Get Lost in the POOLS: a Game Review & Discussion

With a premise rooted in open exploration rather than solving puzzles or confronting monsters and enemies, Tensori’s POOLS isn’t a game in the conventional sense. It’s important to know this going in, because expectations of having something to “do,” a character to roleplay, and even a story to engage with, will likely lead to disappointment. However, letting go of these expectations, if you even harbor them in the first place, will bring you into a sublime and complex expression of liminal spaces.

Though clearly and respectfully influenced by animators like Jared Pike, Kane Pixels and Matt Studios, whose seminal shorts on YouTube have deservedly drawn attention and praise, Tensori succeeds in offering their own singular vision of the Poolrooms, a subset of the broader Backrooms creepypasta in which environments are defined by pools as you would expect at an aquatics center as well as spaces that are only pools because they’ve been flooded. The result is a stunning work of art, perfect for casual gamers and/or anyone who has yearned for an interactive, rather than passive viewing, experience of the Poolrooms. 

 

The Architectural Wonderland

As the game starts, we are literally dropped into a white-tiled space, where we assume first-person control of an avatar with a camera. (Our perspective throughout the game is through the camera, but the first-person-point-of-view doesn’t draw attention to this.) The controls are simple and elegantly implemented, limited to moving/swimming and looking around. After noting that our point of entry is an inaccessible hole in the ceiling, gameplay continues with navigating the maze of rooms comprising an increasingly large complex of spaces. The first thing to note is how immersive the experience is. Tensori clearly have a solid grasp of architecture and the psychology of space, successfully creating environments that leverage structure, spatial volume, and light to express the tension of liminal spaces that are intelligible (that is, navigable) but without a clear purpose. Some are bright and expansive, others dark and claustrophic, and a few that are mind-bogglingly monumental. Even before we consider the oddities and fun references to Backrooms lore, Tensori’s consistently fascinating architectural design beautifully evokes a range of experiences, from calm to unsettling to WTF. It is, on its own terms, a joy to progress through each chapter and discover new elements and new space typologies as they are delivered with increasing surrealism. Add in outstanding sound design, which foregoes a musical score to focus entirely on sound effects and environmental sounds, and POOLS becomes all the more engaging. From the tapping of our footsteps and mechanical sounds of HVAC systems, to random bits of music and noises that are disturbingly weird and inexplicable, it’s astonishing how well Tensori integrate a sonic experience into the physicality of their environments.

 

Lost in Liminality

POOLS is no mere building tour, of course, and this is where Tensori’s other strength comes into force: their understanding of liminal spaces. Where I have a quibble with the Backrooms and the many videos on YouTube, however well done, it’s with the loose conception of liminality, which is related to but not identical to the mysterious. To explain what I mean, consider that liminality has more than one aspect. In the physical sense, liminal spaces are transitional spaces. These could be rooms like foyers, where people transition between exteriors and interiors, or thresholds like doorways. The Backrooms are liminal in the sense that they our conceptually outside our lived experience and consist of spaces that seem more algorithmically generated than actually designed. The maze-like environments are much like a sentence in which the grammar and vocabulary are correct, but the word choices don’t add up to anything meaningful. As pots say, kettles garden in orbit, but only when the moon frets in the calendar’s dreams.

It's the conceptual sense of liminality, however, that is to me the most evocative, and here I refer to semantic ambiguity – that is, the unclear meaning of a space (e.g. its intended purpose). Conceptual liminality isn’t just about ambiguity but irresolvable ambiguity, the impossibility to definitely assign any kind of meaning to a space. Just as the physical condition of being in a liminal space implies a perpetual sense of transition, the mental perception of a liminal space implies an inability to understand it in a teleological sense. We simply can’t explain why any given space is how it is. Worse, we can’t even be sure that there is an explanation. It’s precisely the irreconcilable tension between meaning and meaningless that gives liminality its power, particularly in comparison to the mysterious which implies meaning through a definite question even if the answer is out of reach.

With this understanding of liminality in mind, the most successful liminal spaces to me are therefore those spaces that never offer a resolution to our perceptions of environments that don’t make sense in their whole, leaving us at the mercy of whatever fears and wonders our minds can conjure. When someone introduces a monster, however, or starts populating spaces with all manners of entities, the liminality is lost and we are left with the merely mysterious: undeniably weird places whose meaning is fixed on surviving horror even as the origin of that horror is unknown.

POOLS is a beautiful demonstration of this physical and conceptual liminality. And in their world-building, Tensori demonstrate great skill and restraint in when and how new elements are introduced, whether these are incongruous artefacts or adjustments to the laws of physics. This drives their ability to gradually ratchet the suspense throughout the game and, without a narrative framework or monsters to chase us, makes the complex of maze-like environments delightfully resistant to explanation and rational understanding. Even the strangest, most surprising scenes in the game are presented without any means to discern their purpose, adding to an atmosphere that straddles curiosity and dread. If you want a literary comparison, here’s one: the entirety of the complex is rather like Stanislaw Lem’s inscrutable ocean in Solaris, which produces entirely human doppelgangers of people taken from the memories of a space station’s crew. Why the ocean does this is unclear, just as it isn’t clear whether there is any intentionality underlying its actions. And like Lem’s protagonist, we end having to confront the possibility that it may be impossible to figure anything out.

Tensori does push beyond the strict ambiguity of liminality, however, and does so purposefully. This is most overt in Chapter 6, when statues of the kind previously seen in static poses throughout the game begin to act like the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. Appearing in spaces behind us after we look away, they serve to shepherd us forward by blocking our way back. Even before that, however, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, the statues appear to open light panels lining a corridor, staring at us with glowing eyes. (You might want to freeze-frame the moment in the full Walkthrough on YouTube.) Although the statues aren’t exactly chasing us, and they certainly don’t act in any specifically dangerous manner, the unsettling effect nonetheless emphasizes some intentional presence within the complex. Questions about POOLS’ liminality actually occur even earlier than that, as early as Chapter 1, when a detour in a flooded corridor leads to a submerged hole and ladder – and a pair of hands that helpfully point in the right direction to the exit. Although none of these signs of activity by themselves add up to a narrative, let alone an explanation of what the POOLS complex is and what, if any, purpose it might serve, they nevertheless materialize what could otherwise be dismissed as tricks of the mind. We’re not alone in the POOLS, and that’s a different experience than not being able to know whether we are alone or not.

 

 

Ambiguity Resolved by … Mystery?

The game’s ending calls everything into question. Sort of. It’s enigmatic to the point that revealing it doesn’t really spoil anything about the game unless you view knowing anything about it as a spoiler. In essence, once we reach the final room, we’re confronted with only one exit: a door held open by a figure of whom we can only see an arm and head in silhouette. Curiously, the game removes our agency as a player and we can only watch as our invisible Explorer-Self sets the camera down on a partially submerged table, leaving only behind the sound of treading water or swimming as the scene continues … on an old TV set on a desk. The final scene is of someone ejecting VHS marked “POOLS” from a VCR.

Personally, I would have been perfectly happy without any of the activity or the meta-ending. POOLS could have concluded as non-narratively as it began, with an exit to the “real” world as abrupt and devoid of explanation as our entry into that first room. The experience Tensori create through architectural and sound design really is just that good on its own. But I have to give them credit for crafting a thought-provoking ending that doesn’t ruin the experience and is even very clever in how it subverts the idea of an ending. Thinking about what the ending means, it’s tempting to start with the fate of our Explorer-Self. Is it a happy ending in which we escape? Alas, we don’t see ourselves leaving through the open door, which actually closes as the scene pulls away to the office TV. Does that mean a tragic or horrifying ending? As we don’t hear any screaming or other sounds of distress, nor has anything in the game threatened us with anything other than being creepy, it’s not clear that anything bad actually happens to our Explorer-Self either. For unexplained reasons, our Explorer-Self simply goes against our natural inclination and sets down the camera instead of heading toward the door. The office scene offers no insights here. It’s tempting, perhaps, to interpret the realization that our game experience was, meta-contextually, the recording of a VHS tape and, from there, find a comparison to the Blair Witch. Although there are no counter-factuals per se to disprove this interpretation, studying the details of the desk scene strongly suggests another interpretation, which is where the subversion of endings comes into play. So what do actually see?

• The ejected VHS tape only says POOLS, the title of the game. There is no date or other informational markings; nothing to me that suggests the tape is footage obtained from a particular time and place.
• In the VHS tapes lying on the desk, while there is one labeled “Found Footage” there is also another labeled Level 188.8, which is a reference to “the Flooded Windows” sublevel in Backrooms lore. Other labels are almost impossible (for me) to read, but one seems to be about tiles, another about building games, and yet another about solving something.
•  There are two sketches, an incomplete one of a human torso and, below that, an architectural drawing labeled “entrance,” as well as a human figurine.
•  Also on the desk are two books, one on human anatomy and another titled “Architecture: Build Your Dreams.”
• A scene from Chapter 1, the “helping hands” ladder and hole, is presented to us as a painting on the wall. The depiction is more artistic than photorealistic, and displays an artist’s signature.

There’s a final clue – other than the fact that the most significant anomalous artefacts in the game are art-related – that supports the idea that POOLS isn’t ultimately a found footage horror game. Look closely at the TV, and you’ll see it’s branded with the word “IROSNET” – Tensori spelled backward. Could the office be a reflection of the game developers’ studio and, by extension, their creative process? Could questions about the Explorer-Self’s in-game fate be, essentially, beside the point, because the Explorer-Self is merely a user interface illusion? If so, the camera gets sets down simply because the experience has come to an end and it is we, the actual players, who exit the door in our minds as we rejoin the game’s creators in the real world. POOLS is thus, ultimately, interactive performance art. Its meaning comes not from interpretation, but from experience.

Of course, there’s no definitive way to prove whether my interpretation is either “correct” or what Tensori intended or not. It might not appeal to fans of horror games. But it’s that unresolvable uncertainty, and the corresponding opportunity to create our own meaning, that allows the experience of playing POOLS to be truly liminal … and linger long after the credits.

What’s next, then? Should Tensori decide to continue making games in the liminal genre, I would hope they’d resist the temptation to add levels and lore to POOLS as some Steam commenters suggest. The game offers a complete experience, and there are possible development directions that wouldn’t risk its meticulously crafted. After all, the psychology of space, and the experience of solitude, is far richer than terror. After producing a game with a bias toward psychological horror, I’d see an opportunity to further subvert the Backrooms genre with a game biased toward kindness: what could a compassionate liminal environment look like? I’m not Tensori, though, so ultimately that’s neither here nor there. Whatever the future holds, POOLS stands as a magnificent achievement on its own. It certainly can, and should, be revisited to soak in the many different environments, catch previously unnoticed details, and admire the work of art that it is.

 Get the game here.

Lost Girls, Neither Coming nor Going

 

It’s been several years since I first read Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s porn cum art comic Lost Girls. A potentially scandalous work, I overcame my wariness over its controversy with a trust that reflected, at the time, my relative alignment with the popular assessment of Moore’s work. Since then, however, I find myself more of a dissenting voice, questioning not the intelligence and knowledge Moore clearly brings to his writing but his often-overwrought craft in service of a muddled vision that brooks no criticism. Erudition should be an invitation to share a journey of discovery, not a wall that demands people prove themselves worthy to enter the ivory tower – a distinction Moore’s work seems to have increasingly abandoned.

Fundamentally, the problem I see in his work is a common one among writers; the tendency to thrust more ideas into a story than is necessary and meaningful. For Watchmen, it’s Moore’s inclusion of the god-like Dr. Manhattan that undermines an otherwise nuanced critique of the era’s prevailing mood of superhero worship and a study of the morality of power via the mythologize of costumed vigilantes. As a self-proclaimed puppet able to see the cosmic strings, Dr. Manhattan serves to establish a strictly deterministic universe in which all actions are predetermined and free will, along with the moral accountability that comes with it, is an illusion. Whatever critique of superheroes Watchmen can offer is, on its own terms, impossible given the characters’ lack of agency. After all, what morality can wind-up toys have? The layering of a free will vs determinism debate is too much for the story to bear, especially when Dr. Manhattan is the only character to grapple with it.

But Watchmen is a model of lean storytelling compared to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books, orgies of literary references, tangents, pureed concepts, metafictional wankery, pastiche fetishes, and an unpleasant penchant for the lurid that arrive nowhere if the standard involves meaningful characterizations and relatable narratives. The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, which predates League by about 25 years, remains to me the quintessential model of how to tell philosophically provocative and meaningful, yet entirely gonzo, post-modern meta-stories. League, while admirable and often clever in both ambition and grasp of literature, comes across as posturing in comparison.

These excesses stand out to me precisely because of those works in which Moore does display the focused storytelling of a masterful writer with keen insights to offer in his characters, plots, and narrative themes. The first is V for Vendetta; a suspenseful and satisfying political thriller infused with a deliciously provocative ideological perspective. Words and images complement each other beautifully to deliver an outstanding example of what comic book storytelling can be. The other is From Hell, Moore’s provocative metaphysical meditation on the horrors of the 20^th century as ritually presaged by Jack the Ripper’s murders.

So what of Lost Girls, Moore and wife Gebbie’s ambitious attempt to bring together art and pornography into something that could, in the mating, transcend both? The book is premised on a chance encounter between three characters extracted from classic children’s literature – Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy – at the posh Austrian hotel Himmelblau shortly before the onset of World War I. The narrative hasn’t even begun to undress when, alas, Moore’s tendency for excess shows itself. It happens in a conversation between two inconsequential servants who, in Moore’s process of hinting at Alice’s libertinous character, reference an unseen black character using the “N” word. The word is not only jarring, but entirely gratuitous since the book doesn’t deal with racial issues and is populated entirely by white characters. The first question that comes to mind is: do we really need a scruffy old white guy carelessly and pointlessly bandying racially charged words just to prove whatever notion of authenticity he harbors for his work – in a narrative fantasy? Next is: should we start questioning why Moore is so fixated on English and American literature, with nary a look outside of white borders?

Moving on to the broader thematic excesses, Moore’s decision to reference World War I is hard to reconcile with the overall erotic goals of his fantasia. Other than some passing references, particularly through the transient character of a convalescing soldier, Captain Rolf Bauer, the specter of war only haunts the narrative when readers remember it. Until the end, that is,  when it seems as if Moore suddenly remembers what time period he set his story in, at which point the most he can muster are banal musings on how much better it would be for the young men to be home having sex rather than fighting/dying, along with a final sequence of panels depicting an eviscerated soldier on the battle field. When the post-orgasmic glow of an erotic story comes from artillery shells rather than sex, something’s gone awry with the storytelling.

While to my eyes Moore has a tendency for overworking his sentences to the point of making H.P. Lovecraft look like Hemingway by comparison, even when he’s consciously aping classic authors, Lost Girls suffers more from his need to provide a running commentary, dialogue, or some kind of verbiage on every panel instead of trusting Gebbie’s artwork to excite readers. The lack of balance between words and images is particularly unfortunate in the story’s flashbacks, patterned in the broadest sense from Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz. Because Moore has Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy narrate their life stories, essentially explaining what Gebbie illustrates, most of the book’s characters don’t benefit from a voice, and therefore personality, of their own. Moore essentially locks us into the women’s interpretation of events through their narration, instead of allowing dialogue and images to guide readers to their own understanding of the pivotal moments in the lost girls’ lives. There’s so much writing that one wonder why Moore bothered with a graphic novel format for the story he wants to tell. The book’s limp drama is all the worse given that, for all the writing, Moore fails to create relationships that evolve throughout the course of the story. A notable example is between Wendy and her husband, the condescending and chauvinistic Harold Potter with whom marital bliss is tragically lacking. One would hope that with Wendy’s sexual escapades and Harold’s eventual indulgence of his repressed homosexual urges, each character might learn something to lead to some kind of change in themselves and their relationship to each other. But no. Harold remains every bit the condescending paternalist by the time he drives out of the plot; he and Wendy never even have a conversation to reflect on the meaning of their experiences. The lost girls themselves are similarly deprived of any depth of relationship to each other, since Moore requires very little to get them fucking each other and sharing their life stories. Whatever healing they arguably gain from recounting their trauma-laced sexual comings of age doesn’t lead to anything. For a book with literary aspirations, Lost Girls is curiously dry when it comes to character development. Like a burlesque dancer who comes on stage without any clothes on, and thus no means to tease and tantalize the audience, there is no buildup and release in Moore’ storytelling.

While the above shortcomings provide more than enough interruptus for the book’s coitus, it’s the depiction of child and teenaged sexuality that looms largest over the entire project. The controversy is arguably exaggerated, partly because Moore and Gebbie are not the first, nor the most boundary-pushing, artists to engage the topic, but also because in a book’s storytelling isn’t in service of gratuitous titillation. While there’s no accounting for how readers will personally react, the most questionable panels are generally a minority in a book that is, essentially, cover to cover sex mostly between adult characters. And violence, while implied in a few rare instances, is never depicted. So what, exactly, are Moore and Gebbie doing? The youth sexuality is presented in two ways. First is methodological, in that the story concerns three women’s life stories from the perspective of their sexuality, which means consistent explicitness for them as both youths and adults. There is context, biography, and characterization to what Moore and Gebbie offer, regardless of my view that it ultimately doesn’t amount to very much. Second are the short story pastiches, presented as excerpts from a scandalous little white book the hotel owner makes available to every guest in their rooms. A few of these pastiches consist of big, happy, incestuous, all-age family orgies that are so ridiculous and over-the-top, the impression is neither serious nor erotic but, intentionally or not, hilarious.

From here we get to the point of the book, the climax of its project that serves to pre-emptively defend their choice of methodology and subject matter from criticism. Through the character of Mr. Rougeur, the Hotel Himmelblau’s owner and the coy author of that little white book, Moore makes his argument during the grand orgy that caps off the story:

“You see? Incest, c’est vrai, it is a crime. But this? This is the idea of incest, no? And then these children: how outrageous! How old can they be? Eleven? Twelve? It is quite monstrous … except that they are fictions, as old as the page they appear upon, no less, no more. Fiction and fact: only madmen and magistrates cannot discriminate between them.”

To underscore the point, the not-entirely-reliable Mr. Rougeur says this right before observing that he is having sex with a thirteen-year-old. And thus, Moore believes, the trap is set: what, exactly, is there for readers to be morally outraged about? There is no reality, no action, no person to point to. Nothing, indeed, is actually happening, except as a mental fiction, an interpretation of words and images on the page.

But the trap is far from shut, not the least because Moore isn’t offering a new argument. Horror creators have long pointed to the fictional nature of their work as a moral bypass for the extreme violence and suffering they depict. And as long as there have been artists, there’s been a struggle over what constitute acceptable artistic subjects – with sexuality, of course, being a common flashpoint of censorship efforts. While there will always be debates in this area given a pluralistic society, particularly over where the boundaries of tolerance are drawn, the notion of freely exploring ideas even in light of their relative ability to offend is for the most part accepted and settled in liberal environments. Besides, what is pornography or it’s more refined sibling, erotica, if not the exploration of fantasies both attainable and unrealistic? It simply isn’t clear with whom Moore is arguing with.

Moore presenting an old argument to an outdated problem is unfortunate enough, but all the more so because it means he misses the opportunity for more interesting and relevant questions. The issue, really, shouldn’t be what responsibility reality has toward art, but what responsibility art has toward reality. It’s a matter of psychology and the role of fantasy in our mental health. While I wouldn’t argue that fantasy is necessarily bad, Moore’s declaration of support for an amoral mental playground neglects how thoughts influence our emotional states and patterns of behavior. Pornography, like reality TV, can warp our understanding of reality and can, without a skillful mindset, lead to harmful consequences in terms of body image, performance expectations, relationships, and related expressions of sexuality. When combined with mainstream cinema’s tendency to associate sex with menace (i.e. in thrillers and horror) or embarrassment (i.e. in sex comedies), our cultural understanding of sexuality tends to be more debilitating than liberating. Rephrasing the question, then: how can the art of sex help us enjoy our sexuality with skill and empathy in our day-to-day reality? Unfortunately, Moore doesn’t even offer a rationale or exploration for his declaration via Mr. Rougeur, so Lost Girls is certainly not positioned to explore any other questions.

Whether, despite all that, Lost Girls is of the one-handed or two-handed persuasion isn’t for me to say. It’s different strokes for different folks, and there’s enough variety for at least some panels to achieve some kind of effect. That said, I found the book to be singularly lacking in joy. The WWI context contributes to the downbeat impression, but really it’s Moore’s decision to retell whimsical stories as personal traumas that makes the book more cold shower than hot fling. For Alice, the journey to Wonderland beings with a  sexual assault by a family friend, and continues with her upbringing in an all-girls boarding school from which she falls in with a lesbian dominatrix, becomes addicted to opium, and is subjected to all manner of sexual debaucheries and twisted power games. Wendy’s experience involves her encounters with Peter Pan, over which looms the threat of a sexual predator nicknamed the Captain, a plot whose resolution leaves Peter a prostitute and Wendy sexually repressed. Of the three, only Dorothy has a less brutal retelling, in that after discovering herself during a tornado she merrily fucks her way through farmhands inspired by the Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin Man, before moving on her father the Wizard. Other than a devastated stepmother, Dorothy is the only lost girl to emerge relatively unscarred from her teenaged experiences.

Not only is this grim stuff, glibly exploited, Moore’s decision also undermines the sexual freethinking he claims to support by resorting to unfortunate cliches, from Harold Potter’s latent homosexuality expressed as male chauvinism to Alice’s maturation into lesbian as reaction to a man’s sexual assault, immersion in an all-female environment, and drug-induced mental flights of fancy. He and Gebbie don’t get caught up in obsessions over body types and sizing, but that was the least they could do. And just as Lost Girls disappoint in terms of LGBTQIA+ allyship, it does nothing to alleviate the concerns raised by Moore’s questionable record in handling instances of sexual violence, from The Killing Joke to the Invisible Man’s crimes and punishment in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Furthermore, Moore’s retelling of Carrol, Baum, and Barrie’s stories amounts to an act of artistic bad faith given his habit of complaining about people using his characters in follow-up works, such as the Watchmen prequels and sequel, while having made a career appropriating other artist’s characters for his own purposes. (Watchmen repurposed old Charlton Comics characters in the form of substitutes. Neonomicon and Providence directly H.P. Lovecraft’s stories. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, of course, steals from everyone.) The outcome is a book that doesn’t engage with the original works, but appropriates and replaces them with little opportunity to deepen one’s interpretation of both. By comparison, look at how American McGee’s Alice games engage with Carroll’s books as a dialogue. Interpreting the books’ Wonderland as Alice’s healthy, childhood mental landscape, the games act as sequels exploring what happens when personal and social trauma warp Wonderland’s whimsy into gothic horror with Dickensian overtones.

Having read Lost Girls three times, with diminishing returns, the fact that there is much to write about isn’t a measure of how rich but rather how disappointing the book is. With that, the final word belongs, actually, not to Moore’s writing but Gebbie’s illustrations. Though a bit static and low-energy, her storybook style is nevertheless beautiful and inviting, explicit but not anatomically obsessive. I’m not the first to point out the cleverness she often displays in her panels, such as the sequence in which shadows frolic to emphasize the actual frigidity of Wendy and Harold Potter’s marriage. Also admirable is her ability to change her style to suit the various pastiches splashed throughout the narrative. While I don’t think her art is enough to compensate for Moore’s writing and storytelling – a comic’s success rests, as I mentioned, on the balance of words and images – that’s where the book blossoms best, when it blossoms at all. And with that, I’m perfectly fine with saying that I’ve reached the end of the daisy chain when it comes to Moore’s work. If nothing else, Lost Girls motivates to discover other artistic voices.

Did DC commit hara-kiri with suicide squad?

Here we are, after Man of Steel and Batman v Superman, with another comic book ersatz-blockbuster bloodied by critics while running the gauntlet of marketing hype and fan expectations. As the mighty box office pronounces its own apparently victorious judgment on Suicide Squad, one can’t help but if wonder if DC/Warner Bros executives and filmmakers are starting to feel like Pyrrhus after his costly victory at the battle of Asculum. “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans,” the Greek general reportedly said, “we shall be utterly ruined.”

While not strictly a bad movie as the media would have us believe, Suicide Squad does suffer from a failing that consigns the film to a footnote in DC’s film universe rather than a milestone: a lack of ambition, which is all the more obvious in contrast to the acid trip promise of its marketing campaign and the relative novelty of its concept. It’s not just that Suicide Squad ends up subjecting its supervillainous Dirty Dozen to a rather banal save-the-world plot, but that it sets up promising ideas only to give us lackluster follow-through. The most obvious example of this rests in David Ayers split-personality direction. He starts us with half-an-hour of exposition delivered with a modicum of guerilla style (complete with cutesy graphic overlays), but then drops the guerilla and settles for the usual hum-drum once the plot gets going. A catalog of characters, even when livened up by Batman and the Flash, is no way to start a film – remember show don’t tell? – and abandoning the flourishes that might electrify an otherwise middling narrative is no way to finish a film. Suicide Squad should be edgy, but the tame results beg the question: what happened to the grit and harrowing pathos that David Ayers so capably delivered in the WWII tank drama Fury, with considerably more panache than he does here?

Perhaps it’s time to dispense with the industry’s obsession with realism – Marvel movies all look the same, and DC has so far relied on Zack Snyder’s moody aesthetic and Christopher Nolan’s urban pragmatism. Let’s have the idiosyncratic and unabashedly artsy approach Tim Burton used for his Batman films and Robert Rodriguez for his Sin City films. Or how about taking inspiration from Kerry Conran and his criminally underappreciated Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow?

Stylistic inconsistencies might be overlooked if Ayers had opted for a more sophisticated narrative approach. Off the top of my head, the film could have started mid-mission and used flashbacks to fill in the gaps. Or it could have more openly aped its inspiration, The Dirty Dozen, which provides a more plausible perspective of how a team of misfits could be forged into a cohesive unit capable of fighting a dire menace. It could have used stories of encounters with Batman and other heroes as a means of bonding the villains together. Heck, it could have just followed the path Ayers capably tread in Fury. There are any number of creative ways to tell the story, but instead we get as many empty promises as genuine pleasures, particularly in how characters are described versus how they are developed throughout the narrative. Joel Kinnaman’s Colonel Flag, for instance, comes across especially poorly; although described as the world’s best special-ops commando, he acts like a wishy-washy mop, a far cry from Lee Marvin’s Colonel Reisman. (He even hugs Deadshot at the end.) And Karen Fukuhara’ Katana, ostensibly Flag’s bodyguard, is described as not only the deadliest woman in the room but gifted with a soul-stealing sword that is depicted as little else than a good listener and a sharp blade. This all typifies the struggle Suicide Squad has in managing an ensemble cast; some characters get more attention than others, and only one – Jay Hernandez’ tragic criminal-with-a-conscience El Diablo – is given the opportunity to grow and change. Even the story’s major players – Will Smith’s Deadshot and Robbie Margot’s Harley Quinn – are kept in neutral. Essentially, Suicide Squad’s dramatic conceit is limited to the notion of forcing villains to act on behalf of the great thanks to implanted explosives. How the experience changes them, or reinforces their initial villainous proclivities, is yet another missed opportunity.

Strip away the film’s unrealized potential, and you’re left with a serviceable action movie that plausibly contributes to DC’s world-building and is punctuated by enthusiastic but unambitious character design. Will Smith is enjoyable as a version of his usual action movie personal, and Viola Davis offers us a terrifying and sociopathic Amanda Waller (creator of the Suicide Squad), but Margot Robbie especially sparkles as the psychedelically psychotic and homicidal Harley Quinn. Her gleefully off-kilter performance, however, is limited by the film’s refusal to emancipate Quinn from her definition as the Joker’s victim and plaything.  A telling scene is when the film’s supernatural antagonist offers the Squad their deepest desires in exchange for loyalty; Quinn’s wish is for a domestic bliss with a de-Jokerized Joker, which suggests that her innermost psyche is just as much an appendage to the Clown Prince of Crime as her body. In the comics, Quinn achieves an independence that doesn’t rely on the consent of men. The film, however, squanders a major opportunity to give her agency distinct from male expectations. And Clara Delevigne, as an archaeologist possessed by an ancient evil witch, gets even less than that.

On to the Joker, then, performed by Jared Leto. His version, a suitably deranged synthesis of Nicholson and Ledger generously seasoned with MTV and Miami Vice chic, worked for me. Where some complain that there is too little Joker in the film, I submit that there was too much. However deliciously menacing, and however much Leto and Quinn share a disturbing chemistry on-screen as the King and Queen of Gotham, the Joker is nevertheless locked into a “love” story that goes nowhere and takes away from other characters. Once again, the impression is that the filmmakers didn’t have the courage of their conviction, preferring to elevate the film’s most marketable elements at the expense of fully embracing the ensemble nature of its cast of villains forced to do good.

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Enjoy Star Trek Beyond, but for Smart & Fun Sci-Fi – Watch TV

What would Paramount’s Star Trek film franchise look like had they launched with Star Trek Beyond instead of J.J. Abrams’ slick counterfeits? We’ll never know how much better it would be, but at least we finally have a film that acknowledges the substance of Star Trek instead of merely grafting its modernized aesthetic onto generic action movie plots.

Star Trek Beyond is the trekkiest of the films set in the so-called “Kelvin Timeline,” mostly because unlike its Earth-bound predecessors it actually does go, if not quite boldly than at least with greater confidence, into the unknown to seek out new life and civilizations. Set mid-way during the Enterprise’s 5-year mission, it positions the series where it was meant to be all along: out in space. Although the planet hosting the majority of the film’s action is just routinely beautiful, the film makes up for it with the stunning Yorktown, a majestic starbase whose cityscape twists and loops on itself, Inception-style, and looks every bit the futuristic ideal of civilization Roddenberry’s Star Trek strove to represent.

Given the low standards established by the previous films, it almost doesn’t matter that Star Trek Beyond’s plot is ultimately revealed to be yet another revenge drama. The cast – always the new franchise’s strength alongside production design – is in its finest form, giving us an Enterprise crew worthy of representing the original thanks to focused and often funny script. (Yes, Spock’s romance with Uhura still grates. But it’s handled here with enough nuance to feel less like a stunt and more like a genuine relationship – and this is less critical than the surprisingly thoughtful interaction between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy as well as the introduction of a pleasingly tough new character, Jaylah, played with smarts and sass by Sofia Boutella, and Shohreh Aghdashloo’s dignified Commodore Paris.) Justin Lin achieves a brisk and exciting pace for the film, revving up the action scenes and deftly managing spectacular special effects while also letting the film breathe during its character moments.

It does matter, however, that Star Trek Beyond remains mired in Paramount’s – and Hollywood’s – resistance to high-concept films, particularly in the science fiction genre, and preference for action to ideas. Like the recent glut of superhero movies demonstrates, there is the trend in the industry to look for conflict and drama only in situations involving violence and combat – a trend that has afflicted TV-to-film adaptations beyond Star Trek, like the Mission: Impossible series, as well as generally excellent higher-concept films like Edge of Tomorrow and Oblivion. Although very entertaining and a welcome throwback to some of the elements that made us fall in love with the Original Series, Star Trek Beyond presents us with a villain – Idris Elba under heavy makeup – reducible to a vengeful menace with an appetite for mass destruction. The idea that the Federation might meet opposition by alien races who view them as a colonialist rather than a cooperative force never gains traction as anything other than the stage on which yet another apocalyptic scenario is played. And in the end, just as Starfleet’s identity crisis in Star Trek Into Darkness’ somehow fit into the single character of Peter Weller’s warmonger, it boils down to a personal confrontation between Kirk and the villain.

Lacking a majestic sense of grandeur – which only Star Trek: The Motion Picture succeeded in achieving among all the Star Trek films – as well as well as grand and grandly executed ideas, Star Trek Beyond’s by-the-numbers action-adventure plot just doesn’t stand alongside Star Trek’s best stories – like “Devil in the Dark” and” Encounter at Farpoint,” to name two of many.

The lesson, then, is that the best science-fiction stories aren’t to be found in film but in television, which is rather sad given how different the cinematic experience is from the small screen. It comes down to economics, of course, and the cost of production that studios need to recoup even before profit is factored in. But what does it say that television, with its lower budget, can succeed at telling smart stories rooted in fiction about science while movies run the hamster wheel of exploding blockbuster action movies? If you’ve never done so, I suggest watching shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek Voyager, Odyssey 5, and FarScape.

There’s a vicious cycle at play, in that studios don’t typically present audiences with beautiful and smart science-fiction films (Duncan Jones’ Moon and films by Neil Blomkamp being notable exceptions), so audiences don’t get exposed to what is possible and, consequently, don’t demand better than the usual action movie formulas. Yet there is also a technical element, in that visually demanding film productions don’t seem to have benefited from computers to significantly reduce costs and make it easier to depict strange new worlds – worlds limited by imagination rather than budget.

Nevertheless, Star Trek Beyond certainly is fun. But I do wish people could see what the wonder and challenging social commentary science-fiction is really capable of offering.

Thank you for reading and supporting independent critical writing. It does take time and effort to write, so while all content here is provided at no cost to you please, if you enjoyed today’s article, share it via your favorite social media using the share button below.

zootoopia and the culture war over diversity

Mulling over Disney’s magical Zootopia prompted me to check in with the American Conservative’s resident culture warrior, Rod Dreher and, sure enough, there was this gem with the pop-conservative click-bait title, “What If Diversity Is Our Weakness?” The article is essentially Dreher quoting a reader’s comment from a previous article, all the while channeling Nelson from The Simpsons as he points to the “left” and ha-has. The source of all this glee: a challenge to the cherished notion that encouraging interactive diversity will result in social harmony. But he cites no mere trolling from the unwashed commentariat. No; his citation is powered by a liberal political scientist from Harvard, Robert Putnam, whose research into diversity in 2007 yielded the counterintuitive result that diverse communities exhibited decreased civic engagement. People vote less, volunteer less, trust each other less in diverse communities compared to homogenous communities.

The rhetorical headline makes it clear that with diversity suitably chastened, Dreher is free (as if he wasn’t already!) to advocate for monoculture without being dragged down by liberal critiques of homogeneity (read: white, male, heterosexual). He can be perfectly happy in his very own little bubble – in his particular case a project he calls the Benedict Option where he can be insulated from anyone who doesn’t fit into his Orthodox Christian worldview.

But the results of Putnam’s research aren’t an end to the question of diversity; they describe, in fact, the very challenge diversity poses by its very nature and ubiquity. How, indeed, do we encourage the positive civic interactions capable of overcoming the dissociative factors at play in our multifaceted communities? How do we even sensibly define diversity in type (e.g. ideology, ethnicity, economics, etc.), scale (family, community, city, region, state, nation) let alone policy? The question is fundamentally personal; a matter of our approach to whether we approach diversity with curiosity, detachment or, in some vocal quarters, revulsion.

For an example, we could look to the controversy surrounding North Carolina’s law that bans ordinances denying discrimination against LGBTQ people and directly prohibits transgendered persons from using bathrooms according to their gender identity. The law is partly the product of dangerous misinformation and fearmongering about transgendered people (see Media Matters' debunking here). Broadly, however, it’s an expression of the religious right’s hostility towards LGBTQIA identities – e.g. sinful offenses to God, perversion of nature, heterosexual familial breakdowns. It can only be considered hostility when it isn’t enough to accept that legal doesn’t mean mandatory; to the religious right, what is deviant in their view must be forbidden to everyone.

It comes as a surprise that Zootopia, a Disney film, would offer a remarkably nuanced perspective on the challenges inherent in a diverse society, all the while delivering a crackerjack conspiracy thriller and buddy movie. The film’s creators previously offered us Frozen, a welcome call to girl power that nevertheless came across as glib and, worse, perpetuated Disney’s obsession with casting women as princesses. (What sort of subtextual goodness would have infused Frozen had its sisters been peasants?) That Zootopia dispenses with the fetish for aristocracy and instead gives us a proletarian view is a refreshing change on its own.

The film centers on Judy (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin), a rabbit whose keen sense of justice leads her away from carrot farming into the unlikely profession of policing – unlikely, because in Zootopia’s world small mammals aren’t generally considered physically matched to the demands of police work. A lesser movie would have dwelled in Judy’s challenges at the police academy, cataloguing every act of bullying and condescension from teachers and fellow trainees. But the filmmakers breeze through Judy’s challenges in an exciting montage that culminates with her proud graduation as the first bunny cop before launching into the film’s narrative. Unsurprisingly, being a trained and top-of-the-class graduate earns her no respect in the precinct to which she is assigned. The police chief, an imposing bull voiced with wonderful grit by Idris Elba, even assigns her to parking duty on her first day. It says a lot about Judy’s character that she commits herself to excel at the less-than-ideal assignment. She does excel, but by the second day we can sympathize when the job leaves her demoralized. Who wants to punish people for parking infractions and get abused for it?

The situation changes when she unwittingly helps a sneaky fox, Nick (voiced by Justin Bateman), pull a con on an ice cream store owner. She gets the upper hand on him quickly enough, but the stage is set for an oil-and-water partnership when a missing person’s case connects to a series of frightening incidents where Zootopia’s carnivores revert to their primal states. At stake: the civilizing influence that redefines the predator-prey relationship as one of peaceful co-existence.

Zootopia is exceptionally well-conceived and executed with superb voice work and animation, as funny as it is heartfelt, and inspiring for featuring a female heroine defined by her blend of kindness, toughness, and smarts rather than the usual romantic tropes. Cinematically, it’s one of the finest animated films in recent years solely on the basis of his rich characters a sophisticated narrative.

Layered interpretations aren’t necessary, of course, but when it comes to reading the film from a political perspective it stands out above the usual genre feel-good messaging by refusing to reduce its characters to stereotypes or allowing itself to be glibly mapped onto the conservative/liberal dichotomy. A lesser film would have sorted characters into unabashed racists and their victims, and the big villain would have been some sort of Trumpian blowhard. But every principal character is a nuanced mix of nobility, prejudice, wisdom, ignorance and righteousness of varying degrees. The difference lies in how each chooses to confront the legacy of a savage past: can predators evolve beyond their killer instincts? Judy and Nick – the rabbit and the fox – form a credible and touching friendship from a partnership of convenience, and in their relationship we have a positive, but by no means bump-free, response to the challenges of diversity. (It’s interesting to note that what separates them, more so than their species, is their positions as cop and criminal.) In the film’s startling villain, we find a destructive response, not unlike the rabid right-wingers who denounce Muslims and Mexicans, that illustrates how even understandable fears can upend empathy and moral reasoning.

Ultimately, Zootopia illustrates the take-away from Putnam’s research: we live in a diverse world, and whether we live well or succumb to conflict depends on our willingness to embrace that diversity and make it work. As the RNC convention demonstrates, with supremacists like Rep. King proclaiming that capital-C Civilization owes its success to white people, America has not freed itself from its legacy of racism. This is the context for culture warriors like Dreher, who fail to understand both the distinction and overlap between overt discrimination among individuals and the institutional discrimination of white heterosexual male privilege. In the end, though, it comes down to will. As reactionary conservatives and Trump’s New Republican Party – an expression of fundamental right-wing angst – prove, some people just don’t want to get along. A film alone may not change minds, but films like Zootopia that can deliver terrifically entertaining stories with nuanced cultural commentary go a long way towards fostering a better culture.

Ginna Carter Prevails in PRT’s Eccentricities of a Nightingale (at TFPO)

Review of the Pacific Resident Theatre's production of Tennessee Williams' The Eccentricities of a Nightingale

Misfit, freak, geek – whatever the description, it’s easy to see why Alma Winemiller, the delightfully odd and sassy bird who gives The Eccentricities of a Nightingale its title, was so loved by Tennessee Williams. Her indomitable spirit stands bravely against the condescending and conformist influences of a disapproving community. Today, we wouldn’t overthink the bundle of exaggerated mannerisms that is Alma, nor view her penchant for sitting in the park to feed and chat with the birds as a preliminary sign of lunacy. In turn-of-the-20th-century Glorious Hill, Mississippi, just as in many communities, the pressure to fit in creates ... READ THE REVIEW AT THE FRONT PAGE ONLINE

playing catchup: a meditation for Orlando, and two play reviews (at TFPO)

I've been neglectful in updating the blog with what little writing I'm doing these days - I have a doctor's note if you want it.

So here's the latest since my review of those For Beginners books:

• Orlando: A Meditation for Loving-Kindness - Another day in America. Another mass shooting. Another grievous wound. The news will swell with posturing politicians, opiniated commentators, circular policy debates, and strident finger-pointing. Beating through the noise will be human hearts suffering over the loss of life. We will remember the victims. People with names. People targeted because of their sexual orientation. I have previously written about ... CONTINUE READING AT THE FRONT PAGE ONLINE
• The Existential Superhero Takes a Leap (theatre review of The Superhero and his Charming Wife) - Interpretative dance, moving platforms with gymnastics, video backgrounds, crafty props – these elements form the raw materials of writer/director Aaron Hendry and Not Man Apart Physical Theatre Ensemble’s imaginative and exuberant theatrical experience, The Superhero and his Charming Wife. But ... CONTINUE READING AT THE FRONT PAGE ONLINE
• A Lukewarm Dinner at the Odyssey (theatre review of Dinner at Home Between Deaths) - There comes a moment in Dinner at Home Between Deaths when it seems like the characters will sail into the bleak waters charted by Swimming with Sharks, the singularly unpleasant film starring Kevin Spacey and Frank Whaley. We are mercifully spared the pointless nasty cynicism, but the ... CONTINUE READING AT THE FRONT PAGE ONLINE