“The Third Reich” Is Just a Game… Or Is It?

Here’s a nice essay by Anthony Paletta on gaming in literature:

Gaming in literature tends to come in two varieties; the high-brow and highly abstract, and the demotic and irredeemably nerdy. Look to puzzles in Perec’s Life, A Users Manual or chess in Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense, for the former, and sci-fi literature for the latter. Historically-based wargaming has largely fallen through the gap; there is Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim’s effort to recreate the siege of Namur in Tristram Shandy but otherwise it is a hobbyist corner given little literary attention. Until, oddly enough, Roberto Bolaño’s latest exhumed English translation, The Third Reich. This novel, to be clear, takes its name not from that short-lived empire, but from a multiplayer strategy game depicting its span, of which the book’s protagonist is an avid devotee.

Udo Berger, vacationing on the Catalan coast with his girlfriend Ingeborg, is not particularly given to sunshine. He spends much of the novel in his hotel room, unfurling scenarios for “The Third Reich” and soon launching into a fraught match with a local. Reviewers of the novel, written in 1990, but released in an English translation late last year, seem to be at some loss to describe just what, in fact, Berger’s wargaming constitutes, with most quickly settling upon the notion that it is “obsessive.” That’s not inaccurate, but it’s a sort of obsession rendered by a clear kindred spirit, with a detail of gameplay description impossible to anyone who wasn’t deeply familiar with the topic.

Not that I’m deeply familiar with wargaming or anything, but my few months working at Fantasy Flight Games opened my eyes to the possibilities beyond the occasional game of Axis and Allies (forget Risk, it’s just die-rolling and amassing a huge army in Australia).

I guess I’m going to have to pick up the first two parts in The Paris Review (wouldn’t you know it, I subscribed right in the middle of their serialization of The Third Reich).

The Poetic (or is it Perverse?) Effect of Harpo

Baudrillard on metaphor and [Harpo] Marx in The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact:

The abolition of meaning and metaphor can lead also to perverse or poetic effects.

Perverse, the man who sees himself as rubbish and throws himself on to the dustcart shouting ‘I’m rubbish!’ They pull him out and he jumps in again – he has lost all sense of metaphor.

Perverse and poetic, the woman to whom a man declares that he loves most of all the way she looks at him, and who sends him one of her eyes gift-wrapped.

She too goes beyond the metaphor of the gaze in a cruel act of seduction and counter-transference. The cruel transfiguration of language.

And ironic transfiguration in Harpo Marx’s gesture when, to get into the nightclub, he substitutes a real fish for the password ‘swordfish’. We are not far in this case from the joke [Witz], or from what Freud analyses in the dreamwork in terms of representability (when the word becomes a thing). (71)

Here’s words into things back into words:

I Wish I Could Have Attended that Lecture

Nick Johnson has a piece about The Thing over at Video Word Made Flesh. Johnson is the author of Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica, and, after giving the reader a synopsis of the film, he gets down to what we really want to know: how does the film stack up against Antarctic reality?

Pretty well, it seems:

…no other movie in history has ever depicted daily Antarctic life and its problems with such accuracy and intuitive brilliance. It takes place in a research station with no scientists, which is the case with McMurdo Station in the winter (the McMurdo research station is in fact referenced during the film). The doctor character in the film was insane, which underscores the problem of attracting qualified physicians who have no practice at home and who are willing to work for peanuts on year-to-year contracts in Antarctic stations. The doctor was then locked in a hut away from the others after his madness, much like the kitchen worker who was locked in McMurdo’s luxurious Hut 10 to await retrieval by the FBI after attacking his co-worker with a hammer in 1996. There was rampant suspicion of aliens, which parallels the evacuation from McMurdo in November 2000 of a science tech who held a lecture called “The Reality of Dreams” and later advertised to the hoi polloi that one Thursday aliens would descend in spacecraft to meet him outside the galley.

I wonder if they have a transcript of that lecture. It sounds like a latter days of Philip K. Dick sort of deal.

For more, click here.

“The image we tend to have of ourselves…”

From Jenny Hendrix’s great piece on Tintin in the LARB:

Then there are ways in which Tintin is simply incompatible with film, as his own creator realized. After seeing an animated version of The Temple of the Sun, Hergé wrote a young fan: “I don’t like Captain Haddock in the film. He doesn’t have the same voice as in the book.” Like words, drawings are an abstraction suggesting a truth: their ability to mean something to us comes from what they suggest but fail to provide. There’s a way in which giving Haddock a voice at all denies him his ability to speak. In Spielberg’s film, the characters feel both more and less human than they do on the page: While the Thom(p)sons and Captain Haddock look like CGI burlesques of Hergé’s original drawings, Jamie Bell’s Tintin looks like someone, where before he’d looked like no one and everyone, at once familiar and strange.

“One set of lines allows readers to see,” McCloud writes of Hergé’s style, “the other to be.” Tintin’s characterless mug reflects the image we tend to have of ourselves: something not quite visible, but still indelibly extant. Look at his face as Hergé drew it: there’s such babyish clarity to those round, rosy cheeks, that thumb-like nose, the expressive parentheses of his eyebrows, and so much complexity, too. Like Barthes’ degree-zero of writing, Tintin is the nursery of a new language of line and shape, the very artificiality of which makes it possible to imagine something real. He’s almost nothing, and as long as he stays that way, he can be anything at all.

 

Kepler22-B and Baudrillard

All this talk of another candidate for the role of a “new Earth,” rather than “another Earth,” puts me in mind of Baudrillard’s argument in The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact:

Second hypothesis: the world is given to us. Now, in accordance with the symbolic rule, when something is given to us, we must be able to give it back.
In the past, we could give thanks in one way or another to God or some other agency; we could respond to the gift with a sacrifice.
But now that all transcendence has disappeared we no longer have anyone to whom to give thanks. And if we can give nothing in exchange for this world, it is unacceptable.
It is for this reason that we find ourselves having to liquidate the natural world and substitute an artificial one for it — a world built from scratch and for which we will be accountable to no one.
Hence the gigantic undertaking of eliminating the natural world in all its forms. All that is natural will be denied in the more or less long term by virtue of this enforced substitution. The Virtual appears here as the final solution to the impossible exchange of the world.
But in itself this does not settle the matter, as we shall never escape this new debt, contracted in this instance with ourselves. How are we to absolve ourselves of this technical world and this artificial omnipotence?
Here again, for want of being able to exchange this world (for what?), we need to destroy or deny it. Which explains, at the same time as we progress in building up this artificial universe, the immense negative counter-transference against this Integral Reality we have forged for ourselves.
A deep-seated denial that is present everywhere today. So that we do not know which will win out in the end, this irresistible technical undertaking or the violent reaction against it.
At all events, the undertaking is never complete.

Maybe we could use the “irresistible technical undertaking” to get to Kepler-22B, and then destroy the technology that got us there. Then we could have our cake and eat it too.

Cutting Versions of Your Fear

Over at The Millons, Steve Himmer writes of a childhood fear of Mary Poppins that finds its embodiment in the mashup, “Scary Mary”:

The collective unconscious, or at least our shared fears and fantasies, has always been the lifeblood of cinema: audiences need to share a reaction to make the film and the experience of seeing it work. And, more pragmatically, to make such an expensive undertaking as film worth financing and troubling over at all. “Scary Mary Poppins” is something different, a low-budget, low-stakes (and likely low-profit) exercise in new media. Distributed online, produced with affordable, accessible software and tools, the mashup does not need to make its appeal as universal as a blockbuster does. In this short, public embodiment of my childhood nightmare lies all the possibility of the Web for transformative, responsive, and reflexive creative work: the potential for every viewer to be frightened in his or her own private way even if each must cut their own version of every film.

The idea in that last sentence, the necessity of cutting a personal version of a film, is one I agree with. Why else did I make George and Eye, except to explore the fears that The Fly made me aware of?

It’s almost as if the film that makes one aware of a particular fear (or perfectly embodies a fear) imprints itself on that fear.

“I’ll have some rotten nights after I’ve sent you back, but that will pass.”

Here’s a piece from Gary Dop that appeared on Minnesota Public Radio‘s version of All Things Considered last night:

It was a great love scene, Netflix, but now it’s time to yell, ‘cut’

It’s a love/break-up letter to the increasingly erratic Netflix who wants to be called “Qwikster” some nights, nights where she’ll “wear different clothes and makeup,” but keep her red jacket on, apparently.

It’s interesting in how in the comments section there are a couple of commenters who don’t get where the humor is coming from. They seem to think that it’s a take down of Netflix…which it is, I guess, but you have to look past the great personification of a DVD/streaming movie service to get to that level.

The Sort of Sequel to “The Fly”

More movement on The Fly re-remake (or un-remake) front:

The next thing we asked about were the 2009 rumors of Cronenberg rebooting The Fly for 20th Century Fox, having already done so once with his 1986 horror classic of the same name, which to date is still considered one of the only near-perfect horror remakes.

“‘The Fly’ is not exactly a remake, it’s sort of a sequel, kinda. Yeah, that was a thing. I’ve written a script of that, and I don’t know if that’s going to really happen, but that has to do with Fox.”

Sort of a sequel, kinda? That’s wishy-washy enough to keep my take on his re-remake germane.

More Monkeys Needed

Canon Formation: A. Conan Doyle

Over at The Paris Review, Michael Dirda’s essay on the “unaffectedness” of Arthur Conan Doyle has stirred something long dormant in me:

To this day I can more or less recall the newsletter’s capsule summary that compelled me to buy The Hound of the Baskervilles—as if that ominous title alone weren’t enough! Beneath a small reproduction of the paperback’s cover—depicting a shadowy Something with fiery eyes crouching on a moonlit crag—blazed the thrilling words “What was it that emerged from the moor at night to spread terror and violent death?” What else, of course, but a monstrous hound from the bowels of Hell?

[...]

Their informant, Dr. Mortimer, pauses, then adds, hesitantly, that near the body he had spotted footprints on the damp ground. A man’s or a woman’s? eagerly inquires the great detective, to which question he receives the most thrilling answer in all of twentieth-century literature: “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

I’m wondering if my fascination with giallo films and certain types of crawling horror (especially Richard Matheson’s work and episodes of Night Gallery) can be traced back to Doyle. During the next week, I hereby resolve to repair to the archives to spend some time with Holmes and Watson, just to see how I read them now.

For more from Dirda, click here.