrayed the potential for abuse of power invested in media corporations. The mise en abyme structure of Lumet's cinematic rant against television allows the Hollywood film industry to ventriloquize a critique that could just as easily be directed at the corporate conglomeration of the film industry. This scene cleverly distinguishes between "live" TV audiences and remote ones, even as the film's own distribution was destined for movie theaters in which audiences have a conflicted relation to the images and messages on screen. Hal Ashby's Being There returned to the critique of television viewers as illiterate morons who mindlessly imitate what they see on screen and the vacuity of an American political system that is pathologically averse to substance. Among Hollywood film's most devastating critiques of television is the character played by Peter Sellars in Being There. As an illiterate moron, Chance the Gardner is barely able to function in society except by watching and imitating the actions of characters on TV. In the courseof the film's mean-spirited critique of television and the American political system, Gardner also proves to be an ideal candidate for elected office. Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist (1982) depicts the television set as a conduit by which evil spirits violate the domestic sphere. In David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983) it is the television signal itself, not the physical apparatus, that is responsible for undermining a viewer's connection to the real world. The Videodrome broadcast contains subliminal signals that trigger hallucinations in viewers whose actions may then be controlled by the broadcasters. Looking closely at the television console in this scene, we see that, in addition to the beta tape deck, the TV is connected to an Atari game console, which figure prominently along with several game cartridges when the television set starts to come to life. In 1987, long-time TV actor Paul Michael Glaser (best known for his role as "Starsky" on the ABC series Starsky and Hutch) directed The Running Man, set in a dystopian sci-fi future where a hyperviolent game show blood sport has taken over the role of prisons. Robert Redford's Quiz Show (1994) revived cultural memories of the quiz show scandals of the 1950s, highlighting the lack of ethical standards among ratings-obsessed network executives and their sponsors. Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000) extended the institutional critique to the racism of Hollywood executives who approve production of a minstrel show revival that becomes wildly popular. The dramatic conclusion of Bamboozled links the film's narrative depicting a contemporary TV show that succeeds by reviving conventions of racist minstrelsy with a historic montage of live action and animated examples from the history of Hollywood. Daniel Minahan's Series 7: The Contenders (2001) returns to the TV game show and blood sport premises of Death Race 2000 and The Running Man to portray a television show in which ordinary citizens are armed and pitted against each other in a fight to the death. Although it was originally conceived as a weekly TV series, Series 7: The Contenders representts a particularly blunt example of the cinematic critique of television, drawing aesthetic inspiration from game shows and reality TV to create a hyper-violent mashup that portrays both television and its audiences as lacking in moral or ethical standards. Mark Neveldine's Gamer (2009) creates an explicit bridge between the hyperviolence of televised blood sports and the world of videogames. This expository sequence from the movie Gamer is equally mean-spirited toward tabloid television and the gaming industry. Michael C. Hall plays Ken Castle, the creator of "Society'" a Second Life-ish virtual world in which users control human avatars instead of computer-generated ones. Interviewed by Kyra Sedgewick on a live TV infotainment interview show, Castle describes his new project, "Slayers," which places "volunteer" death-row inmates in combat situations where they are controlled by middle class teenagers, facing real world life and death battles. This scene is remarkable for its technical explication of the Slayers system as well as its preemptive trivialization of a broad range of ethical concerns. The broadcast is interrupted by a radical group of hackers known as Humanz, embodied as an African-American male (Ludacris) who speaks directly to the TV audience, opposing the technology of Slayers and advocating a return to organic human existence. Gary Ross' The Hunger Games (2012) extends this premise to a dystopian fascist future society in which teenagers must fight to the death as part of a televisual strategy for maintaining order among the masses. The fascist kitsch that adorns the opening ceremonies of the Hunger Games is obviously not accidental, but what purpose does it serve in the film? Does one need to recognize the echoes of Leni Riefenstahl's documentation of Nazi rallies and Olympic games in order to appreciate what the spectacles of totalitarian government look like? Why has the villification of television as an echo chamber for cultural turpitude remained so unchanged for so long?