The Question in Bodies #5: eXistenZ (1999)

In Summer 1999, The Matrix came out, and that's pretty uncontroversially one of the most culturally significant films of the last two decades, if not the most culturally significant, period.

The Matrix changed the way mainstream films were made and watched, and its iconography is a shorthand now for the campaigners in a war against everything that many of us, including, lest we forget, the makers of The Matrix itself, stand for. But as important as The Matrix is, the thing that it isn't is prescient.

As far as its relationship with culture goes, it's mainly a set of commonly scrambled symbols, part of our cultural lexicon. It's not half as profound or coherent  as it thinks it is, and its images, which are powerful, exciting images, are more or less without any real anchors of meaning, and lend themselves to being appropriated by any number of functionally illiterate Agent Smiths. In hats. And that's how the world's most influential white supremacist can bang on with the rest of them about using the Red Pill and no one really goes, wait a minute here. But The Matrix, while absolutely a film that helped to get us where we are, was never a film that told us where we were going.

On the other hand, the second half of 1999 also gave us another VR Movie, David Cronenberg's eXistenZ, which did not gain an enormous following, did not transform cinema, and did not become part of the cultural lexicon. But of the two of them, it's eXistenZ that hasn't dated. While The Matrix looks now like the most 1999 film imaginable, eXistenZ is a film that feels like now.

We Don't Go Back #69: The Pied Piper (1972)

The story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin was very much part of the fairy tale repertoire when I was a kid. I remember seeing Cosgrove Hall's animated adaptation as a kid, had at least one book of fairy tales that included a retelling, heard it at school. One of my dad's Prediction magazines had a typically unsettling piece (for a kid) about the history and folklore of the story (March 1982, "Who was the Pied Piper?"). Although it goes back to the fourteenth century, it was retold by the Brothers Grimm and Robert Browning, among others, and so you'd think its entry in the canon is assured.

None of my children had heard of it before I asked them yesterday.

It isn't one of the stories they were told at school and thinking about it, of the multitude of fairy tales I read to my kids, or saw with them adapted on TV, it was absent. They know the stories of the Three Little Pigs, Red Riding Hood, Aladdin, Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, all present, all correct.

But no Pied Piper.

Catullus LXXXV

odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris?
nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

— Catullus

It is the prerogative of first-time lovers
To claim yourselves the creators
Of the language of romance. I know that.
And yet, if in singing to uncomprehending Latins
About things that did really did not as yet have names,
If in locating the precise intersection
Of friendship, obligation and desire,
If in explaining what it is to find yourself
One of many and only one of many
And never more than one of many,
If in curdling inside and
Calling her obscene and calling worse things
And yet still closing my eyes and seeing
That full red lower lip, that cream-white throat,
Those soft pale upper arms around which
I could close my fingers without hurting her,
If in remembering her salt and wit and filthy lovely laugh,
If in being crucified across loathing and wanting
I failed to see that I was a true pioneer of heartbreaks,
What difference will it make?
You will be able to invent all these things yourselves
Perfectly well without me.

Room 207 Press Weekend Flash Sale

Just until Monday, all of the digital books I have listed at the Room 207 Press store at DriveThruRPG and DriveThruFiction are at a 60% discount.

Which include: 

Chariot and its supplement Cosmic Memory, still the best RPG I have ever written;

MSG™, the game of corporate irresponsibility that io9 described as "Stuffed to the gills with black, black humour".

Inner Worlds, my monograph on relationships in gaming;

and this is not a picture, a ghost story collection.

Find them at my storefront here.

We Don't Go Back – Guest Post: The Turin Horse (A Torinói Ló) (2011)

So it's Guest Post Week, and the second post of this week comes from esteemed colleague Daniel Pieterson who wrote this fabulous piece on Bela Tarr's 2011 The Turin Horse (A Torinói Ló).

We Don't Go Back – Guest Post: Ravenous (1999)

I've known Craig Daniel for a few years now as part of a loose collective of colleagues and friends who talk about games and politics. We were talking the other day about backwoods horror which Craig, who lives in rural North Carolina, naturally has strong feelings about. Too often, poor rural people are demonised and othered, and we were talking about films that might buck that trend. Anyway, Craig mentioned Antonia Bird's 1999 blackly comic cannibal horror Ravenous, to which I enthusiastically assented, but which I haven't seen for, oh, years. 

The 90s were a weird time for media. I think it was the first time that media really exploded, that you no longer had a hope of catching a general idea of the shape of pop culture. And at the same time, it was the birth of the internet, and I often feel that there was this assumption that people didn't necessarily archive and record things the way that they pretty much automatically do now, because they just assumed that it was, you know, on the internet. Does that make sense? I think that there's a lot from the 90s that's nearly forgotten, which, if it had been made a decade earlier or a decade later, wouldn't be, and Ravenous falls into that bracket. Which is a crying shame.

Here's Craig on Ravenous.

Res Gestae

He called us to his bedside.
We brought our dictaphones,
Batteries refreshed
Ready for our Master's Voice.

He said, erect these words
On pillars of brass and stone
In every city of My empire:
“I changed the world forever.

I shut the gates of war, and three times
Peace achieved by force of will
And simple force whose equal none
Will see again for centuries.

These have been My times:
I already have a month of My own
And one day I know the years shall be counted
Beginning with the day I was born.”

He spoke for an hour or more,
listing the things he had achieved.
(I cannot remember them.)
When he was done, he closed his eyes.

He exhaled, and I thought
how frail and used-up he looked
And wondered if, when he had died
And had achieved his promised godhead,
I would think of him, the man deified,
As old and hoarse and dying.