Rather Dismissive of the Whole Medium

I’m still recovering from two weeks across the continent, where a minor bout of congestion partly killed my voice, and now this weekend is a music festival, after which I will probably sleep about 12 hours. So this will be a grab bag of random thoughts I wrote down at various points, with little elaboration.

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I occasionally complain that video games aren’t taken seriously as an artistic medium, but as a counterpoint, consider this issue of Peter Raleigh’s (excellent, strongly recommended) Long Library, where he compares the recent Backrooms unfavourably to Silent Hill 2. It’s a fantastic example because he just casually assumes knowledge of Silent Hill 211 Which, after all, if you’re only going to know about one horror game, Silent Hill 2 is probably the one to know. , in a way that I think will become much more common in the near future. On the other hand, compare for instance W. David Marx’s slightly snippy comment that Elon Musk “expresses his contra-liberal tastes through a love of video games”, which feels rather dismissive of the whole medium. I think the former approach to criticism will ultimately triumph over the latter.

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A few weeks ago, I was listening to a Vergecast episode22 Which, unfortunately, I can’t find a link to now, but I think it was the episode around the announcement of the iPhone Duo. revolving around health tracking and one of the hosts pointed out that, to paraphrase, all this health tracking doesn’t really matter because you could always get hit by a truck tomorrow.

And, while the point is taken — you can’t really control everything, health-wise, no matter how hard you try — it’s also quite sad that a truck is the metaphor we use, isn’t it? Because, as a society, we don’t have to accept traffic deaths. And yet, somehow, it’s so completely normalized that we just do.

Which makes me wonder if, in a hundred years, if traffic deaths went to zero, would people still use “getting hit by a truck” as a metaphor, detached from their personal experience? In much the same way people refer to “spinning a yarn” without understanding how that plays into textile productions at all.

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So The Handmaiden is a film that I kind of love, even though I think it’s pretty weak in some ways (certainly not as strong or important as No Other Choice). One common (correct) criticism is that, for a movie about lesbians, it’s incredibly male-gazey.

But on thought there… obviously, there’s a whole complicated set of issues about power (and who has it) and gender (and which has it) and how The Handmaiden is an adaptation of a novel by a woman and how sexuality is portrayed on film and the history of male gaze. But. But! The thought is: The Handmaiden (which is, ultimately, a feel-good romance about a pair of lesbians provided for male viewers) is not that far from the widely-beloved genre of feel-good romances about gay men provided for female viewers, a la Heated Rivalry. Like, yes, again, obviously, very different situations in many ways. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody point out the structural similarities — how they’re almost dual to each other.