MovieBob on Tropes vs Women in Video Games

I've spent more hours than I care to admit over the last few days fighting with people on reddit about the Tropes vs Women in Video Games series. I know, I know, it's fighting on the Internet (and reddit specifically) but I just couldn't help myself after reading so many arguments that a) Anita Sarkeesian thinks video games are evil, b) Sarkeesian is a shitty journalist and that's what the backlash against her was about, c) it doesn't matter that the damsel in distress trope reduces women to objects because it's just a simple storytelling device, or d) in fact the trope also objectifies the male hero figure so lets talk about that.

Ugh!

Anyway, after putting so much energy into fighting about shitty responses to Tropes vs Women in Video Games, the prospect of a video on the subject by MovieBob filled me with palpable fear. I really, really like MovieBob. I think he's a great, witty commenter who puts out a prolific amount of amazing content. I do not agree with all of his opinions, both on culture and politics, but generally I enjoy his perspective and look forward to his videos. However, when I saw that he had put out a ten minute long video on Tropes vs Women I was nervous. A few days of fighting about it on reddit had more or les conditioned me to assume that any video on the subject would be frustrating and infuriating, and I wasn't sure if I could take that from someone I admire as much as MovieBob.

Thankfully, my gut reaction was completely misguided. It's like I forgot who MovieBob is, as he's repeatedly demonstrated that he has a solid understanding of gender politics. His video is a great addition to the debate going on right now, and more or less just calls out all the trolls who have been/still are freaking out over this. It's a solid video that does a better job at identifying exactly what Anita Sarkeesian is doing with her videos than anything else I've seen lately. Check it out, enjoy, and if you end up back on his The Game Overthinker website avoid checking out the comments, because man are they ever depressing.

 

Tropes vs Women in Video Games: Damsel in Distress Part 1

The first video in Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes vs Women in Video Games series has been released, and can be viewed below. It's the first part of a discussion of the gaming-incarnation of the "damsel in distress" trope, and is a fascinating watch. This entry effectively canvases the use of the trope in the Zelda and Mario series, as well as the transformation of Rare's Dinosaur Planet into Starfox Adventures. Check it out, it's worth your 25 minutes!

In case you weren't aware of the Tropes vs Women in Video Games series before checking out this video, you should know that the newly-launched series has already been the subject of much controversy (all of which kinda makes a good case for the series' existence). Sarkeesian has been making her Tropes vs Women videos for a while, but for the video games extension of the series she turned to Kickstarter to get funding from fans. For reasons that (frankly) allude elude me, this was seen as some sort of irredeemable transgression on her part, and attracted the collective hatred of misogynistic gamers from the depths of the Internet. Slate's Amanda Marcotte sums it up nicely:

Sarkeesian's story is a doozy, by the way. She started a Kickstarter page to raise money to make a documentary about the tropes used by video game designers to portray female characters. She hadn't expressed an opinion about video games yet, but simply by stating that she would at some point in the future do so, she had to endure an absolute avalanche of misogynist abuse from men who hoped they could silence her before her too-scary-to-be-heard opinion could be voiced. Every access point they could exploit was used to try to get to her, especially her YouTube page. Her Wikipedia page was repeatedly vandalized with lies, links out to porn sites, and pornographic pictures. Eventually, Wikipedia shut it down.

Wow. Sarkeesian asked for a paltry $6,000 from fans to make a series about videos games and the roles of women within them, and just for that she was viciously attacked. Helen Lewis at the New Statesman canvases the harassment and intimidation tactics Sarkeesian was subjected to, and it's a pretty harrowing read. Thankfully the story at least has a happy turn in that Sarkeesian was able to raise over $150,000, and will be putting out follow ups to the video above.

So now we have a solid video series examining gaming with a critical lens that is sorely needed. We also have a moment of shame in the gaming community that can be pointed to as evidence that there is something tangibly wrong with the way (many) gamers think about gender and deal with other people. I'm at a bit of a loss trying to conceive of how anyone thought it would be reasonable to harass anyone the way Sarkeesian was harassed, much less for the mere prospect of having an opinion, but clearly that was the case for a great many people out there. Again, this kind of thinking within the gaming community is precisely the reason why we need these kinds of videos, as the only way to make any sorts of changes to these phenomena is discussion and education.

Repost: The Good, Racist People

Last month Forest Whitaker was falsely accused of shoplifting and frisked in a New York deli down the street from Columbia University. Ta-Nehisi Coates from The Atlantic has weighed in on the event by identifying the larger problem behind it in his fantastic piece, "The Good, Racist People." I don't want to summarize it for you, it's a concise, powerful piece that you should go read now. That said, I do want to highlight this particular passage for elegantly identifying (one of) the issue(s) at play here:

In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist ... The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion.

As Coates points out, this distinction between being racist and being a good person makes racism forgivable. Good people can't be racist, and so when these people do racist things they are forgiven in some other way (they were just doing their job, they were just trying to protect their family, they were reacting poorly to a crowd, etc.) because, again, they're good people and so they can't be racist. The net outcome of this type of doublethink is that society refuses to examine how racism continues to exist today. Where "good people" are guilty of it they are forgiven/excused because their goodness negates the possibility of them being either evil or racist. When people can't be forgiven for it, well, anyone heard from Kramer lately?

I'm reminded of the fantastic ill doctrine video on "How to Tell People They Sound Racist" (below), which provided a handy guide for telling people how to examine when they sounded racist. That video drew the distinction between the "what they did" conversation and the "what they are" conversation. As an informational guide, the video gave advice for how to have a conversation with people about their statements and beliefs without making them feel accused of being racist (which tends to end a discussion on bad terms). The point was to provide a methodology for having productive discussions of race (and racism) while being mindful of the possibility that people involved in such discussions might say things inspired by underlying prejudices without them being aware of it.

Coates point is similar in how he wants to have a conversation about racism in contemporary society that doesn't end the moment someone gets called out for their prejudices. The tension underpinning both their arguments is precisely this linking of racism and evil that works to cease productive discussion and forgive transgressions. We freeze the moment someone drops a 'hard R' and immediately turn to the defensive, "Well I'm a good person and therefore not a racist and therefore right" mentality. At best this isn't helping and at worst it's ignoring the problem in such a way as to allow it to continue and proliferate in an act of, you guessed it, racism. Coates goes on to allude to how this attitude towards racism in society "haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence." There's a real and measurable cost of this notion that racism exists only in the worst people of the world or in times gone by, and until we can do away with that idea and confront the continued prejudices alive in society today we will continue to live in an unequal and hostile community.

(Coates piece via @JAWalker, ill doctrine video via a good friend a long time ago)
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'Reposts' are inspired by other articles or blog posts around the Internet. They are used here with accreditation as the basis for short bursts of Max's interests.

Repost: "There can be only one [rooster]"

Business Week has put up an inspiring story about the meteoric rise of Huy Fong's "Rooster" Sriracha hot sauce. I love me some Sriracha, so I was excited to learn more about my favourite/go-to brand of the stuff. It turns out that the actual term "Sriracha" is generic, and the actual "rooster" brand is Huy Fong's Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce. Good to know.

The actual article is a fascinating read, telling of Huy Fong's humble beginnings and its unprecedented rise in popularity in the West. Interestingly, it turns out the entire hot sauce industry is experiencing something of a renaissance, with it ranking as the eighth-fastest-growing-industry (behind for-profit universities and solar panel manufacturing, randomly). Anyway, give the article a read if you have any affection for the one and only "rooster" sauce, it's a good bit of background info on my condiment of choice.

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'Reposts' are inspired by other articles or blog posts around the Internet. They are used here with accreditation as the basis for short bursts of Max's interests.

Zero Dark Thirty

My first thought coming out of Zero Dark Thirty was “Kathryn Bigelow is not a subtle filmmaker.” The film ends with a close-up of star Jessica Chastain, just moments after successfully completing her decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden (spoilers?). In this final shot she breaks down in tears as a nameless military pilot asks her “Where do you want to go?”

The last line felt like a proverbial hammer, tactlessly beating the film’s message into me so that I didn’t miss the point. “Clearly this movie is undermining the hunt for bin Laden,” I thought, “and with this final bit of dialogue it literally begs the question ‘Was the victory worth it?’” In finding the dreaded terrorist the American characters lowered themselves to disturbing moral lows, and with this final line Bigelow was asking the audience, “What now? What does one do with the victory that cost them so much?”      

However, in talking to other viewers and reading reviews (like that of the infamously contrarian Armond White) I realized how politically motivated my reading was. Far from the biting critique I saw the film to be, I heard voices extolling the film’s detailed account of all the effort involved in the search for bin Laden. Intelligent people argued with me about whether the hunt was necessary, and explained all the good done in the world by the example made of bin Laden. Clearly I had missed something if people with eyes could get that kind of message out of Zero Dark Thirty, and so I struggled to find my stance on the film.

Zero Dark Thirty opens with a harrowing presentation of the September 11 attacks, as 9-1-1 call recordings are played over a black screen. The audience is not shown a single moment of the historic day, but we’re allowed to listen to it and remember the horror and confusion. It’s an effective, clever, and respectful way to convey the emotion and memory of 9/11, and it starts the movie off on a high note.

However, other depictions of attacks later in the film begin to problematize the opening’s artfulness. Although 9/11 was beyond portrayal, Zero Dark Thirty has no problem showing us a shooting in Saudi Arabia, or the bombing of a Marriot in Islamabad from 2008. There’s also a depiction of the London bus bombing from 2005, though the actual explosion is respectfully cheaply hidden behind a bush at the last moment.

The contrast between the depictions of 9/11 and every other instance of terrorism in Zero Dark Thirty is palpable and troubling. Further, the film’s journalistic approach to history makes the artful opening scene seem increasingly out of place as the movie proceeds. Why the special treatment for 9/11? What makes that attack stand out among the rest? Is it a difference of importance or scope? Do the victims of that attack feel pain more acutely than those of the others? Is the movie saying that 9/11 is more important because it happened to America(ns)?

While it might be easy to write off Zero Dark Thirty with a politicized answering of these kinds of questions (indeed, I almost did), to do so would sell it short. There’s no overtly pro-American agenda at work here, as any attempt to insert one would be undercut by elements like the depiction of American soldiers shooting down parents in front of their children. So why the difference in treatment between 9/11 and other attacks?

This question is (perhaps frustratingly but also brilliantly) best answered with another question: whose perspective is the film portraying? The answer is Americans, but not for the reasons you might think. Zero Dark Thirty is not a celebratory film, but nevertheless it tells its story from a distinctly American perspective.

This point is underscored by the film’s use of its protagonist and narrative focal point, Chastain’s enigmatic “Maya.” Although it remains unclear whether she represents an amalgam of real CIA agents or one specific person, by all accounts her character is given an intentionally vague background so as to protect the identities of the people who brought down bin Laden. However, the film takes advantage of this necessary lack of characterization by using Maya’s indistinctiveness as a narrative conceit. All protective purposes aside, Maya’s lack of definition is expertly used as a signal of both Zero Dark Thirty’s audience and its subject: Maya is specifically characterized to represent any — and thereby all — Americans as the hunters of Osama bin Laden and those who suffer its tolls upon them.

What do we know of Maya? That she's smart, relentless, and increasingly dedicated to the cause; that she has nothing in her life besides her job, no social life or family to speak of; that she lost something in 9/11 attacks; that she may or may not feel that she’s been spiritually chosen for her purpose. All of these qualities make her simultaneously anonymous and analogous to huge swathes of Americans. Perhaps most tellingly, we learn late in the movie that she was chosen for her job right out of high school and has, in her own words, never done anything else. Maya’s entire existence (barring her formative years) is contained within Zero Dark Thirty: we see everything she’s ever done, and so in a very real sense she is the hunt for Osama bin Laden, or at least America’s experience of it. Through her, the movie is both aimed at and about America and its hunt for bin Laden.

With this direction in mind, consider Zero Dark Thirty’s matter-of-fact portrayal of the decade-long manhunt. This approach is a far cry from “Mission Accomplished”-type political announcements and dancing-in-the-streets-in-font-of-the-White-House reverie that the history has inspired in the past. Rather this is a film that depicts the bare facts almost entirely without comment. It forces its audience to watch Americans waterboard, beat, confine, and kill in the course of that country's search a single old man.

Finally, in an incredible climactic sequence, Zero Dark Thirty presents a moment-by-moment account of the raid on bin Laden’s compound. The scene is one of the only times in the entire film when Maya is not the central focus, as the raid instead plays out from the perspective of the Navy Seals team that carried it out. Although the depiction remains journalistically faithful to the facts, it’s notable that at no point does the perspective shift to that of the residents of the compound, for whom the event must have seemed more horrific than action-oriented. This inflection is yet one more nod to the fact that Zero Dark Thirty presents history to the audience from an American perspective, and stays true to that sense of the facts at all times.

The closing shot of Maya crying against the hanging question, “Where do you want to go?” forces the audience to consider what they feel about everything they’ve just seen. The film presents its story as it was lived and perceived by America, and asks the audience as witness: was it worth it? Where does one go now/from here?

How you answer that question will be informed by your politics, and indeed my initial response to the film was dominated by mine. I still think that the notion that bin Laden’s assassination was a significant victory for America demonstrates an adolescent ignorance that verges on offensively arrogant, but then that statement is political rather than critical of Zero Dark Thirty. A contrary perspective could equally make the same assertion about my take on the film, and that is precisely its brilliance: Zero Dark Thirty uses a largely (but, again, notably not completely) journalistic approach to America's hunt for Osama bin Laden to craft a narrative that demands critical reflection on politics and history but doesn’t provide any answers. The way the question is posed might be a little clumsy, but the range of possible answers necessitates its asking. It’s quintessentially the opposite of the Spielberg-ian, beat-you-over-the-head-with-meaning approach to filmmaking that I initially perceived.

Kathryn Bigelow is not an overly subtle filmmaker, but perhaps she’s just subtle enough. Brave enough to have a voice (because make no mistake: an uncelebratory American take on the killing of bin Laden this soon after the fact is a distinct voice) but subtle enough to leave room for others. The film is a nuanced portrayal of history that accords to a distinct perception of it without asserting that perspective as the end of the conversation. It in fact specifically calls for debate as to whether that depiction is justified on its face, not to mention once other perspectives are considered. In that sense, Zero Dark Thirty is a true product of its time: a film that evidences contemporary political debate without purporting to the benefit of hindsight.