On Being Offended (by The Onion or by Anything Else)

I want to talk about The Onion, but first I want to talk about the boob song.

At last Sunday’s Oscars, there was this bit about Captain James T. Kirk traveling back in time to tell Seth MacFarlane how not to be the worst host in the show’s history. Among the fatal missteps that Kirk wanted to help MacFarlane avoid was singing “an incredibly offensive song that [upset] a lot of actresses in the audience.” On the off-chance you didn’t hear the song or read about it, dear reader, it’s called “We Saw Your Boobs,” and it catalogs the films in which Naomi Watts, Charlize Theron, and numerous others have appeared bare-chested—complete with shots of those actors looking grumpy and defeated, and of Jennifer Lawrence looking victorious because “we haven’t seen [her] boobs at all.”

Get it? Because she wins. Because you see, “sex is a contest,” and “men win and women lose when sex or nudity happens. It’s an archaic, prudish, creepy concept that derives from twisted notions about female purity and women-as-property.”

Plus, to celebrate the act of cinematic mammary-ogling while simultaneously slut-shaming the women to whom those breasts belong—in direct proportion to how naked they’ve gotten, and how often—is both manifestly regressive and spectacularly moronic. Besides which, MacFarlane was more or less daring the women he name-checked to do anything other than play along, because hey, they totally asked for this by being naked on camera, the dumb humorless floozies. (Headdesk forever and ever).

But what I found equally irksome, if I’m being honest, was the way the song was declared “offensive” first and foremost, as though that quality alone justifies its existence and assigns it comedic value. The mechanics of jokes matter, so I’d like to use this one, with its hoary premise and its lazy framing, as evidence that we all need to stop leaning so heavily on “offensive” as a category.

I’m not saying that we need to banish the word offensive from our vocabularies, exactly. Being offended is a valid reaction. It’s just that it’s not a particularly informative one. You can be offended by earnest, mean spirited hate-speech, yes. But you can also be offended by prescient, valuable satire. Or you can be offended by button-pushing attempts at incisive commentary that come up sort and thereby come out muddled. All of those things are equally likely to offend you, and the fact that you are offended will not help you to tell them apart.

In other words, nothing is objectively offensive, but lots of things are objectively problematic. And problematic things can spur useful dialogue, whereas all we ever seem to want from offensive things is a Big Old Apology (which all too often means very little and accomplishes even less). The time and effort we spend talking about whether something is offensive could, therefore, be better spent talking about whether it’s harmful, or immoral, or tone deaf. Even if the cultural object in question is all of the above, you can still like it—and you can like while still acknowledging that, in some respects, it’s kind of fucked up.

Which brings us to The Onion.

As Maryann Johanson points out, this joke is problematic for a whole host of reasons, “like how women of color come in for extra bonus disrespect and misogyny, and how little girls are inexcusably oversexualized.” Very, very true.

“But that’s not what this tweet was about,” she continues. “I didn’t see Wallis as the butt of this joke. It seemed completely obvious to me—to the point that I didn’t even have to think about it—that the butt of the joke here is people who say such things about women.”

Again, the mechanics of the joke matter. This is parody by exaggeration. Say that same bitchily misogynistic thing about Jennifer Lawrence, for exmaple, and it wouldn’t even register as satire; it would just register as the the kind of thing that people constantly say about women, especially but not exclusively on the Internet. Say it about an indisputably adorable and irrepressibly ebullient little kid, however, and the hatefulness of the sentiment becomes freshly obvious and sharply visible—which is supposed to make us ask why it’s OK to talk about anyone that way, if we can all agree that it’s not OK to talk about Quvenzhané Wallis that way.

Jonhanson concludes by conceding “that if you have to explain a joke, the joke has failed. So The Onion screwed up. Just not quite in the way that a surprising number of people seem to think they have.” We can appreciate that The Onion was taking aim at a valid target (that target definitely not being Quvenzhané Wallis), while also acknowledging that they missed the mark pretty severely (hence the widespread, perfectly understandable misunderstanding that their target was Quvenzhané Wallis, which again, was not in fact the case at all).

The Onion’s own apology calls the tweet “a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire,” but I think it would be a mistake to decide that this joke, because it is so problematic, has no value—and to some of you, that statement will mean that I am taking The Onion’s side, explaining away their error, and telling their detractors to shut up and stop being offended. The comments section of Johanson’s post (which, as with so many comments sections, I would strongly encourage you not to read) contains a whole lot of outrage along those lines.

But look, I’m not making excuses for The Onion, nor am I telling anyone not to be offended, and I don’t think that Johanson is doing any of that, either. Rather, I’m saying that it’s pointless to talk about who is and is not on the The Onion’s side, because everyone in this discussion, including The Onion, is on the same side.

That’s what we stand to gain when we stop using offence as our primary unit of measure. We can eschew the reductive, self-congratulatory fiction that the world is neatly divisible into an enlightened, empathetic Us and an ignorant, boorish Them. We can see that Seth MacFarlane’s shtick is fundamentally different from The Onion’s in terms of form, intent, and effect, even if both end up being offensive. And most importantly, we can move past the idea that being good is a fixed state rather than an ongoing process, and that it’s more important for offensive parties to seek absolution than it is for all of us to seek understanding.

Personally, when I’m offended by something, I try to approach it as the beginning of a potentially meaningful conversation, not the end of one.

Where’s Evil?

This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war. This is a spiritual war. And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country—the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age? There is no one else to go after other than the United States and that has been the case now for almost two hundred years, once America’s preeminence was sown by our great Founding Fathers.

He didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

-Rick Santorum

 

“I’m not your destiny, or the Devil, either!” I said. “Look at you! Came to kill evil with your bare hands, and now away you go with no more glory than a man sideswiped by a Greyhound bus! And that’s all the glory you deserve!” I said. “That’s all that any man at war with pure evil deserves.

“There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

“It’s that part of an imbecile,” I said, “that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

What We Mean When We Say “Art”

This is the fourth post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here, Part Two is here, and Part Three is here.

So. When we say art, and we are not referring simply to paintings and sculptures and stuff, we usually mean one of the following things.

1. Art is something that takes skill to make or execute well

When Julia Child wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she probably meant that French cooking was an art in the pre-Renaissance sense: pies and crepes as “well-crafted functional objects.” We all need food (which the functional part), but it takes an accomplished chef to make truly great food (which is the part that makes it art).

But contemporary readers tend to understand this usage as a metaphor, and indeed, Child herself might have meant it as one. It’s not that French cooking is an art, this argument goes, but rather that if you’re sufficiently good at French cooking, the results can be like art.

2. Art is something that seeks meaning and explores the human condition and does nothing else

When we say that French cooking is like art, but not actually art, this is the kind of art we’re saying it’s like. As discussed in a previous post, this is an extraordinarily and pointlessly restrictive definition.

It also makes very little internal sense. Operating on this definition, we often try to separate art from entertainment, despite the great number of things that explore the human condition while simultaneously entertaining us, from the Shakespeare canon to The Colbert Report. A skilled writer can find time for high-minded ruminations on morality and numerous dick jokes.

We could say that some entertainments contain art, or that they contain art-moments, but at that point entertainment and art are officially intermixed anyway. It’s too late to take the chocolate out of the milk–and what would be the point of doing so, anyway?

3. Art is something that well-educated people respect, and that people of good taste enjoy

I have several friends who become angry when they see conceptual art of pretty much any kind, and I suspect that their anger stems from this definition. They always want to say “That’s not art!” or “You’re telling me this is art?” because they have internalized the idea that art means something they have to respect (which is a hard sell where stolen urinals are concerned, which was sort of Marcel Duchamp’s point).

As I’ve said before, this makes it impossible to talk about bad art, dumb art, art that tries and fails, or art that you can understand and even respect without liking. If only the really successful attempts get to be included in the conversation, then we miss out on a whole lot of really interesting work, and that’s a shame.

4. Art is something that is meaningful and important without being enjoyable

This is appreciating art as a synonym for eating your vegetables, and the arts as a blanket term for those entertainments that we should probably keep around even if no one really finds them entertaining.

It’s this definition that leads people to sit quietly with their hands folded at the opera, nodding off occasionally and glaring at anyone with the audacity to applaud too often–despite the fact that opera was as rowdy and lowbrow a popular art-form as any in its heyday. The more you respect opera, the less you expect to enjoy opera.

And in galleries, when visitors encounter visual art that is overtly playful, or layered with historical meaning, or salacious and moronic, they tend to regard it all with the same sort of uniform, glassy-eyed seriousness. Nothing sufficiently respected has the opportunity to mean much of anything.

So enough with all the stultifying respect already.

Art has to be something that we all have permission to love, hate, kinda-like, kinda-dislike, laugh at, cry over, intellectualize, or engage viscerally on a case-by-case basis, or else there’s very little point in talking about it.

What I’m trying to ask is whether the word art is really worth hanging onto, given all of the above. It’s a term that means at least five different things, none of them all that useful, most of them highly problematic, and at least one of them actually nonsensical.

But even so, I think we’re sort of stuck with the word, at least for the moment–and in my next post, I’ll discuss how running an online art gallery has lead me to that conclusion. If we can understand what makes the word necessary right now, we can better address the goal of making it less necessary in the future.

Zip It, Mundungus: On Adaptation and Omission

So I’ve never read any of the Harry Potter books–and I know, I know, that makes me culturally illiterate–but nonetheless, I went ahead and saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1: The Fellowship of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And there’s this scene in which the not-actually-titular fellowship is about to move Harry to a safe-house, and there is serious planning afoot. And some guy we’ve never seen before says something sort of off-topic, to which Alastor Moody replies, “Zip it, Mundungus!”

“Who the fuck is Mundungus?” I whispered to the Potter-literate friend sitting to my left.

“Oh, he’s been in the series since about the fifth book,” he replied. “He’s… a problem.”

“Oh,” I said. “So was he played by a different actor in the other movies? I don’t recognize him.”

“Um,” he said. “No, he wasn’t in the other movies.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I guess this is how they’re introducing him.”

I really had no idea what to say, other than “They can’t do that,” which of course they can, because they did. But this was unconventional storytelling, to say the least, and it had to mean one of two things:

1. The Harry Potter movies are meant as addenda to the books, an understanding of the latter being prerequisite if the former is to make a lick of sense. In this case, the films strive to be well-made, but not autonomous.

2. The Harry Potter movies are cynical cash-grabs, defying all manner of screenwriting logic because the intended audience already knows the plot and, more to the point, will readily pay to see the films no matter how much they suck. In this case, it makes no difference whether or not the films are well-made; if the consumer doesn’t care, then why should the producer?

Whether Harry Potter 7-1 is a quirky adaptation full of fan service, or a half-assed adaptation full of profit-motivated contempt, the “Zip it, Mundungus” moment serves as a yardstick for what not to do when adapting a work from one medium to another. In short: You’ve got to be canny and decisive about what you choose to excise, and equally, about what you choose to leave in. If you’ve left a peripheral character out of six of your eight movies, then you can probably get by without him for the remaining two.

Countless adaptions have suffered from being excessively faithful to their source material. When Zack Snyder says that the length of each shot in his film version of Watchmen corresponds to the size of a panel from Alan Moore’s original comic–that’s bad. Just because it works on the page doesn’t mean that it will work on film; indeed, the pacing and structure of Watchmen are meant to be peculiar to comics, and thus untranslatable. If there are vital things from the book that refuse to work in a movie, then you either replace them with something that will work or, as Alan Moore famously counseled Terry Gilliam in regards to Watchmen, think hard about whether you should be making the movie in the first place.

Generally speaking, the best adaptations are the ones that boldly leave things out. The film version of Everything Is Illuminated wisely leaves out an entire parallel narrative from the book. Because those who want to read Jonathan Safran Foer’s book can read it, and those who want to watch Liev Schreiber’s film can watch it. One is a loving adaptation of the other, but they’re not one and the same, for goodness’ sake.

Even Peter Jackson’s massive adaptation of The Lord of the Rings leaves a fair amount out, as any Tom Bombadil fan will attest. And that trilogy would not have gained anything of value if Saruman, just before dying, had turned to our heroes and screamed, “Zip it, Bombadil!”

“Who the fuck is Tom Bombadil?” someone would have whispered to his slightly embarrassed, Elvish-speaking friend.

Come to Think of It, I Don’t Particularly Want to Play on Roger Ebert’s Lawn

I respect Roger Ebert for admitting that his argument about video games was profoundly stupid. There are two major reasons why Ebert’s original argument was invalid. He now freely admits the first and most important one–namely, that he was discussing a medium about which he knew next-to-nothing. “I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn’t seen,” he says. Amen.

His ignorance of the medium leads him to some truly bizarre conclusions. For example, consider this excerpt from his faux-debate with Clive Barker (who, incidentally, is an expert on video games like a a grizzly bear is an expert on veganism):

Barker: “Let’s invent a world where the player gets to go through every emotional journey available. That is art. Offering that to people is art.”

Ebert: “If you can go through ‘every emotional journey available,’ doesn’t that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices. If next time I have Romeo and Juliet go through the story naked and standing on their hands, would that be way cool, or what?”

The bit about doing Romeo and Juliet naked and upside down–simply put, that is not what games do. It’s more like what movies sometimes do. Interactivity does not allow the player to do whatever he wants. It allows the player to act in a very limited number of ways, within a closed system that is designed to lead him to a certain preconceived conclusion. Sometimes player-action is really no more based in choice than the act of turning a book’s pages: You can either turn the page and see what’s next, or you can put down the book and do something else.

Think of it this way: If you could do anything you wanted in Grand Theft Auto, then the ability to kill prostitutes would not be an ethical issue. Sure, you could kill prostitutes, but you could also drive them to the nearest community college and enroll them at your own expense, and on the way over, you could have a frank discussion with them about class privilege, gender inequality, and safe sex. You cannot discourse with prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto, but you can kill them. The ethical problem in Grand Theft Auto is not that you can do anything, and that given that freedom, lots of people choose to kill prostitutes. The problem is that you can do relatively few things, and one of those few things that you can choose to do is kill prostitutes. The option is there because the designers put it there, and the alternative is absent because the designers didn’t put it there.

Even when games have branching narratives (and many do not), there are rarely more than two or three possible paths. And even the hundred-or-so important decisions in the Mass Effect games do not constitute anything approaching free choice. The experience still has an author.

To use Ebert’s own example, Braid:

You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game.

If he had played the game, which of course he has not, Ebert would know that Braid is specifically about the impossibility of taking back our mistakes. As the game builds toward its famous final level, time manipulation ceases to be an amusing superpower and becomes instead a tragic distortion of perspective: What if you thought, mistakenly, that you could bend the laws of nature to your will? What sorts of mistakes might you make as a result? You would probably make some pretty horrible ones, as the game intends to show you through an interactive–but fundamentally linear–narrative.

Similarly, what if you thought that video games were a space wherein you could do whatever you want, without limitation or consequence? What important things might you miss? You would probably miss the point entirely, as Barker and Ebert both do.

Reason Number Two:

My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art.

If you have to reject something on “purely theoretical grounds,” even when that conclusion runs contrary to observation or common sense, then you’re either (a) working with a bad theory, or (b) being a sophist. The point of theory is to systematically explain real objects and actual experiences, not to trap us in snooty technicalities.

A simple example: Around the turn of the 20th Century, the general consensus was that photography and filming were technical operations rather than creative pursuits, and that photographs and films therefore did not count as art. Eventually, that theory was revised–specifically because people began to understand the medium, and the skill required to work in it, and the many subjective choices it involves–and it suddenly seemed silly and pointless to exclude photography and film from aesthetic discourse. The problem was the theory, not the thing being theorized.

“I concluded without a definition [of art] that satisfied me,” Ebert says, ending this discussion about what art is the only way that any discussion about what art is ever ends.

An Entirely Earnest Request to Roger Ebert

So Roger Ebert has said once again, in his patented get-off-my-lawn rhetorical register, that video games are not and can never be art. First of all, let me say that I honestly believe discussions over the definition of art to be, by their very nature, a complete waste of time.

As Ebert himself points out, the whole matter is one of self-importance rather than anything empirical or useful: “Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?” he asks.

Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, “I’m studying a great form of art?” Then let them say it, if it makes them happy.

Likewise, if cinephiles wish to preserve a privileged space for their favored medium–cinema is better than television, celluloid is better than digital video, anything is better than video games–then let them go ahead and do so, if it makes them happy. I will not waste your time, or mine, by trying to wrestle with that ghettoizing impulse, or by rehashing my (readily available) argument as to why it simply does not matter whether such-and-such a thing is Art or not.

Instead, I would like to challenge Roger Ebert on a considerably more practical matter. Mr. Ebert, if you’re going to call Braid “pathetic,” as you do in the article that I have quoted above, then it really is quite essential that you actually play the fucking game.

To put it another way: I am not particularly fond of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. You, Roger Ebert, are. That’s fine. I’m sure that we could have an interesting discussion about our differences of opinion–but that discussion would only be possible because you and I have both seen the film.

It would be absurd for me to say that I didn’t like Mulholland Drive (let alone to say that the film is “pathetic”) if that opinion were based solely on hearing someone talk about it, or on viewing a few stills from it, rather than sitting down with the work and giving it a shot. Watching Kellee Santiago’s TED talk does not qualify you to form an opinion on Braid, any more than reading your review of Mullholland Drive would, in and of itself, qualify me to disagree with that review.

To be clear: I am not claiming that Braid is a perfect or unassailable work of art. The game is excellent, but it falls down in places (and interestingly enough, when it does fall down, it does so in a markedly David Lynch sort of way; Jonathan Blow, the game’s designer, has cited Mullholland Drive as an influence, and a little of Lynch’s petulant opacity shows through in Braid’s less successful moments). What I am arguing is simply that, until you actually experience Braid–not as the subject of a lecture, or as an aggregate of YouTube videos, but as a game, which is what it is–your qualitative claims about the game will be cranky, incendiary gibberish rather than criticism. (And here I’ve taken the bait. I’ve done what is referred to, in certain corners of the Internet, as feeding the troll).

If you seriously want to be part of the discourse on video games, then play some. Braid is about five hours long. You’ve spent far, far more time than that watching and writing about movies that you strongly disliked.

If you cannot be bothered to play any video games, then the topic at hand is one of which you are wholly ignorant. Casually dismissing an entire medium based on a small number of examples would be ridiculous enough–but when you haven’t even spent any time with those few examples, you’re just embarrassing yourself. Either form a valid, well-founded opinion, or proclaim your indifference and walk away.