I know, I know – I can’t believe I have this much to say about my weekend, either. Bear with me, one more and I’m done. Since the Redhead Gallery trip was a bust, the three of us trudged off in search of oversized burritos, then pushed on through the sudden attack of chilly rain to Pages on Queen, where I spent money on books that I will have to read and then give away (I don’t have any bookshelves).
Since
I know the term was invented by Mussolini, but seriously, it could be called Spartism, if that wasn’t such a totally lame sounding word. Although I deeply respect my friend’s opinion, and his knowledge of things philosophical and political far outstrips my own, his attempt to slander a work of fiction by labeling it with a political epithet seems, well… naïve. Many, perhaps most, of the world’s greatest cultural works are dependent on an unabashed, aggressive nationalism and a narrative voice that derives power from exclusion. Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. Byron’s ‘Don Juan’. Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’. Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’. Milton’s entire canon.
As Sylvia Plath would say, ‘Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you.’ Maybe not the best argument for my position, but see? Literature is chock-full of worthwhile reading that is steeped in dubious political juices. Besides, what does fascist mean anymore? It’s become a hopelessly vague pejorative. Orwell wrote over fifty years ago that the word ‘Fascism’ was almost entirely meaningless, and I doubt it’s made much progress towards clarity since then. But I digress.
A lot less physical than climbing perhaps, but no less mentally exhausting, Edward and I bunked down in
I mean, what a tease. One hears about a game whose entire premise is based on piñatas, and one makes assumptions. Such as that you will be allowed to smack the piñatas with a stick repeatedly, until showers of candy rain about your head in a sugary thunderstorm of pure insulin-crashing bliss. But no. No no no no no. Sad to say, ‘Viva Piñata’ is just ‘The Sims’ with paper-tissue-coated animals.
That’s right, people: the first 30 minutes of the “game†is all about hitting the shitty ground in your shitty garden with your shitty rusty shovel, then planting grass seed and waiting for it to grow so that piñata worms show up (no, you can’t hit them, stop asking) and then, if you’re very lucky, you might attract some piñata birds with your piñata worms, and get a whole piñata ecosystem started. And how do ecosystems continue? With sexual reproduction of course! You have to build a little house for the worms, where they can get some privacy and maybe have a glass of wine and give one another back rubs while presumably listening to some Barry White so that they can get in the mood for making whoopee.
At this point, I’m pretty sure I turned to Edward and said, “Wait, hold on, time out – am I really playing a video game that is about WORMS FUCKING?” The silent, shaking laughter and evil smile from the other end of the futon was enough to tell me that he’d been waiting for that moment of horrified revelation for days. Possibly weeks. Bastard.
You clearly didn’t play long enough! If enough of your worms fuck and you get a garden sufficiently full of happy-dappy pinatas, eventually mischievous pinatas will also appear, and those? THOSE you get to beat to death with a shovel. Then the other pinatas happily-dappily eat up the resultant explosion of candy.
Disturbing? not at all.
Meanwhile, now I want to re-read Foucault’s Pendulum again. I enjoy how all the student revolutionaries call each other “Fascist!” whenever they’re mad.
Weeks, actually.
It’s the fact that you spend all your time Simming with the fucking Pinatas, building up an ecosystem of acid-trip animals in the hope of a serious bash-fest, and yet you only get to smack ‘the bad ones’ that disappoints me. Admittedly, as a FPS player, i need more violent stimulation than most, but still, it’s all too cuddly and cute to endure. And the micro-management of one’s garden gets to you after the first hour.
You can actually bash and destroy your own pinatas, but there’s not much point since it’s not satisfying.
So yeah, I waited. I knew the horror you were in for. But who am I to spoil your dreams of pinata bashing goodness?
Rare just ain’t what they used to be. I do hope some of thier classics come to the Wii Virtual Console. I would love to be able to fire up RC Pro AM or Goldeneye once more. 🙂
i am SCANDALIZED at the lack of destruction you describe in that so called video “game”. i mean, merits of worm procreation aside, what a bitter disappointment. humph.
I am feeling the need to once again apologise for the forgetting of the pinata at your birthday…perhaps if you’d have been able to get your rage on then, you wouldn’t be so desperately seeking the bashing of computerised pinatas and/or worms?
To fill your unmet needs (pinata needs, that is), the next time we are together I will buy us a plethora of pinatas. We will 1) get our drink on 2) get fun, creative bashing objects 3) make nice collages of people we would enjoy bashing, feel free to include pictures of worms if you so feel the need 4) have crazy fun smashing 5) have insulin handy for the undeniable spike in sugars and/or have puke bucket ready.
I don’t have the most reliable memory in the world, but I’m pretty sure that I said “Miller is a fascist†or “300 is fascist†– partly jokingly, and partly because I’m a contrarian whose friends by and large have been talking about how cool the movie’s going to be. But it was partly motivated by my feeling that Miller’s work has distasteful and often unacknowledged undertones.
I agree that “fascism†is a word that’s gradually lost any clear meaning it once had in popular usage. That said, historians and political analysts still use it to identify a pretty distinctive bundle of characteristics exemplified by Mussolini’s Italy or Hitler’s Germany and their official culture. Beyond the rampant militarism, social regimentation & strident nationalism you mentioned, these might include (depending on who you’re talking to) the celebration of technology, socio-economic corporatism, rule by fuhrerprinzip, obsession with social purity, strongly patriarchal values, nostalgic primitivism, and cults of death & heroic leadership, along with a few other elements that I can’t recall off the top of my head. Many of those qualities are obviously found elsewhere, so it’s really the combination that does it.
On the one hand, it’s therefore obviously anachronistic to call the Spartans themselves thoroughgoing fascists. On the other, I still think that Miller’s 300 glorifies a lot of the same politically objectionable ideals. Certainly not all of them, but even changes like his substitution of a deformed Spartan for Ephialtes the Malian seem telling, echoing the sort of “stab in the back†mythology that inevitably crops up under fascist regimes – and in paranoid, jingoistic societies at large, of course. It’s the eugenic undertones there that get me, I think.
In more general terms, the trailer for 300 would probably have given Edward Said an aneurysm: it’s cartoonish in its orientalism, with the dehumanized hordes of sinister, grotesque, & feminized easterners facing off against the small band of manly, austere & noble westerners. And that’s coming from someone who doesn’t have a lot of time for Said, in general.
Is 300 therefore fascist in the proper sense, either because it represents a deliberate articulation of Nazi ideas or coincides perfectly with every element in the loose definition I sketched out above? Obviously not. I don’t think Miller actually has a picture of Mussolini over his bed. I do think that his work might have an uncomfortable amount in common with, for example, productions of Faust & Hamlet staged under the auspices of the Third Reich (i.e. “fascist†interpretations of the plays) or the artistic oeuvre of Leni Riefenstahl in terms of the ideals and sensibility it celebrates. (Not everything that Sontag says applies to Miller’s 300, but you can check out her brief summary of fascist aesthetics at http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/33dTexts/SontagFascinFascism75.htm at the beginning of the second section – and the whole essay’s an interesting if somewhat dated read.)
– Alastair
I’m nevertheless willing to concede that questionable politics shouldn’t in and of itself be sufficient reason for condemning a work of art. It certainly seems like a knock against, though: if we had to recommend one of two novels to a friend, generally equivalent except for the fact that one is poisonously racist, I think most people would suggest reading the other.
Since it begs the question to invoke the authority of “the world’s greatest cultural works†and leave it at that, I’d therefore want to know what 300’s redeeming qualities are supposed to be. Beyond their purely formal or aesthetic attractions, most of the works you mention have a sophistication of narrative and characterization that means there’s more to the piece than just its exclusionary message. If nothing else, there’s at least a degree of ambivalence that opens the door to individual interpretation: Paradise Lost is a great poem partly because Milton’s Satan is so compelling, whereas we (rightly) ignore hundreds of similar works featuring one-dimensional caricatures of the devil as dogmatic and insipid.
300 is certainly visually striking, and might even be a graphic groundbreaker. But its narrative also straitjackets us into identifying wholeheartedly with the Spartans, stirring imagery & writing aimed at having the reader cheer unreflectively for them while booing the villainous Persians. In that sense, I think the comic functions far more like a morality play than something like Ulysses, working on the same literary level as The Fountainhead or Maoist propaganda novels. It’s art, in other words, which largely works by appealing to and exciting its audience’s prejudices.
Does that mean people shouldn’t read it? No, of course not: there’s something to be said for pretty pictures & cheap thrills, especially since we’re all sensible enough to recognize them as such. I just reserve the right to glibly call Frank Miller a pandering fascist.
– Alastair