Second Skin

Second Skin is the best, most profound, and most significant of these three films inspired by geek culture. It is a true achievement, both in documentary film-making and in public discourse about online gaming. Artistically, Second Skin is beautiful—compelling interviews interspersed with machinima sequences and illustrative animations. It succeeds in storytelling because of its focus on several story lines; as the narrative focuses on different aspects of online gaming, the narratives are emphasized or de-emphasized. In a segment focused on addiction, one gamer receives particular attention because his around-the-clock habit wrecked havoc on his life. Another gamer is shown in proximity whose lesser (but still alarming) addiction seems to cause a deepening rupture with his wife.

But the filmmakers do not solely focus on the negative—love lives are formed and disabled people are liberated through the virtual world. The positive and the negative do not cancel each other out; rather, they help formulate a cultural critique that should disturb us all—the reason we want to retreat into the virtual world is that we are dissatisfied with the real world.

Nerdcore Rising

Nerdcore Rising is a vibrant, engaging, and surprisingly profound exploration of so-called nerdcore hip-hop. The film follows MC Frontalot, who coined his genre’s name, on his first nationwide tour—a significant step forward, considering that his music was basically a hobby to that point. Nerdcore Rising is a hybrid between a tour/concert film and a talking-heads documentary; it features live concerts (interspersed and overlaid with brilliant and hilarious animations), a travel narrative with goofy moments, observations from the band and their fans, and interviews with other musicians (other nerdcore artists, hip-hop artists, and even Weird Al Yankovic). The film that emerges from this hodgepodge of techniques is insightful at times, particularly when exploring the disenfranchisement of nerds and geeks that necessitates a music written for them (see especially “I Heart Fags,” derived from expectations on young men to assert false, chauvinistic masculinity).

Nerdcore hip-hop is always presented as self-effacing, but never as a simple parody of mainstream hip-hop. Amid the fun of MC Frontalot’s performances and his various antics, the film makes an argument: nerdcore hip-hop is in the true spirit of the wider genre’s emphasis on expressing who one is. It is, the film declares, a worthy subgenre.

Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet

The subject of Reformat the Planet—chip tunes, i.e., electronica using outdated video game systems—is, unfortunately, much more interesting than the film itself. It’s worth viewing, to be sure, but it features little cultural critique and suffers from a weak narrative. There is a narrative formed from the rise of chip tunes and the Blip Festival that signals the arrival of this unique musical “scene,” but the film wanders between topics and frequently repeats itself. The argument of this documentary, much repeated but nonetheless lacking the punch of Nerdcore Rising, is that the participants in the chip tunes scene are musicians who want to return to a simpler, grittier style. There’s some meat to that claim—the style subverts both the commercial aim of the video game systems and the extravagance of electronica—but wider implications are mostly eschewed.

What saves Reformat the Planet is the stunning cinematography and editing. The performances imitate the music in multimedia innovation, sucking in the viewer. These sequences do not resemble a music video or traditional concert footage—they’re something new and beautiful in their artistic extravagance and technological simplicity. These sequences often make a better case for chip tunes than any of the interviewees.

Sex Positive is an important film. That sounds like hyperbole, especially if one considers that I attended the world premiere in a half-full theatre, but you wouldn’t think so if you always this brilliant documentary about AIDS activist Richard Berkowitz—irascible and confrontational, but also profound and impassioned. Whether we disagree with him, we have to respect that he legitimately wants to do good, first by fighting the gay establishment in calling attention to promiscuity, then by promoting the concept of safe sex. The most significant contribution that Sex Positive makes is its analysis of what AIDS did to the people in the gay community—the interviewees paint a picture of young, productive men dying at an alarming rate without any real explanation. Sex Positive is shot beautifully, with a shaky or still camera as the interview demands, and interspersed by stock footage that is sometimes shocking but never indulgent. Berkowitz is a compelling subject, and the filmmakers explore his complexities to the extent they are able, even venturing into his years spent as an S&M hustler and a drug addict. What I appreciate about this film is that it explores without being too preachy—though there is some preaching.

Sorry. I’ve given up on C.S. Lewis. Not on his scholarship or his apologetics (though I’m skeptical of those at this point), but on his didactic, overbearing fiction.

It’s useful to trace how I got to this point.

First, there was Narnia. I remember reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a kid–or, rather, I remember having read it. I don’t think I read any of the other volumes, though they were in my library. Fast-forward to a couple years ago, when that book’s adaptation was brought to life by Disney. The film was decent (not great, certainly not as good as Jackson’s Lord of the Rings), so I was interested enough to pick up the Narnia books again. I didn’t remember anything from them, so I went into my one-volume Chronicles of Narnia with the expectation that I would enjoy it. I should also note that I was reading J.K. Rowling and Lemony Snicket at the time, so I was generally positive toward children’s literature.

So I read Lion.

I hated it. There were some spectacular lines, but the story was disjointed to the point of near-incoherence and the dialogue was stilted, like the worst of Victorian prudishness. It was one of the most singularly horrible reading experiences I had subjected myself to.

Being a glutton for punishment, I read Prince Caspian. More of the same, really; the dialogue improved somewhat, but did Aslan have to jump in, deus ex machina, without any connection with the previous 75 pages? Finally, I gave Lewis a third shot and read The Magician’s Nephew. The only thing–and I do mean the only thing–I got out of it was the observation that Neil Gaiman stole his beginning to Anansi Boys from the creation of Narnia. Other than that, it was crap.

I know I’m being pejorative, and I know I have some Lewis aficionado friends who occasionally read this, but I simply must be honest: I found all three books pretentious, awkward, and intensely overrated.

My impression of Lewis improved somewhat when I listened to John Cleese’s reading of The Screwtape Letters. Finally, here was the Lewis I had been told of–clearly a prose stylist who understands the subtle hypocrises and real triumphs of modern religion. The words themselves, not just Cleese’s performance of them, were marvelous. Screwtape is the only reason I hold out hope for Lewis’s apologetical and scholarly writing.

Unfortunately, I was duped again by Lewis when I also downloaded Out of the Silent Planet from Audible.com. It started out well, more or less. Ransom is a lovable, solitary professor at the beginning–a stock character if there ever was one–and I had hopes he would develop out of that. The séroni are truly terrifying in their first appearance, and the narrative held me on the edge of my seat until the lowly doldrums that is Ransom’s encounter with the hrossa. This sequence reveals the total flatness of Ransom; the book might have been called C.S. Lewis Goes to Space. Ransom’s two-dimensional self-righteousness, and the weird neoplatonism of the author, weigh down every paragraph. Ransom learns from the hrossa, but only their language and some transparently didactic religious points that Lewis wanted to get across (particularly when Hyoi tells Ransom about the restrained sex life of hrossa). It was at this point in the narrative that I truly resented the early confrontation between Ransom and Weston; the latter plays the nihilist (we’re supposed to boo and hiss at him, I guess) and the former plays the dignified humanist who is against vivisection. I had recognized Lewis’s precise honing of that conversation for his didactic purposes, but I didn’t realize the extent of it until Ransom meets another species and utterly fails to change.

But the oddest things about the encounter with the hrossa is its parallel with Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver, too, is a fool in a strange land. In each voyage, he–like Ransom among the hrossa–is instructed in the local language and learns it quickly because of his supposed facility for languages. Ransom is an anti-Gulliver in some respects; he is an Oxford philologist, so it makes sense that he recognizes Hyoi’s linguistic capabilities when they first meet. But in other respects, he is a pale imitation of Gulliver; neither character changes, but at least Swift’s protagonist is delightfully complex in his chauvinistic idiocy. Ransom is just the stereotype of an Oxford don who makes strange lands and strange peoples dreadfully boring.

So I gave up. I downloaded Jonathon Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude from Audible.com and was delighted, in the first five minutes, to know that I was going to be given complex characters and questions rather than propositions.

I am profoundly disappointed in my reading of Lewis. I was intrigued by the idea of a Christian science fiction novel, but I won’t be picking Out of the Silent Planet up–or anything else by Lewis–for a long, long time.