Melendy Avenue Review 2023-09-29
Hey all- work is still going hard. I’m going pretty hard at work, and also getting some creative stuff together. Should have a good update next week. In the meantime, we have a link to my latest podcast episode in case you missed it, and a dandy Ed’s Corner. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reading in the Time of Monsters 013 - Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Milton Hindus with Drew Flanagan
Lagniappe- Ed’s Corner: Get Rich Quick By Remembering the 80’s & A Warning From the Past
PODCAST
Reading in the Time of Monsters 013 - Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Milton Hindus with Drew Flanagan
My good friend Drew and I had a good time talking about Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the great French modernist writer whose work has been shadowed by his rank antisemitism and collaborationist stance towards Nazi Germany. Drew has spent time in the archive of Milton Hindus, a Jewish American literary critic who helped bring Céline into the American literary consciousness and who spent some time with him. We discuss what made both men tick, and how all of this relates to ongoing debates about how to treat art by morally awful, but unquestionably talented, people. Enjoy!
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: Get Rich Quick By Remembering the 80’s & A Warning From the Past
In my last Ed’s Corner I talked about the recent spate of movies coming out over the course of this summer that are essentially adaptations of various toy or game brands. As of now, I’ve watched most of them. There’s The Mario Movie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and Barbie, and they are all of a piece in a general trend of attempting to convert creative properties into intellectual properties. What I mean by this is that these movies are attempting to convert a product that was originally intended to be the medium of creative expression, whether it be a game or toy that the person playing with would apply the products of their imagination to, into a particular cultural element that is subject to copyright.
Everyone’s experience playing with a Barbie is different, and is quite possibly highly personal. Everyone’s experience with Barbie (2023) is general and shared across the broader culture- they all saw the same movie. Instead of the intellectual property that composes these games and toys being the medium by which the users express their individual creative impulses, they are now the expression of a specific creative expression that is received by the broader audience. We’ll come to understand this phenomenon more in depth as we proceed through the various movies that compose this shift in creative media, but we’ve got to start at the beginning, or at least as close as we can get to the beginning. For that I had to watch a very bad movie, and read an even worse book, if only because they foresaw this sort of thing coming, and in a way started the ball rolling in this current direction. I’m talking about both the book and movie Ready Player One.
While the book Ready Player One, and by extension the author Ernest Kline, may have been ahead of the curve, it paid a terrible price for its knowledge, and so have I, considering I had to read it. To briefly sum the book up, in the not too distant (alternate) future, the world has slid ever deeper into environmental collapse, and what remains of the social safety net has been slashed to ribbons, to the point that the fate of many a person is to end up in literal debt peonage for any number of mega-corps. Sounds pretty standard as far as both young adult and sci-fi dystopias go. In fact, the one interesting bit about the dystopia part — “The Stacks,” where urban living space is so expensive that trailer parks have been built up vertically — was ripped off from William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic.
The big difference that sets Ready Player One apart is that the real world doesn’t really matter too much to this story. This doesn’t play out in a Philip K. Dick departure-from-reality sense, where no one knows where the virtual ends and reality begins, but in the sense that most of the book's action takes place on the internet. Or, rather, the OASIS, an immersive virtual reality game that’s kind of a mix of Second Life and Minecraft: Hardcore Mode, with character perma-death that, for some reason, is the most popular form of entertainment on the planet. Well, that reason is apparently to escape from the oppressive reality of the slow burn climate apocalypse that nobody does anything about. But there’s kind of a chicken and the egg type problem where it’s not clear if the world got so bad because OASIS was so popular that everything went to shit because all these kids were playing Fortnite on their phones all the damn time, or things were turbo-fucked to start and everybody just gave up and started doomscrolling.
Regardless, the OASIS was the brainchild of brilliant game designer James Halliday (and Simon Pegg as his buddy Ogden Morrow is also there). Clone depicts him as probably living somewhere on the neuro-divergence spectrum, but the important bit about Halliday is that he’s so socially withdrawn that he relates far more to media than he does to people. The reason I had to append “alternate” to the “future dystopia” descriptor above is that Halliday grew up in the 80’s, and all of his work is highly infused with 80’s nostalgia, especially things in nerd culture. Cline describes Halliday’s tastes as “eclectic”; he makes a point of being a fan of the entire gamut of 80’s sitcom runs, John Hughes-style teen romance flicks, comic books, video games (of course), horror movies, Dungeons and Dragons, sci-fi like Star Wars and Star Trek, pulp fantasy, anime, rock operas, Monty Python, basically just any old nerd shit. Halliday strikes me less as a man with broad tastes, and more as someone who is undiscerning when it comes to their cultural diet. Not that my or anyone else's judgment of his tastes matters any more, because he’s dead as the story begins. But having died, Halliday has in some small way imposed his nostalgic tastes on the culture as a whole. The OASIS is big business, and Halliday, being as socially withdrawn as he was, never had a romantic partner, let alone heirs, to leave his digital real estate to. So he opts for the Willy Wonka gambit and declares that anyone who can find the three hidden clues in his huge video game and solve the attendant riddles will inherit his controlling shares of the company that runs OASIS.
This announcement causes a digital gold rush of nerds to try to hunt up the “Easter eggs” Halliday left in the game, many of them turning towards the many pop culture properties Halliday often referenced in his own creative outputs for “clues” as to how to solve his devious riddles. I don’t know if the collective cultural shift back into remembering the 80’s caused this strange discontinuity in the setting, or if it was a result of the harsh living conditions of the world of Ready Player One, or if Cline just lacked imagination, but it seems that in the world is of the story, culture itself had stopped the day Halliday died, that there now is only nostalgia, just all of these old shows that people go over and over again looking for hints. There aren’t even derivative spin-offs, or hell, even fan fiction, nobody’s in a band, the shift to an online only existence hasn’t really even changed the way people talk all that much, except that the people who seriously dedicate themselves to searching for Halliday’s prize call themselves “gunters,” which is short for “egg hunters.” That concatenation never really struck my ear as believable, if only because there wasn’t any other attendant vernacular shift to go along with it.
I guess I should explain the concept of an Easter egg as they are understood in the context of video games. I’m sure most of you have heard the term in reference to some kind of intellectual property product, like say a movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where some background detail or brief character cameo is actually a reference to some bit of established canon in the comics. While similar, video game Easter eggs aren’t necessarily direct references to media outside the game itself, although sometime they are. Rather video game Easter eggs are secret areas, items or information that exist within the gameworld, but are not discoverable through the standard course of play. While most Easter eggs are accessible without cheat codes or manipulation of the game data, any given player is unlikely to come across them accidentally in the course of playing the game, as they’re generally hidden well off the beaten path, and often require counterintuitive application of the game mechanics to find the areas where the Easter eggs are contained. They’re more of a reward for players who have mastered the game and are just playing around inside the game space outside of the stated game context that is the nominal function of play experience.
Easter eggs are most commonly found when the player starts to see the game as a space to inhabit and explore, rather than a system or challenge to best. We’ll get into a more concrete example of a real life Easter egg in a bit, but I have to say that the riddles in Halliday’s game are not really Easter eggs. Halliday goes out of his way to let everyone know that they are there, literally “reply all”’ing every player on the OASIS with his video will that explains the contest. Contrast this to most Easter eggs, which are fun little secrets that nobody knows are even in the game unless someone stumbles across them. Also the Easter eggs, or contest or whatever, isn’t very well implemented. Even as Halliday was shuffling off the mortal coil, the OASIS was already made up of several galaxies worth of digital space, constituting uncounted numbers of procedurally generated planets. The odds of even a dedicated player stumbling across the exact place mentioned in the riddle are extremely slight to the point of near-impossibility, given the sheer volume of game space at play in this scenario.
It’s little wonder then that no one has found even the first of the hints by the time our main character Wade Watts, OASIS handle Parzival, enters the scene a few decades later. Most folks have given up on the chase, or joined up with a few serious gunter clans, the main one being the corporate backed “Sixers,” who play the part of the evil empire in this whole charade, trying to claim Halliday’s legacy so they can incorporate the OASIS into the portfolio of Innovative Online Industries, a shady telecom megacorporation. For a minute there I thought they were being clever by having IOI resemble 101, which is a binary number, but it’s 5 in binary, not 6, and I feel they should’ve just changed the name to Innovative Industries Online for 110, but no. Anyways, that’s most people who are still out there hunting for the eggs… but Parzival is different, he hunts for the egg alone, when he’s not attending internet high school, or avoiding his abusive caretaker of an aunt and her string of junkie boyfriends (I applaud the book for not inventing a fake future drug and just flat out saying that “yeah, people are still doing meth 50 years from now”). Wade is pretty much the exact opposite of the Sixers. He’s independent, he has a real passion for the OASIS, and he likes playing the game for the sake of playing the game, whereas his corporate nemesis embodied in the Sixers big boss Sorrento believes everyone is interchangeable, individuality doesn’t matter, and you should sell out early and often, aesthetic value be damned.
In the book Sorrento was at least kind of interesting because he’s a worthy villain. He used to be a big nerd like Wade, a former game designer like Halliday that put out some good stuff, but then sold out because he couldn’t live up to the greatness of Halliday and thus would only ever be second best. If he couldn’t achieve greatness as an individual, then individual greatness wasn’t worth having and he might as well become the guy in charge of the army of faceless goons, and sell out his nerd cred to the corporate overlords. He’s an interesting foil to Wade in this context, somebody who was chasing after the legacy of Halliday like Wade, but could never live up to it as Wade has been able to. There’s no “we’re not so different, you and I” type of speech, but you see elements of Wade’s antisocial callousness in Sorrento calcified and taken to their darkest extreme. Sorrento could’ve been what Wade turned into if Wade had been at the chase for an extra decade or so like Sorrento had.
In the movie, however, Sorrento’s a total joke, who got his job by inflating his resume by claiming he worked very closely with Halliday back when his game company was a start up, when really he was just a coffee-fetching intern. You don’t really feel a threat from Sorrento, that he has the particular type of wits that would help out in a pop culture scavenger hunt and that he could credibly beat Wade to the punch, if our hero can’t hustle to stay ahead of the Sixers in the movie version. Any actual menace he might have is transferred to his corporate raider sidekick F’Nale Zandor played by Hannah John-Kamen, who is head of the department who sends out the ops teams that disappear people into corporate peonage, and who is in all of four scenes. Wade beats them in the end by calling the cops on them. Like, the local Columbus Ohio Police Department just shows up in a few Prowlers and hauls off a corporation that has an entire army of heavily armed repo men with armored personnel carriers and stuff. Not to mention I have to believe if they didn’t own the police outright like in RoboCop, IOI at the very least is paid up with the right people. Hell, they could just shut off the internet down at the precinct so that they can’t book ‘em properly, as they practically have a monopoly on internet service. But alas, this megacorp is helpless in the face of Johnny Law.
Anyways, eventually Wade does find one of the clues, and it leads to another, and eventually, after almost losing to the Sixers, who it may surprise you to learn, tried to cheat at every turn, he emerges victorious. I won’t bore you with the plot, Ernest Cline put so little in it’s not really worth mentioning. What you need to know is there are three keys and three gates, you gotta do some nerd shit to get each one. In the book the tasks run from playing some old arcade or home computer game from the 16 bit era, which if you do you proceed to get placed into a scene from a movie, where you have to recite all the lines from memory to score points. The literal final end boss was having to quote all of Monty Python and the Holy Grail all the way through. And it’s not like the movies Wade is put into are thematically relevant to Wade’s own emotional state or predicament, he just has to do a scene from War Games as Matthew Broderick because Halliday thought it was a cool movie.
The first person narrations don’t even make these scenes exciting or interesting, most of the descriptions of the scenes are just Wade describing his surroundings when he first comes into the movie zone, and then ending the description with, “...it was that location from the movie.” Wade always recognizes the movie instantly, even though it would probably be disorienting to be inside the movie rather than watching it, and he knows all the lines to all the movies, and dispenses with his part in them by describing how he got all the lines right, or maybe only flubbed one or two lines but was still good enough to pass the test. Even in the final Monty Python-off where Sorrento is hot on his heels and he has to complete the scene with the higher accuracy or lose the Easter Egg hunt once and forever, there’s no tension in the re-enactment scenes, the pressure never gets to him, he just flawlessly recites the lines. The narration claims after the fact that he had watched the scene a million times with his friend H, and so he knew it by heart, but maybe Cline could’ve set this up and had a poignant emotional call back to it in the moment, instead of just having the climax of the action be Wade effortlessly completing a task that’s mostly skipped over in the text.
Look, the plot is more a means of conveyance for the act of nostalgia than an actual story. Most of these “live the movie” scenes are a naked appeal to the audience, inducing the 80’s kids to remember. The internet of the OASIS is a torrenting and pirating heaven: all media ever produced is available somewhere on the internet, easily for anyone to download. Why the tyrannical IOI, who is in the business of being an internet provider, just lets the users seed torrents and load all of Boss Baby onto Twitter instead of clamping down on that shit, I couldn’t tell you. The movie seems to imply that Halliday bought the rights to all of his favorite properties with his OASIS billions and just hosted them for free in the game as an act akin to cultural preservation, but in the book it’s just that everything is free somewhere on the internet.
That kind of bugged me, because why bother with OASIS then? I mean it’s supposedly the town square of the global village, sure, but OASIS requires a lot more data bandwidth and expensive peripherals than just a basic connection would, and IOI is out here taking thumbscrews to folks who fall behind on their payments- in some cases literally. OASIS is great and all, but why would you bother with it when you could save an emulator of any game you ever wanted to your computer just by weezing the Starbucks WiFi? Wade reads, watches and plays everything that Halliday mentioned enjoying growing up in his little online compendium to the game, but we don’t actually see Wade put in these hours of study in remembering the 80’s-ology. We aren’t with him in the joy of discovery, we don’t know what he likes or dislikes about the media he’s dedicated his life to, all we see is that he’s absorbed all the knowledge there is to get about it in consuming it. Wade doesn’t watch movies so much as he memorizes IMDb pages. Wade doesn’t have any emotional connection to the media of yesteryear besides a sort of bland enjoyment. He just knows all the references, and that’s supposed to make him our hero.
Of course it’s not really a fault that Wade doesn’t have his own opinion on the media he consumes. His literary function is to be a blank slate for the reader to project themselves onto, to live the ultimate fantasy of, uh, remembering the 80’s, I guess. Well, the fantasy is one where you’re rewarded with riches and renown for remembering the 80’s, and there’s also something of a fantasy of having the time to enjoy it all. The book is pretty slippery with time, Wade spends hours and hours grinding away at OASIS to scratch out a level or two with his meager means, but he also goes to school online, and he makes a little bit of cash in real life scavenging broken electronics and selling them off, oh and he also also has not merely studied, but has nearly unrivaled expertise in the entire canon of 80’s schlock. Where does he find the time? The promise of the internet is that we have everything at our fingertips, but that comes at the cost of FOMO, where you can’t consume every piece of media and thus might be missing out on something. Wade and the world of Ready Player One are the fantasy that a person could embody all the knowledge of any media you might want to consume, and that the world would allow you the opportunity to consume it. Because all of this media consumption happens offscreen it sort of seems like it’s an instantaneous process, which it might well could be for all we know. Wade doesn’t enjoy the experience of consuming media. He enjoys the information that consuming the media provides.
And that information is Cline’s bugaboo too. The moral of the story, for him, seems to be that at least the information of this media should be free. Cline’s vision of the internet is as a place where we’re all able to enjoy the information this media provides together, if not necessarily share the experience of consuming it together. It’s really in the dynamics of how this proposed internet works that Ready Player One actually has interesting things to say. The internet as facilitator of the plot is actually rather deftly handled, tedious exposition is rendered into Wade just googling something. When it’s dramatically appropriate for Wade to have a consequential sit down talk with his arch nemesis Sorrento, it’s not that he foolishly walks into his enemies clutches, he just joins a virtual chatroom set up in such a way that both sides can do nothing besides talk, and Wade knows enough about how computers work to understand that they can’t kill his avatar in this meeting even if they wanted to, so it’s all upside. Even the in-world explanation for why this technology exists, that it’s basically like a Zoom call, but with holograms for important business meetings, and that it’d make sense for IOI to have and use this kind of program being a big corporate client, makes sense, and I dig that.
In fact, Wade’s deft use of the internet through the whole of the book actually sets the reader up for one of the actually dramatically interesting passages in the story, where IOI flips the script on him and it turns out the meeting was far more dangerous than Wade at first believed. This is not because IOI pulls some weird hacker shit out of nowhere, but because the meeting was a distraction while one of their wetworks teams moved in to attack Wade’s house in real life. Wade wasn’t at his house at the time, he had a little hideaway in the burned out wreck of a van a little ways from his aunt’s RV stack, but it’s a pretty clear escalation of things when IOI’s mercenaries blew the stack to pieces and sent a crew to sweep the wreckage. This raises the stakes for the second act. In this whole exchange we begin to understand IOI’s endgame, they want the OASIS because they want to control all the content, and Wade needs to stop them because content is sacred, goddamn it.
Later in the book we catch a glimpse of how IOI would pervert the world of content when Wade infiltrates their corporate headquarters in the guise of a debt peon who is thrown into their employee enrichment system. IOI’s debt peons can earn “points” by watching company propaganda, hitting quotas and ratting out any malcontents or rule breakers to earn limited access to various bits of media to personalize their little workstation as well as recreation material. This sort of game-ified Big Brother is probably what IOI would turn the whole of the OASIS into if they win in the end, a sort of dark reflection of the free and open play and sharing of information Halliday was championing, and that Cline seems to think is the purpose of the internet. Cline seems to have been hyperfixated on content in an era that largely predated the streaming content boom of recent years. While it might be wearying to hear him say “hey do you remember the 80’s?” over and over again, he at the very least thought about the idea of how content interacted with the internet and media distribution packages enough to see where it could go terribly wrong and try to warn us of it. If there’s any meat to this work, it’s that warning.
Which makes it rather surprising that the movie Ready Player One created the Torment Nexus in the adaptation of the work into film. The film has hijacked the media consumption experience to serve as an advertisement for one particular content distributor, Warner Bros. All manner of copyrighted characters from Warner Bros. intellectual property portfolio are sprinkled through the film as Marvel style “easter eggs,” as opposed to the kind Halliday has hidden. Wade’s kind-of girlfriend Artemis, who is a girl that’s really good at videogames, but still slightly worse at them than Wade is so it’s cool, sneaks up on him by disguising herself as Goro from Mortal Kombat. Wade’s one and only online friend, H, is building a replica of the Iron Giant from The Iron Giant, which comes into play in the final confrontation at the end of the movie. At various points digital avatars of all of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, various characters from Japanese design house Sanrio like Hello Kitty, several different copies of Master Chief from Halo, and the character model of recently popular Batman villain Harley Quinn, the one specifically from the videogame Batman: Arkham Asylum, are hanging around in the OASIS.
All of the movies Wade injects himself into are ones from the Warner Bros. catalogue, like a rather eye-rolling sequence where the Egg hunters fuck around in the Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining (but Jack Nicholson did not give his likeness rights to the movie, so the characters are menaced by the lady from Room 237 and by disembodied axes smashing through doors, it’s a trip). The plan of the real-life equivalent of IOI is no longer to hold a monopoly on content, but rather to load everything down with ads. The plot is even looser in the movie. Time keeps sliding around. Not only does Wade have infinite time to do whatever, but apparently Ogden Morrow, Halliday’s loyal assistant, was pretending to be the supposedly-automated docent at the in-game Halliday museum for the past twenty years. That can’t possibly be right, because at least at the beginning everyone in the OASIS was trying to find the prizes 24 hours a day, and scouring the museum day and night, which would have been impossible for a real person, even one as loyal to both Halliday and Wade as Morrow turns out, for little reason, to be. It doesn't matter. The film cares even less about the narrative than the book did. It just wants to create that feeling of nostalgia that Cline was chasing in the books, but direct it at particular properties, which in turn will enhance the value of the production company's intellectual portfolio.
From the point of view of the film adaptation, one company having a stranglehold on many intellectual properties is the only way to achieve the promise of the OASIS, a place where all the characters you remember from your childhood are all in one story, together. But the movie turned out bad, not worth remembering, so the message doesn’t land. It’s hard to be nostalgic for the act of nostalgia itself, especially when nostalgia is just the loss leader for branded content. So, Ready Player One was kind of a swing and a miss at trying to convert a creative property into an intellectual products. But Hollywood would refine its techniques, and take another swing at it this past summer. We’ll have to see how they did, in our next Ed’s Corner.
Mithra says thanks for hanging in! See you next week!