Rob posting Burns’s To a Louse reminded me of this passage. It’s from a John Steinbeck letter, but I encountered it in John Carey’s brilliant anthology, The Faber Book of Science.
The Morgan Library has a very fine 11th-century Launcelot in perfect condition. I was going over it one day and turned to the rubric of the first owner dated 1221, the rubric a squiggle of very thick ink. I put a glass on it and there imbedded deep in the ink was the finest crab louse, pfithira pulus, I ever saw. He was perfectly preserved even to his little claws. I knew I would find him sooner or later because the people of that period were deeply troubled with lice and other little beasties — hence the plagues. I called the curator over and showed him my find and he let out a cry of sorrow. ‘I’ve looked at that rubric a thousand times,’ he said. ‘Why couldn’t I have found him?’
I notice, btw, that the book now has a rather gaudy cover that makes it look like a textbook, whereas my copy has a fabulous photo of ‘Mabel and Alexander Graham Bell kissing inside the frame of a tetrahedral kite’.
Technological change is extraordinarily rapid, yet somehow it seems to creep up on us. The internet went from being an obscure curiosity for the geeky to part of people’s everyday lives without most of us ever having a eureka moment when the change was brought home to us.
I have had a few such moments, though. I still remember the moment I saw my first proper 3D game, Virtua Fighter — in a Vegas casino, of all places — as incredibly exciting. I would quite seriously compare it to what it must have been like for the audiences when they first saw The Jazz Singer. It was jaw-dropping to see these graphics which were simply unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
It helped that it was completely unexpected. I didn’t read the gaming press, videogames barely made the mainstream media unless there was a moral panic going on, and the internet barely existed – I’d certainly never used it. So I had no prior knowledge; I just stumbled on the cabinet among all the other games and was blown away by it. What struck me most wasn’t the greater realism of the characters, exactly: even in the moment of first seeing it, the blockiness of the characters looked pretty primitive. But the way the characters moved in three dimensions really did make it feel more like you were controlling a ‘person’ rather than just an animation. And more than anything, it was the swooping camera, that moved around the action and zoomed in and out as you played, which brought home this shift from a flat game world to one with depth.
I’ve already compared it the shift from silent movies to talkies; a more exact comparison would be the invention of perspective in Renaissance painting. I don’t want to use hindsight to claim that I saw Virtua Fighter and immediately had a sense of all the ways 3D would have an impact on gaming, but it didn’t take any particular brilliance to see it and know that you were present at the start of something. Perhaps in C15th Italy there were people feeling the same way.
I still like the look of the original Virtua Fighter. I know that the minimalist environment — a bit of texture on the ground and a few clouds — is because of technical limitations rather than aesthetic choice, but I find it appealing. If you see the later versions of the game (they’re currently up to Virtua Fighter 4, with VF5 due out this year), the backgrounds are ever more lushly-detailed graphical marvels, mainly for the sake of eye-candy but also as part of a pointless attempt to build a narrative context. The places they fight are related to the characters’ elaborate back-stories. But really, what’s the point? It’s a beat-em-up; I don’t need to know my character’s motivation. And while I was excited as anyone else by the advances in computer graphics at the time, that lush, hyper-realistic aesthetic gets cloying after a while. It’s about time for a bit of less-is-more.
Comparisons with early cinema and Renaissance painting inevitably bring up the question of games as art. That’s not what I had in mind when I made them, and I certainly wouldn’t pick Virtua Fighter as a case study, since apart from the graphics it was the simplest and most formulaic game imaginable. But even discussing a game this simple, the kinds of things I find myself mentioning — the overall visual styling, the way the 3D characters made it more immersive, the characterisation, set design, lighting, camerawork — make comparisons with various artforms almost inevitable. That’s why it seems certain that descendants of today’s games will be treated as artworks with all the importance of films, novels or paintings. Someone will find a way of bringing it all together and making it into something more.
OK, not the worst ever, but the one which is currently annoying me: screw-top beer bottles. You know the ones, which look like traditional crown caps but actually screw off.
You can see why someone thought they were a good innovation; they look the same (which is important, because what kind of girlie-man drinks beer from bottles with the same type of closure as a bottle of coke?) while being more convenient: no need for a bottle-opener. But ‘looks like a crown cap’ translates as ‘authentic serrated metal edge’. They’re like little blunt circular saws. If a piece of packaging is painful to open, there’s something wrong with it. Come on people, this isn’t fucking rocket science. I’m looking at you, Fentiman’s Ginger Beer.
Once again I review something much too late to be useful. I wasn’t keen to see Casino Royale. Once upon a time, and against my better judgement, I felt a slight twinge of excitement or interest whenever a new Bond movie came out. Having reached the point where even a new Bond didn’t provoke a flicker of curiosity, I was in no hurry to get sucked back in. But it’s had great reviews, so when my sister said she was going I went with her.
I can see why it’s been getting so much praise; it’s a good film and and a positive change of direction for the Bond franchise. Basically they’ve cut down on the kitschy excess that had accumulated around the Bond films – the endless one-liners, the ludicrous gadgets, the jokey names, the bizarrely contrived stunts and supervillain lairs – and made it into a tight, modern action movie. It has a bit more edge to it, in that the violence is more brutal and that Bond is played as a bit of a thug, and it’s a bit more ‘realist’ (or at least less absurd). The locations are glamorous, the cars are fast and the women are beautiful, though, so its slightly harder-edged realism never goes so far as to actually feel realistic; let alone, to use another bit of movie-review shorthand, ‘gritty’.
So I basically give it a thumbs-up, although it could probably have been a bit shorter. Some of the credit has to go to Daniel Craig, who is surely the most physically intimidating Bond since Connery, and does a good job of the hard-boiled killer act. But too much of the comment about the Bond films is in terms of who is ‘the best Bond’; they can only act the script that’s put in front of them. If Pierce Brosnan or Timothy Dalton had been put in this film, I’m sure they’d have done a decent job. It’s the script and direction that make most of the difference. It’s impressive what a change in style they’ve managed; it must have taken self-control by all concerned to resist falling back on the familiar Bond schtick. It’s the kind of change you might expect if there had been a break of twenty years since the last one that allowed people to look at the material afresh. I suppose it comes down to making a film which takes itself seriously.
Having said all that, I’m not going to rush to see the next one. It’s a well-made spy yarn, but it’s still just a spy yarn. It may be more serious but it’s not actually any weightier. And it’s not a lot of fun. There’s not a single likeable character; Craig’s Bond is intense, charismatic and even a bit scary, but not very nice. And they’ve cut down on the jokes so much that it’s become rather humorless.
It’s undoubtedly a much-needed refreshing of the brand, and probably the best Bond film for a very long time. I still wonder how much of an impact it would have made without the Bond name attached. It’s not a patch on The Bourne Identity, for example.
Having made a statement by making this one such a radical break with recent tradition, I suspect they’ll loosen up a bit for the next one and reintroduce some of the sillier elements of the Bond films – like a few gadgets and a villain with a plot for world domination – as well as a bit more humour. Which might be just what the film needs or it might just lead to them making the same old mistakes.
I went to see The Last King of Scotland tonight. It’s very good (fine performances all round, a convincing portrayal of the weirdness at the centre of a dictatorship) but it doesn’t exactly send you out with a spring in your step and a cheerful optimism about the human condition. I guess the world isn’t ready yet for a sparkling romp set in the court of Idi Amin.
I feel I ought to have something more thoughtful to say about it but I don’t just at the moment. Maybe tomorrow.
