That's enough, Kevin Smith

Above: Kevin Smith makes a movie about his right temple and you'd better not criticize it.

Let me propose something: no single individual has been affected more negatively by the coarsening of American popular culture than Kevin Smith. Back in the day, after Clerks almost got an NC-17 rating for language and went on to become a word of mouth cult hit, Kevin Smith was widely seen as a daring counterculture auteur whose unabashed vulgarity stood in bold contrast to the staid mainstream cinema of the day. More simply put: Clerks had a lot of dick jokes at a time when people actually stood a chance at being legitimately offended by dick jokes. In the past 15 years, Kevin Smith has mostly demonstrated his ineptitude at all the part of movie making that don't involve writing down dick jokes and Star Wars references and our culture has pretty much lost the ability to be offended by anything. This is a big problem, not just for Kevin Smith's current terrible movies, but also for his past movies that everyone used to like. In a time when we can hop on the Internet to read the richest athlete in the world's text messages about wanting to piss on porn stars, I'd venture to guess that the blowjob jokes in Clerks don't hit as hard as they used to.

For whatever reason, complete artistic irrelevance hasn't made Kevin Smith any less visible. Mostly, this is because of Kevin Smith's other skill, which is starting to look more and more like his true calling: endless and defensive complaining about every single real and perceived slight he experiences. Last week, he posted a diatribe on Twitter about the injustice of professional film critics pointing out that his latest movie, Cop Out, is a piece of shit, including this rebuttal:

“Like, it's called #CopOut ; that sound like a very ambitious title to you? You REALLY wanna s**t in the mouth of a flick that so OBVIOUSLY strived for nothing more than laughs. Was it called "Schindler's Cop Out"?”

He then goes on to compare his movie to a retarded child. No, really. The substance of his argument isn't that his movie is actually good, it's that he wasn't trying very hard, so pointing out the fact that it isn't good is mean. Hey, Kevin Smith! People that go to the movies don't get a discount on the price of admission because you decided that doing a studio comedy gives you carte blanche to phone it in. We all still have to pay $9.50 to watch you fail at your job.

Smith goes on to unveil his master plan to replace the tyranny of professional criticism:

“Next flick, I'd rather pick 500 randoms from Twitter feed & let THEM see it for free in advance, then post THEIR opinions, good AND bad. Same difference. Why's their opinion more valid?"

I can spare Kevin Smith the cost of setting up a screening room for 500 of his Twitter followers for his next movie and tell everyone right now how this would turn out: they'd all give it rave reviews. Why? Because they're following Kevin Smith on Twitter, and Kevin Smith has one of the most slavish fanbases in the entertainment industry. This is a man who puts out DVDs of himself giving lectures and Q & A sessions as if he were Noam Chomsky or some shit, and people buy them. If they get invited by Kevin Smith himself to an advance screening of a new Kevin Smith movie, they're going to be coming in their pants no matter how objectively awful what's onscreen is. Of course, that's not a problem for Kevin Smith, but it is a problem for non-Kool Aid drinkers trying to figure out whether to spend their hard-earned dollar whatever self-indulgent bullshit Smith decides to throw onto the screen next go round.

The supreme irony of this whole episode is that Kevin Smith is bar none one of most critically over-praised filmmakers in recent memory. Gaze upon the favorable reviews for Clerks II, a movie I'm still bitter about wasting money on four years after the fact. Remember Dogma, which was marketed as a bold skewering of religion and was actually a tedious blend of pseudo-theological nonsense and forced attempts at "edginess"? Critics liked that one, too. (Sidebar: the Catholic League should have gotten some back-end points on Dogma, since their protests basically were the movie's marketing campaign. Although since the organization is currently attacking the New York Times for exposing a cover-up of horrific child abuse by priests, it's probably best they don't have any more money than they already do.) Even Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, essentially a feature-length complaint by Kevin Smith about how people make fun of him on Internet message boards, got average reviews.

Probably the real reason that Kevin Smith is so emotionally volatile about criticism at the moment is the relative commercial failure of his last movie, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, which as I understand it was an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Seth Rogan by remaking the little-remembered Comedy Central original movie Porn 'n Chicken. Clearly, that didn't work out the way it was supposed to. He admits as much in this junket interview:

“That was supposed to be the one that punched us through to the next level. Everyone thought it would do $60 (million) to $70 million, and it wound up doing Kevin Smith business. I was like, ‘I’m done.’ If I were to write at that point in my life, it would about the poor fat kid whose movie didn’t make enough money. . . ."

Whatever dark night of the soul the underperformance of Zack and Miri caused him to experience clearly didn't last long enough, because within the same fucking interview he's saying:

“All the (stuff) I used to put in the films, I can put into my blog or into my podcast, so that leaves me wide open in terms of what do I want to do in film.”

If you've paid to see more than two of Kevin Smith's films in your lifetime, did you ever leave the theater thinking that his problem was a surplus of good ideas that couldn't be fully mined by just one mode of expression? Unless you're a member of the Kevin Smith Cult, my guess is no. In fact, you were probably thinking something like "why does he keep dragging out Jay and Silent Bob again and again?"

In fact, Kevin Smith's unfettered access to so many forums for his ceaseless bitching, lucrative as it may be for his lecture DVD and book sales, is probably the worst thing that could happen to him as a film director. That's because it reinforces his biggest flaw over and over again: his pathological inability to detect the line at which a good idea starts becoming a bad one. For instance, take the incident in February in which he was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat. It'd be pretty reasonable for him to be upset about that, to take the issue up with the airline, and to use his celebrity status to raise awareness of his displeasure at the incident and the broader (no pun intended) issue of the way the airline industry treats the overweight. Instead, he declared a goddamned electronic jihad against Southwest: according to his Wikipedia page, he devoted two hourlong podcasts and a series of 24 YouTube videos to the subject (the latter of which I was heartened to find out that hardly anyone watched), along with several lengthy diatribes (the second of which is hilariously titled "Running out of gas on this subject") on his blog and who knows how many tweets. I remember sitting in O'Hare airport right after this happened and wondering why in the fuck CNN was reporting on Kevin Smith's Twitter feed, and getting kind of annoyed with the whole thing.

Similarly, Kevin Smith's whole "I'm a regular dude with a limited formal background in movie making, and I'm not a great visual stylist" persona used to come across as refreshingly unpretentious and in keeping with the spirit of independent film making. When he does it nowadays, it looks like he doesn't give a shit about developing his formal command of his medium, despite his resources, because he knows that if he throws enough "fucks," oral sex jokes, and Star Wars references into a script, his devoted fanbase will eat it up with a spoon, and when his attempts at making a more serious film fail miserably, he can just shrug it off with a few one-liners in his interviews rather than trying to take any sort of lesson from it.

Anyhow, the other bit of Kevin Smith news from the past week is that his next movie is going to be Red State, a low budget horror film about fundamentalist Christianity reportedly inspired by the notorious Fred Phelps. It's being pitched as a dramatic departure from his usual work, which I guess it would have to be, so good for him. In typical Kevin Smith fashion, this quote about the film gives me pause:

"...it's not like a splatter film, it's not like slasher balls-to-the-wall gore, it's more unsettling and disturbing type of horror."

So it's going to rely on Kevin Smith's ability to convey tone, pacing, and insinuation? Good luck with that. If, say, Eli Roth were announcing this film, I'd be intrigued. Hell, if Kevin Smith were making this film six years ago, I'd be cautiously optimistic. Maybe I'm wrong, and Red State will turn out to be the next Exorcist or something. More likely though, it'll be a wildly uneven mix of Smith's trademark diminishing-returns "edgy" dialogue punched up with some gratuitous violence and a running, ham-fisted attempt at social commentary. None of that will matter, though, because Fox News will get wind of it and start running a series of its trademark saturation-level outraged editorials about "Hollywood sneering at conservatives again" a month or so before it releases. To which Kevin Smith will respond with his trademark genial mock-surprised smartassedness on the ten thousand forms of electronic communication over which he has provenance. Then the media coverage over the "controversial new film" will ensure that it at least recoups expenses with a bit of return, since Kevin Smith certainly isn't going to spend more than $15 dollars making it. Also, I imagine that a fair number of critics will praise it for its "boldness" and "irreverence" regardless of its actual quality, except for one or two scribes whom Kevin Smith will complain at length about in his podcast and next DVD. And everyone will come out a winner except the people who have to pay to see the movie.

Video Game Addiction and the Psychology of Gaming

Above: Fake Magic Johnson and Fake Alan Alda enjoy a competitive videogame on a television that is not turned on.

There's a lengthy but compelling piece in the Guardian online about video game addiction that's well worth a read. It chronicles the author Tom Bissell's journey from being a prolific writer to what amounts to a video game-addicted cokehead, and centers around his obsession with Grand Theft Auto IV. The thing that grabbed me about this piece is that there's a million cliches that could have gone into this story, from analogizing video game makers and drug pushers to assuring readers he's given up games to spend more time sitting outside or some such, but Bissell avoids pretty much all of them. Instead, he gives one of the most frank and thoughtful depictions of games and their appeal that I've ever read.

A large part of this is the fact that Bissell devotes several paragraphs to a stream of consciousness description of the experience of playing a GTA game (Vice City, in this instance), and writes it in a way that really captures the sense of freedom and possibility that the games provide. Later, when he's started abusing cocaine heavily, Grand Theft Auto IV becomes his go-to activity while high, and the game and drug form a sort of symbiosis. This leads up to the climactic meditation of the piece:

What have games given me? Experiences. Not surrogate experiences, but actual experiences, many of which are as important to me as any real memories. Once I wanted games to show me things I could not see in any other medium. Then I wanted games to tell me a story in a way no other medium can. Then I wanted games to redeem something absent in myself. Then I wanted a game experience that pointed not toward but at something. Playing GTA IV on coke for weeks and then months at a time, I learned that maybe all a game can do is point at the person who is playing it, and maybe this has to be enough.

My experiences with life and with video games are hardly identical to Bissell's, to put it mildly, but I think he absolutely captures something vital about gaming with his point about games providing real experiences. This is a point that I do not believe non-gamers fully understand: so much of the quality of a game, especially a modern game, is tied into its ability to break down the sense of separation between the physical activity of playing a game (read: pressing buttons) and the actions onscreen. In short: the extent that a game can make you feel personally involved and empowered in what's happening onscreen, you'll probably like it.

In some ways, this is a grotesque oversimplification: there's many, many factors that have to come together to provide that experience. However, in great or even merely enjoyable games, the whole is more than the sum of the parts in a way that's difficult to capture with objective description. Here's the really interesting thing, though: despite all this complexity, games are getting much, much better at providing this quality of experience on a consistent basis. Think about this: a short game is roughly 5-7 hours of playtime in length, and a long game can easily be over 100 hours (I played Grand Theft Auto IV for at least 140 hours, and I imagine that Bissell played for triple that amount or more) or essentially endless if the focus is on competitive multiplayer. That means that a game has to keep your attention for much longer than a feature film does, and likely as much as an entire season of a TV program. What's more, almost all games are built around a fairly simple set of actions that repeat themselves over and over again with usually little more than minor variations over time. Even in expansive, free-form games like the Grand Theft Auto series, you'll get the main essentials of play in the first few hours.

By all rights, keeping someone interested in a video game ought to be an impossible task, but it turns out that it isn't. In fact, over the past several years, I've found that video games as a medium are not only more consistently compelling in my opinion than pretty much any other form of entertainment, but getting better all of the time, and I think Bissell has zeroed on the main reason why with his statement about experiences. A misconception that has plagued popular thinking about video games for some time now is the idea that the appeal of games is something like a more-participatory movie or television show, that the structured narrative is at the core and that the interactivity serves to make the narrative more compelling for the player. In fact, the reverse is true: games get most of their appeal from coming up with cool things for the player to do and letting the player control his or her experience of those things. Nobody plays video games for the story; if they did, nobody would ever play video games, because video game stories, with punishingly few exceptions, are terrible. GamesRadar wrote an article on the plot holes of Modern Warfare 2 that's three goddamn pages long (granted, mostly to maximize the number of pages clicked on, and thus ads viewed - welcome to the world of Internet games writing) and that's a game that's grossed more than one billion dollars since last November. MW2's narrative flaws didn't even stop it from amassing widespread critical acclaim, either. Hell, I'll even throw in my two cents: Modern Warfare 2's story was completely retarded, and I still played through the game twice, spent a solid two months with the multiplayer, and loved about every minute of it.

The contrast between games and other forms of entertainment has really hit home for me that past couple weeks as I've been playing Bioshock 2. A brief recap for the uninitiated: Bioshock is a first-person shooter game that came out in 2007 that became a massive critical and commercial hit. It is far and away one of the most original first-person shooters ever created; partly because of the setting (a failed underwater city resplendent in 1930s Art Deco architecture created as a libertarian utopia by a thinly veiled version of Ayn Rand), and partly because of the rich and well thought-out narrative, which actually came to a definitive resolution at the climax. This last point is important because virtually all major video games follow the modern Hollywood blockbuster model, of openly planning for a multi-sequeled franchise in pretty much all aspects of production, with none more glaringly obvious than the plot. Bioshock, however, felt self-contained from the get-go.

It also (deservedly) made a shitload of money, so when Bioshock 2 was announced, I was scornful. Here was an unnecessary cash-in sequel to a original and complete work, which to top it off wasn't even being made by the creators of the first. It's the sort of thing that drives fans crazy. The thing is, though, that Bioshock 2 didn't turn out to be the Blues Brothers 2000 of the video game world (fun challenge: come up with a snappier analogy and post in in the comments! I couldn't!), it's actually an immense amount of fun to play (less surprisingly, it's also selling by the bucketload).

Now, I don't want to give short shrift to the makers of Bioshock 2, who all things considered, did a fine job with the narrative and tonal aspects of the game, but most of what makes Bioshock 2 work in the way that it does are small improvements to the core gameplay and a few neat additions. In fact, the phrase "small improvements to the core gameplay and a few neat additions" is essentially a comprehensive summary of the philosophy behind video game sequeling. Simple as it is, this approach really works in games in a way that I don't think it can in other media. If somebody came up and told me that the upcoming sequel to a blockbuster movie was being hailed as "pretty much the same thing as the first one, only the hero shoots somebody with a speargun this time," I probably wouldn't make seeing it a priority. However, when I found the speargun in Bioshock 2 (it pins dead enemies to the wall, and you can pull out the spears to reuse them, which makes the corpse fall to the floor!) I was genuinely jazzed. I can't rule out the possibility that this speaks to a certain lack of sophistication on my part, but I think it has more to do with the point that the experience of playing games is qualitatively very different from our experience of other media. Playing Bioshock 2 made me realize that despite what I had thought, the not easily replicated aspects of the first game, its originality and narrative focus, were less important than I had previously thought, while more reproducible elements, the combat and exploration of the game world, were much more.

This has been a bit of a digression, but I think it relates profoundly to Bissell's piece on game addiction and the core role of experience in it. There's a reason that we can talk seriously about gaming being an "addiction," even if it doesn't fit the technical parameters of the term, in a way that's harder to apply to an equally avid consumer of movies, TV, or novels: video games give us feedback. They reward good play, punish bad play, and create a sense of improvement over time. Cracked's David Wong wrote a great piece a few weeks back on how video games use basic principles of behavioral psychology to hook people and keep them playing. Wong's focus is more on massively multiplayer RPGs like World of Warcraft, which I've never played and have no interest in, (although my girlfriend and I have sunk 80+ hours into playing Borderlands, which is essentially an scaled-back postapocalyptic shooter version of the same basic ideas) but I think that the basic framework he elaborates can be made to fit just about any type of video game to one degree or another. Simply put, the appeal of video games is ultimately a behavioral one, rather than an intellectual one.

I'm not sure what the full implications of this are, although I'm sure that the hoary old chestnuts of "are video games healthy?" and "are video games art?" will resurface fairly rapidly. I may have more to say on this topic in general, and those two questions in particular, at some future date. I am fairly sure, however, that it means that the current cultural ascendancy of video games will probably be a prolonged one, and may even just be getting started, given the explosion of platforms like Facebook and the iTunes App Store. Look for some 40 year old college student to publish an essay in Newsweek about the intermingling between her FarmVille and OxyContin habit by December or so.