You know those movies about characters trail-blazing the business of some terrible vice? They’re always set in a not-too-distant past, have trailers full of period-specific songs, and include the words “inspired by a true story” on the poster. There’s the initial meteoric rise to power and wealth, followed by a period of unbridled excess — generally involving use of montage — and, ultimately, the inevitable downfall which was doomed to happen from the start, with, possibly, an epilogue of redemption. It’s a very specific film archetype, wherein the traditional bad guy is, instead, the quintessential American hero: the visionary entrepreneur who possesses the ingenuity and tenacity and just plain balls to seize an opportunity only he can see, and achieve a feat so stupendous — inventing the American cocaine trade, for instance, becoming the first black man to rise above the Italian mafia in the New York heroin business — you’re at once inspired and horrified by his success.
In 2001, Blow kicked off this trend of movies where you’re rooting for the drug dealer. The movie’s based on the life of George Jung, played by Johnny Depp, a Boston guy living in California, who starts off smuggling pot cross-country in the 60’s, and ends up becoming the American connection to Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel, which, with Jung’s help, would go on to own 85% share of the U.S. cocaine market by the late 70’s / early 80’s:
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Then came 2005’s Lord of War, in which the illicit contraband is weaponry, and Nicolas Cage plays Ukranian-American gun trafficker, Yuri Orlov — a fictional character based on a composite of a number of actual post-soviet arms dealers — whose big break comes as he watches Mikhail Gorbachev give his resignation speech on television, Christmas Day 1991. Like a prospector who’s just struck oil (See also: There Will Be Blood, for a variation on this cinematic theme), he envisions, in this moment, the future of his business expanding with the gush of weapons — even tanks! — he’ll now be able to buy (illegally) from the just-dissolved Soviet Union’s stockpile in the Ukraine:
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2005 was also the year Weeds premiered on Showtime, in which Mary-Louise Parker plays a widowed housewife who becomes a suburban pot dealer, and a few seasons later ends up married to the head of a Mexican drug cartel.
By 2008, when American Gangster came out — which tells the story of Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington, who bypassed the entire Italian mafia to become the heroin king-pin of New York in the early 70’s by establishing his own direct supply connection in Asia during the Vietnam war and smuggling the drugs into the U.S. in the coffins of dead U.S. soldiers — rooting for the vice-peddling, psychotically enterprising, imminently doomed outlaw businessman — even though, good god! he’s a fucking heroin drug lord turning all of Harlem into addicted zombies!! — had become a familiar experience:
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Which is how we arrive at Middle Men, due out later this year, a based-on-reality story in which Luke Wilson plays Jack Harris, a mainstream businessman who partners with a pair of porn content providers (played by Gabriel Macht and Giovanni Ribisi) to form the first online adult billing company in the mid 1990’s:
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The drug dealer used to ALWAYS be the bad guy. You weren’t supposed to sympathize with him. Now it’s every fuckin’ movie like this. But the story isn’t just about the clever bastard with an idea for a supply to human nature’s demand, it’s about the vice itself. It’s not just George Jung’s story, it’s the history of blow we’re fascinated by — how a chance cell-mate pairing between a California pot smuggler and a member of the Medellín cartel would pave the way for the U.S. cocaine highway. How the Vietnam war became the camouflage for the heroin epidemic Frank Lucas created. How the Soviet Union’s collapse helped the business of illegal arms dealers. Each of these stories has this moment where entrepreneur and zeitgeist collide, and — for better or worse; mostly for worse — it changes the world. In Middle Men the focus of the story could have easily been the porn industry — but it isn’t. Porn is just the side effect. Like the preview voice-over announcer says, it’s the story of the worldwide web.
What neither he nor Mark [Zuckerberg, Facebook founder] had known when they started the damn thing was how addictive Facebook was. You didn’t just visit the site once. You vsited it every day. You came back gain and again, adding to your site, your profile, changing your pictures, your interestes, and most of all, updating your friends.
… Most kids who tried out [Facebook] once tended to come back — 67 percent every day.
The Internet: It might not be illegal, but it’s unquestionably addictive.
Once considered the province of geeks, the Internet is now where all of us live. It is a huge, enormous thing that is changing how we do practically everything and permeating the very experience of our lives. It is now all of our’s vice. And it’s breeding a whole new generation of vice entrepreneurs. Drug dealers and gunrunners have new company.
In related news, is it just me or does the new poster for The Social Network seem, like, awfully familiar?
You know, the little Marvel Studios franchise about a charming-yet-ironic 21st-century superhero played by Robert Downey Jr.? You might have heard about it. Considering the two films have cumulatively grossed over a billion dollars in worldwide box office sales so far, it’s highly probable that you’ve even seen it. You couldn’t miss it.
Oh?
Really?
Somehow you managed?
Well, no worries. Here. A quick crash course.
Iron Man (2008) trailer:
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Notice the AC/DC track that opens the trailer? “Highway To Hell” has basically become the official theme song for Tony Stark. So much so, AC/DC even made a special Iron Man music video for the song with Marvel in conjunction with the release of the sequel:
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In fact, the band is so inextricably tied to this superhero franchise, the very first scene of Iron Man 2 — which came out just weeks ago — uses yet another AC/DC tune for its score:
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So now, suppose you’re watching a preview for the new animated DreamWorks movie, Megamind, and, exactly 1 minute into it, you see THIS:
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And you think, seriously?? Is this actually happening?!
The Megamind wiki page says that originally Robert Downey Jr. himself was slated to be the voice of the supervillain (now voiced by Will Ferell), which would have, perhaps, made it more obvious this was supposed to be a parody. And, yes, DreamWorks is big on the satirizing of established literary conventions and characters, like with Shrek poking fun at familiar fairy tale tropes, etc. Hence Megamind’s “borrowing” of the Superman origin myth, no doubt, and even the whole Unbreakable dealie-o with the story being driven from the villain’s point of view. But whereas with Shrek the satire was immediately apparent, Metro Man’s appropriation of not only Tony Stark’s charming-yet-ironic personality but his freakin theme music!? just comes across like a poorly-made knock-off.
Even Dimension Films’ genre spoof, Superhero Movie, suddenly seems less derivative:
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What do you think? Megamind’s Metro Man: nuanced spoof or not-so-subtle imitation?
This is not typically the kind of stuff I write about here, but it is something I feel quite strongly about, and, if nothing else, it makes for a case study in cross-cultural communication — not to mention some interesting neuroscience.
Last week, as the New York Times reported, French President Nicolas Sarkozy addressed the Parliament at Versailles with a withering critique of the burqa as an unacceptable symbol of “enslavement.”
“The issue of the burqa is not a religious issue. It is a question of freedom and of women’s dignity,” Mr. Sarkozy said. “The burqa is not a religious sign. It is a sign of the subjugation, of the submission, of women…. I want to say solemnly that it will not be welcome on our territory.”
Now, I got the link to this article from my cousin, who, it should be pointed out, shares the same history I do. We were not born in the United States, and growing up as first-generation immigrants in America we have spent our whole lives reconciling mixed, often contradictory, cultures. The fact that our families were able to leave the giant labor camp / prison that was the Soviet Union at all, is the result of one of the most successful human rights campaigns in history. So it’s no surprise that our reactions to the news of this French move were resoundingly positive. It was, however, quite surprising (though it retrospect, it shouldn’t have been) to discover many of my American-born friends expressing outright disapproval. I heard everything from straight up calling Sarkozy a “moron,” to the derisive cynicism that “Nothing says freedom like banning the burqa.”
I should hasten to point out here, it’s not that my American-born (liberal) friends are burqa-lovers, by any means, it’s just that freedom of religious expression is a sacrosanct American principle — as well it should be — and messing with it immediately inspires a profound distaste. It would, no doubt, be easier to have the issue of religious expressions be capable of being soblack and white, so absolute, so all or nothing. It would certainly be much simpler, clearer, less offensive or culturally insensitive, if the idea that banning anything could actually bolster freedom wasn’t so contradictory. The reality, however, is that pretty much all freedom depends on the banning of something, and that something is the myriad efforts to deny human rights.
Which is precisely the spectrum that the burqa finds itself on. To clear up any confusion — since, in the predisposition for pursuing starkly-defined edges between black and white, it might seem effective to assume I’m just roundly including ALL kinds of modesty coverings, like headscarves, for instance, in this indictment, I’d like to state that I’m definitely not. A headscarf isn’t anywhere in the same vicinity as this:
The burqa is a full-body ghost-like sheet that covers a woman from head to toe, which Sarkozy, in no way inaccurately, likened to an “imprisonment.” The International Society For Human Rights seems to have drawn the very same analogy in the PSA at the top of this post. There is a good deal that has already been said about the legitimate impediments to health and physical safety that come along with these trappings (apt word, indeed, in this instance), but what makes the burqa an outright violation of human rights in my view is the fact that when a group of people is denied the freedom simply have their face be visible, they are deprived of the most fundamental, basic, human capacity to elicit empathy.
In his book, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, Daniel Goleman writes, “Suppressing our natural inclination to feel with another allows us to treat the other as an It…. Empathy is the prime inhibitor of human cruelty.”
Conveniently for us, then, human brains are actually hard-wired for empathy. In fact, damage or malfunction in the neural systems instrumental in allowing us to understand and resonate with someone else’s emotional state happens to be a basic requirement for psychopathic behavior. Clinical psychopaths are actually incapable of reading emotions; their brains simply do not register the meaning of expressions of fear or anguish, for example. Normal, healthy, functioning brains not only understand others’ emotions, they are actually designed in such a way as to induce the witness to internally experience the same emotional state that he or she is witnessing.
For instance, take a look at this face for, like, two-hundredth of a second:
As you do, Goleman explains:
The amygdala instantly reacts, and the stronger the emotion displayed, the more intense the amygdala’s reaction. When people looked at such pictures while undergoing an fMRI, their own brains looked like they were the frightened ones, though in a more muted range.
When two people interact face to face, [emotional] contagion spreads via multiple neural circuits operating in parallel within each other’s brains. These systems for emotional contagion traffic in the entire range of feeling, from sadness to joy.
Moments of [emotional] contagion represent a remarkable event: the formation between two brains of a functional link, a feedback loop that crosses the skin-and-skull barrier between bodies. In systems terms, during this linkup brains “couple,” with the output of one becoming the input to drive the workings of the other, forming what amounts to an interbrain circuit.
Brains loop outside of our awareness, with no special attention or intention demanded. [This] automaticity allows for rapidity. For instance, the amygdala spots signs of fear in someone’s face with remarkable speed, picking it up in a glimpse as quick as 22 milliseconds, and in some people in a mere 17 milliseconds (less than two-hundredth of a second). This [happens] so fast that the conscious mind remains oblivious to that perception.
We may not consciously realize how we are syncrhonizing, yet we mesh with remarkable ease.
Giacomo Rizzolatti, the Italian neuroscientist who discovered mirror neurons, the special class of neurons responsible for this kind of social duet, explains that our innate capacity for empathy allows us “to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation; by feeling, not thinking.”
If you really stop to consider the significance of this, it’s pretty astounding. Our capacity to communicate through emotions happens entirely outside the realm of conceptual communication i.e. words. We don’t even need to speak the same language, or be able to TALK at all, for that matter, in order to simply look at someone’s face and personally understand what that person is feeling. As Goleman writes, “Mirror neurons ensure that the moment someone sees an emotion expressed on your face, they will at once sense that same feeling within themselves.” Through seeing another person’s face we experience, as instantly as a reflex, a mutually reverberating state that neuroscientists call “empathic resonance.” And empathy, I’ll write it again: is the prime inhibitor of human cruelty.
Sarkozy talked about the burqa as a tool for “depriv[ing women] of identity.” I see it as something more profoundly sinister. It deprives them not just of individual identity, but of shared Humanity. Our fundamental, human neurobiology depends on others to be able to see our face in order to elicit empathy. It is not the only way, of course, and it’s obviously not tamper-resistant, but it is the most instinctive, moreso even than language. Making someone hide their face is, literally, the oldest trick in the book for denying them empathy. When you can’t empathize, as any psychopath case study will show, you quite literally can’t recognize the other person’s Humanity. When you can’t recognize another person’s Humanity, it becomes a lot easier to be cruel. And when an entire population (oh, say, you know, women) is systematically denied their Humanity, their widespread oppression is inevitable. Thus whether or not your cultural sensitivity allows you to consider the burqa a means of oppression unto itself, it is absolutely part of the cycle that breeds it.
Human rights and religious freedom don’t always go hand in hand as neatly as we would like. Perhaps we might all live in a much better world if the two would just coordinate their priorities, but all too often religion seems to like endorsing things like female genital mutilation or child brides (notice a trend here on whom religion likes to shit on?) When the two don’t go hand in hand, the question that comes up for each of us is, how will we navigate the ensuing grayness? From my own experience, as a beneficiary of people around the world having fought against the oppression of others, there is nothing “moronic” or cynical about standing up for those who are being denied a basic human right, especially when it’s the right to empathy.
I had already joined the Circusscene when, in early 2006, I was consulting at Wong Doody and heard about a clothing company client they were working with called Edoc Laundry. The clothes had an intriguing concept: there were secret codes in the garments, which, if deciphered, would reveal clues to a mystery story. The wearers of Edoc Laundry clothing would thus become players in an “Alternate Reality Game” — a new form of interactive entertainment that uses the real world as a platform for creating an ever-evolving narrative. Now, I had grown up in subculture, gone on to produce nightlife events and music festivals, and ultimately ended up in marketing. So the concept of a secret “code” embedded in clothes — of hidden meanings conveyed in the way people dressed — it all made perfect sense to me. This was already a game all of us in the modern world were playing. It was called Lifestyle.
Years earlier, Reznor had heard about a complex game played out over many months, both online and in the real world, in which millions of people across the planet had collectively solved a cascading series of puzzles, riddles, and treasure hunts that ultimately tied into the Steven Spielberg movie AI: Artificial Intelligence. Developed by Jordan Weisman, then a Microsoft exec, it was the first of what came to be called alternate reality games — ARGs for short. After leaving Redmond, Weisman founded a company called 42 Entertainment, which made ARGs for products ranging from Windows Vista to Pirates of the Caribbean:Dead Man’s Chest. Reznor wanted to give his fans a taste of life in a massively dysfunctional theocratic police state, and he decided that a game involving millions of players worldwide would help him do that in a big way.
Reznor was stepping into a new kind of interactive fiction. These narratives unfold in fragments, in all sorts of media, from Web sites to phone calls to live events, and the audience pieces together the story from shards of information. The task is too complicated for any one person, but the Web enables a collective intelligence to emerge to assemble the pieces, solve the mysteries, and in the process, tell and retell the story online. The narrative is shaped — and ultimately owned — by the audience in ways that other forms of storytelling cannot match. No longer passive consumers, the players live out the story.Eight years ago, this kind of entertainment didn’t exist; now dozens of such games are launched every year, many of them attracting millions of followers on every continent.
When I was in high school I started going to raves. This was way before anyone would say the words “social” and “media” next to one another, when us kids still did shit like go to the library, and AOL was the only way to instant message. But if you were, let’s say, looking for an underground party to dance at all night, where no one was gonna care if you weren’t 21, you could definitely find it online. In Boston, where I grew up, there was NE-Raves, an online mailing list for electronic music events in the Northeast, originally hosted out of MIT. According to the “Cobbled-Together History of Hyperreal,” as far back as 1992, NE-Raves was one of the very first rave email lists in the US, along with SFraves on the West Coast. By the time I got into the Rave Scene (ahem *ARG*), both of these regional lists, and others, had been subsumed into hyperreal.org. In fact, by that point there were actually various other newsgroups and listservs and websites and whatnot created by and for the rave community, but in a sense, all roads would lead back to Hyperreal, which had become a kind of online clearinghouse of information on “Rave Culture, Chemistry, and Music.” In ARG parlance, Hyperreal could be considered the “Rabbithole” — the trailhead that marks the first website, contact, or puzzle that starts off the ARG. When Hyperreal first began, now almost two decades ago, as creator Mike Brown writes:
The majority of people with internet access back then were college students involved in computer-oriented studies, employees of well-funded technology companies like AT&T, and a smattering of U.S. government and military agencies. Consumer-oriented services like Compuserve, Genie, Prodigy and AOL, as well as most dialup bbs ‘networks’ were not on the internet, or had very limited gateways for mail and news that no one knew about. There was no spam, and since you weren’t interacting with a true cross-section of the general public, the entire net had a different character than it does today, socially.
So as the rave scene started to blow up nationwide, we’d tell each other online about the flyers we found and the records we bought and the parties we went to. You’d have people in the Midwest who were driving 9-12 hours to get to raves in New York and D.C., and to hang out with the friends we made through these online forums. A lot of information sharing was going on in this subculture’s subculture.
They are collective and talking and engaged, both with the project and with each other. They’re having a collective experience in which they literally bring different pieces, one to the next, swap them back and forth, gossip about them. They have an element of cocreation and a collaborative nature that doesn’t really have an analog that I’ve been able to think of in the arts, although it does in another place. This behavior—this sort of creative, collaborative, enthusiastic scavengering behavior—is something that we call by another name when we direct it, not to entertainment, but to the physical world. We call it science, as it’s been constructed since Newton and the Royal Society, and that’s worked out pretty well for us as a species.
I would argue it has a direct analog in culture as well. The term “Alternate Reality Game,” after all, was never actually what the creators of The Beast used to describe what they were doing. It was a phrase that came from the players themselves, to refer to this idea of a self-styled world that proposed an alternative vision of reality hidden under the “mainstream” surface. In Tara Mcall’s book This Is Not A Rave (“This Is Not A Game” anyone?) she writes about the way early ravers deliberately positioned themselves against the status quo and the mainstream club crowd:
They saw a need to maintain their scene’s underground status. To be part of an underground culture meant that you stood apart from the norm. It indicated that you belonged to a secret community. If you were part of the underground you were part of a chosen group. Set apart from the mainstream, these early ravers bonded with one another by exhibiting small signs such as specific articles of clothing that could be “read” by those in the know, signaling that they belonged.
Signals embedded in attire, containing meaningful (cultural) codes decipherable by others in the know? Sounds pretty much like what Edoc Laundry had in mind. While the expression of identity — whether alternative or not — is a function of all lifestyle apparel, there are numerous other rave/ARG parallels that come to mind. For instance, back in the day the actual location of a party (especially if it was unpermitted) would be kept under wraps until the very last minute, with only an “info line” phone number disseminated. To find out where to go you’d have to call the number on the night of the event, and oftentimes the directions you’d get wouldn’t lead you directly to the location but to a designated “map point” where you’d either receive further instructions on where to go, or park your car and be shuttled to the event location. At the time all of this was done in order to avoid “outside” attention — after all, it’s harder for law enforcement to bust up a party if they don’t exactly know where it is — but now it’s par for the course in ARG “experience design.” From Wired’s description of the Year Zero ARG culmination:
On April 13 [2007], all the players who had signed up at a subversive site called Open Source Resistance were invited to gather beneath a mural in Hollywood. Some of those who showed up were given cell phones and told to keep them on at all times. Five days later, the phones rang. The players were told to report to a parking lot, where they were loaded onto a ram-shackle bus with blacked-out windows.
The bus delivered them at twilight to what appeared to be an abandoned warehouse near some railroad tracks. Armed men patrolled the roof. The 50-odd players were led up a ramp and into a large, dark room where the leader of Open Source Resistance (actually an actor) gave a speech about the importance of making themselves heard. Then they were led through a maze of rooms and deposited in front of — a row of amps?
With the sudden crack of a drumbeat, Nine Inch Nails materialized onstage and broke into “The Beginning of the End,” a song they had never before played in the US. “This is the beginning,” Reznor intoned, as guitar chords strafed the room. He got out one, two, three, four more songs before the SWAT team arrived. Then, as flashing lights and flash bombs filled the room, men in riot gear stormed the stage. “Run for the bus!” someone yelled, and the players started sprinting. The bus sped them back to the parking lot and the cars that would take them safely home. But before they drove away, they were told they’d be contacted again.
If you were a party kid in the 90’s, there’s no way that this doesn’t sound like an exaggerated version of something straight out of the old raver playbook, but I’m not suggesting that the ARG form takes its cues strictly from rave culture. Whereas in a deliberately produced ARG the key elements of the game’s narrative are painstakingly planned out and scripted, the narrative of any Lifestyle ARG becomes the evolving story that its own culture tells about itself. Hip Hop, for instance, originally defined the foundation of its culture (it’s “narrative”) through The Four Elements of Hip Hop: MCing (rapping), DJing, graffiti, and breakdancing — though later there evolved as many as 9 elements, including beatboxing, hip hop fashion, and slang. Not every lifestyle necessarily outlines the elements of its narrative as explicitly, but every lifestyle indeed has them. Whether it’s a certain type of music, a fashion aesthetic, an ethos or set of values, specific kinds of community-reinforcing events and experiences, or a particular cultural mythology, these all become indelible components of any Lifestyle ARG “narrative.”
Having been the Marketing Director for a Lifestyle-driven music festival over the past three years, I’ve thought about Alternate Reality Games in this framework for a while, but the idea resurfaced when I heard about the recent tumult caused by the True Blood campaign. Originally developed last year by Campfire Agency to promote the premiere of HBO’s True Blood series, the ARG, which won ad:tech’s Best Integrated Campaign award for 2008, hinges on the same premise as the show — that Vampires are real, and thanks to the development of a synthetic blood beverage they are now finally able to ascend from the “underground,” as it were, and become functioning members of society, albeit still a uniquely particular minority within society, with their own “Alternative Lifestyle.” Initially, a network of online destinations had emerged addressing the various inevitabilities of True Blood’s parallel universe. For instance, there’s the Human/Vampire dating site, Lovebitten, there’s the American Vampire League advocacy group (“Because Vampires were people too”), and there’s also Blood Copy: “Once a human’s attempt to understand the vampire phenomenon, now the leading source for vampire news (and proud member of The Gawker Media Network).” It’s that parenthetical which has generated quite a brouhaha.
Yesterday morning, we reported that Gawker Media had acquired a blog called BloodCopy. This “news” turned out to be false, part of a viral ad campaign for an HBO show called “True Blood.”
We apologize for the error. We’d also like to explain how it happened, because we imagine others came to the same conclusion we did. We also think that HBO, Gawker, and the marketing agency crossed a line, and we’re not surprised that they are now withdrawing parts of the campaign.
First, we received an email from a marketing firm announcing that “BloodCopy has joined the Gawker Media Network.” The email was an invitation to a party to celebrate this event.
Here’s the email:
At the time, the front page of Bloodcopy.com read:
Last week Gawker Media realized they simply could not live (so to speak) without having BloodCopy.com on their roster of websites. As of next week, we will officially be under the Gawker umbrella, joining sites such as Gakwer, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, Lifehacker, Deadspin, Jezebel and io9. Hope they can handle us.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, there are more things about vampires than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But I know a lot of them. And I’m finding out about more. And I’m willing to share with the class. So stick to BloodCopy – and Gawker – and we’ll bring you all the news that’s fit to print (and some that’s not) about vampires.
There has been discussion in the fallout, of Gawker’s advertising department “Undermin[ing] the credibility of Gawker Editorial to promote an ad campaign,” and while, by that same token, I think there hasn’t been quite as much discussion on the subject of reporters actually checking facts before simply rehashing press releases…. I’ll leave that particular debate to the journalists. What’s interesting to me in this whole situation is that despite Blood Copy’s open proclamation that it is A BLOG ABOUT VAMPIRES, the idea that Gawker Media would have bought it, seemed, somehow….. plausible enough to publish!
Why?
Well, consider the other properties under the Gawker Media umbrella:
Essentially, Gawker owns a network of Lifestyle Blogs. If, let’s say, Vampires were real (which they’re not) but if they were, and there was a news blog for that Lifestyle… it’s completely plausible Gawker would, indeed, buy it. Playing with the idea of superimposing True Blood’s reality onto actual reality has been a goal of the ARG all along. Last year it was about how reality might look if a new synthetic-blood beverage brand had, in fact, just been introduced to the market:
This time around, it’s about what reality might look like if the Vampire Lifestyle indeed became, as Blood Copy proposes, “a more visible and influential part of the mainstream:”
In the era of the Long Tail we have an ever-expanding array of choices for defining our identities, and brands now play an integral part in expressing these definitions. We may not all necessarily consider ourselves to be members of an alternative subculture, but we are all aware of making deliberate “Lifestyle” choices in how we dress, what we drive, the music we listen to, what we do for fun, and on and on. Even between relatively mainstream choices there are always conscious decisions being made. Whether we’re buying American Apparel or American Eagle, the choice of one vs the other is not accidental. By deliberately making these different Lifestyle choices we are all defining own particular realities — we are ALL participating in a Lifestyle ARG.
Just saw the trailer for the latest Bret Easton Ellis adaptation: The Informers – Check it (if you’re seeing this in a reader, click HERE to see the video).
Ellis is one of my favorite writers. There’s a lot of people out there who enjoy his writing in a disturbingly literal way (particularly the people who like American Psycho the best of his work), but I think he’s one of the most explicit satirists around. He’s like the modern Evelyn Waugh. There’s an irony that’s as sharp as Patrick Bateman‘s machete cutting through all of Ellis’s books. His condemnation of the modern, over-privileged, narcissistic, instant-gratification obsessed yet terminally insatiable, superficial, alienated, self-destructive, overindulged, psychologically damaged society, is wrought precisely through a celebration of its most hyperblolically psychotic, emotionally anesthetized elements.
And for some reason there’s something inexplicably captivating about these stories about these characters for whom inhumanity comes effortlessly. I’m no psychologist, so I have no clue why THAT’s the case, but that Ellis’s stories–the seminal of which are some 30 years old now–continue to resonate with each new generation, is a testament to the persistence of this pathology.
Watching the Informers trailer I remembered my first introduction to Bret Easton Ellis: renting Less Than Zero back in high school. At the time the story was already a decade old but its glimmering bleakness was still just as compelling. Looking back on the preview for Less Than Zero, which came out in 1987, it’s kind of a trip:
In contrast to the Informers, Less Than Zero’s version of pretty much the exact same story, told three decades ago, seems so sincere! Almost quaint. And yet Less Than Zero was considered so controversial when it came out. Perhaps in that time we have steadily been moving more and more towards the society Bret Easton Ellis always envisioned as a satirical cautionary tale. After all, the Informers isn’t just an 80’s “period” film. As unimaginatively literal as I thought the film adaptations of American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction were, Informers looks like it might actually deliver on the kind of phenomenally allegoric treatment an Ellis tale deserves! Can’t wait to see it.
