Further Thoughts on Geek Cred

Hutch’s recent post on the difference between The Big Bang Theory and Lost struck a chord with me, so much so that I felt compelled to contribute the following couple of gaming-related examples. More-so than comics, movies, and other various geek-related entertainments, filmmakers and television producers seem to have an over-riding urge to fudge facts when it comes to presenting video games in their motion pictures and television shows.

The Wizard is the most obvious example; this movie, which is explicitly about gaming (and Nintendo in particular) gets so much wrong that’s it’s hard to tell where to start. The always prestigious and often foul-mouthed Angry Video Game Nerd covered much of it in his review.

Or, how about the final episode of A Bit of Fry and Laurie? The “Truancy” sketch opens with the following image:

Holy crap, it’s Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts! It’s even using the theme music!

The next shot is of Hugh-Laurie-as-surly-teenager. Stephen Fry enters, playing the father, to discuss Hugh’s truancy; apparently, he hasn’t been to school in four years. What has he been doing all this time? He’s reached Level Nine.

Level Nine? But Super Ghouls ‘N Ghosts doesn’t have nine levels. It only has eight. And that screen-shot is clearly from the first level!

And because I know this, I can’t let myself enjoy the rest of the sketch. Perhaps you might fare better; here’s a video of that sketch in Russian.

It’s like those Tolkien fans whose brains explode when the scores of elves show up at Helm’s Deep. We know it isn’t so; we can’t turn off the fact that we know it isn’t so; we can’t enjoy it.

And furthermore, the people creating these entertainments know this. They know they’re risking alienating a portion of their audience by fudging things or, at the very least, not checking their facts. So why would anyone knowingly piss off a portion of their audience, especially a portion that is made up of sticklers (for where does geek devotion live save in the details?)?

The only answer I can come up with is that they think that portion of the audience is so small that they can get away with it. That, in and of itself, is an insult. (I would argue that Lost is insulting even without this, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.)

In the case of that Lost example that Michael cites, it’s not even just a matter of having contempt for a portion of the audience; it’s having contempt for the source material as well. They want to make the Star Wars films say something it doesn’t say, and the films are sufficiently beneath them that they consider it to be malleable.

I have another example of this, from a local independent film that I did some acting for. (I’m not going to name the film, as it’s unlikely to find distribution and I’m predisposed not to gang up on fellow little guys.)

In the scene in question, one brother (the family screw-up) is telling the other (a successful CEO of a technology company) about his recent visit to an arcade (the film takes place in the eighties). He explains that there’s a gamer who is the master of Centipede. Every time he plays, it’s flawless. But this time, he’s having trouble. He turns to our narrator: “Dill, I need your help.”

And so Dill puts in his quarter, and together, they blasted that centipede, they saved the day. And Dill sums it up for his brother: “isn’t it great when someone needs you for who you are instead of who you’re always pretending to be?”

It’s a touching moment; it’s the character’s best moment, and the one that sums up one of the major themes of the film.

The only problem, of course, is that Centipede doesn’t offer two-player co-op. I brought this up to the director. At first, he tried to argue with me about it; then, after I dragged him to an arcade and showed him an old Centipede machine, he shrugged his shoulders. “It’s just Centipede.”

Why not, I suggested, use another game– one that is a co-op? No, he said: “It’s just Centipede.” Centipede was so far beneath his towering work of art that it should have been lucky to be twisted around in its service.

One more example, a positive one: the film Reign Over Me, starring Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle. First of all, it’s just a great film, one that avoids the sentimentality one might expect with great writing, great performances, and strong detail work. One of those details in the presence of the PS2 game Shadow of the Colossus, which the Sandler character is obsessed with. The game isn’t bent out of shape, details aren’t fudged: that’s miles above the other examples, to start with.

But more than that, it actually fits in with the film thematically. Instead of grabbing some random game (or other object of geek devotion) and bending it to make it say what they want it to say, they spent time finding the perfect game for their film and its theme. They treated that game, and all members of the film’s audience, with respect. End result: a good film that doesn’t take anyone out of the experience or insult them.

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