To my mind, the best director in contemporary Hollywood—for our purposes, let’s say post-Star Wars (1977)—is the Dutch import Paul Verhoeven. While Verhoeven was working in the United States he gave us trashy, excessive Hollywood films we could sink our teeth into. More than that, if you look closely at these ostensibly paradigmatic examples of Hollywood’s deleterious product (e.g. Showgirls (1995)), Verhoeven was also the most subversive of genre auteurs, directing the spectacle back in at itself, parodying the absurdity of U.S. culture.
Although they were not released consecutively and have no narrative continuity, I like to think of Verhoeven’s Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990) and Starship Troopers (1997) as a trilogy, as each explores in a rather complex (if stylized and gratuitous) way the mutual underpinning of mass media and warfare, and each does so through the popular sci-fi action film. The first is about the corporeal effects of a postmodern, war-based society on the blue-collar worker; the second is about the intoxicating and derealized fantasy of Third-World violence cable news provides the middle-class American on a daily basis; and the third film is about the way the precise control of information allows certain groups of beings to be designated as irredeemably “Other,” as not worthy of mutual recognition or even life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLAt5RUXW2Q
One of the great things about these films, however, is that each is perfectly assimilable as an enjoyable Hollywood blockbuster. To the attentive viewer, then, these films would effectively seem to be sending two messages simultaneously, one inviting us to delight in visual excess and the elimination of the enemy, the other compelling us to think critically about the framework in which such messages are relayed to us. Verhoeven accomplishes in each of these films a precise but disorienting balance of these two messages that allow us to have our cake and eat it too—or, perhaps, allowing us to have our cake but forcing us to eat it.
I bring up Verhoeven because I have a sneaking suspicion that video game developer Ubisoft might be up to something similar with its recent game Far Cry 3. To sum the game up succinctly, you play as a privileged, white (some have used the adjective “douchey”) young man named Jason Brody, who spends a lot of time sticking knives into black men in the jungle, and then becomes the leader of an indigenous tribe, whose exotic, always-mostly-nude matriarch he’s also sleeping with. Quite predictably, this has sparked a lot of debate within the circles of people who are wont to have such debates, as the game packs a lot of colonial tropes about the encounter with the Other, along with very viscerally racist and sexist imagery and gameplay. It’s also a hell of a lot of fun.
But like Verhoeven’s films, the game seems to always be sending you two messages at once. In each of Verhoeven’s films, vital to the critique of spectacle and militarism is the concept of mise-en-abyme, or a text within a text (the French phrase actually means “placed into abyss.”) In Starship Troopers, for example, much of the exposition is delivered by a web browser not used by a character within the film, but placed directly on screen. As a cursor selects different informational videos that explain the storyworld to us, the viewer, we’re left to reflect on the authoritarian control of choice through media that are supposedly “open;” if the point isn’t clear, the only choice the invisible operator of the cursor is ever given is “Would You Like to Know More?”—a pseudo-choice that seems pretty familiar to all of us who have sat through video advertisements on YouTube or Hulu. The casual brutality of these propagandistic videos within Starship Troopers mirrors that of the actual film, and we are left to reflect on the way both propaganda and Hollywood action film elicit, control and depend upon our hatred for the Other.
Like Starship Troopers, Far Cry 3 uses excess and self-reflexivity to critique its own genre, its own medium. The game “places you into the abyss” in many ways, but most interesting are the dream sequences that are about half-playable: you mostly walk through some gorgeously animated environments while hallucinating, as information about your character is delivered to you. The main spectacular effect of these scenes, however, is the way the environment shifts or suddenly appears as you move forward; these sequences in the game, of course, mirror the game’s own (possibly unintentional) issues with “popping,” the tendency in these open-world games for details of the surrounding environment not to appear until you get close to them.
Through these dream sequences, the preconditions of the game’s own illusion are incorporated into your character’s experience of the story-world, just as Verhoeven’s mises-en-abyme call attention to the relationship between the spectator and the media. It is just the beginning of the way the game starts to blur some of the conventional boundaries (the self versus the other, the story-world versus the medium) expected of games like this. For example, Vaas, the engaging and charismatic villain, the game hints over and over again, is not so different from your character (I will refrain from explaining how, to avoid spoilers). This led one reviewer to suggest that Ubisoft could and should have ended the game with the revelation that Brody and Vaas were actually the same person.
But I think Ubisoft was after bigger fish. They seem to be using the genre most associated with identification as a Self and with violence against the Other—the first-person shooter—to undermine, or at least call attention to, the stable (and racialized) notions of identity on which it relies. A Fight Club-style twist would have offered a catharsis that gave the player release from the boundary-defying conflicts that structure the game’s narrative. In the end, there is no twist about you being Vaas to paradoxically drive home the fact that, by the middle of the game, you might as well be Vaas.
The end of the game has thus been unsatisfactory to some, perhaps as the final “victory” hardly feels like a victory. But then we’re reminded of the end of Starship Troopers, in which Neil Patrick Harris, a telepath, proclaims of a captured alien, “It’s afraid!” to the raucous cheers of the troopers, signifying, it would seem, the ultimate military victory. The finale of Far Cry 3 is nowhere near this brilliant, but it is similarly unsatisfying—and dissatisfaction can be a very ethical emotion.
Pat Brown is a graduate student in Film Studies at the University of Iowa. No, that doesn’t mean he makes movies; he just likes them a lot.
