Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

I attempted to watch Pixels last night. I was having a low day, in terms of emotional and mental capacity, and I basically turned to the nearest streaming service and said, give me the dumbest thing you’ve got, it’s all I can handle. And lo, Adam Sandler’s computer game movie appeared, and I figured, well, there is zero thought required for this one, yeah?

Never underestimate the amount of thought that will go into films that make you this angry.

It’s not that this film is bad, it’s that it’s bad and it wastes every opportunity it has and it thoroughly reprehensible in its portrayal of…well, just about everyone. It’s all lazy stereotypes and bad dialogue and casting Sean Bean as a British soldier during an alien invasion and not bothering to kill him off.

Then there is the relentless misogyny, which gets turned all the way up to eleven by the end of the movie. Fuck that. Fuck it right to hell.

Pixels: officially a movie that I will never be low enough to enjoy.

Last night I sat down and re-watched John Wick, ’cause I have this idea for a story in my head and I wanted to wrap my head around the minutia of the genre I like to call killing your way to the truth of things of which Wick is the most recent high-profile example. There are others on my list. I mainline a lot of media, in the build-up stage of writing.

I’ve also been immersed in the creation of a short story course for work, where I try to pull apart the microstructure of scenes and lay out things like narrative beats and action/reaction rhythms, giving people a toolkit for pulling apart the minutia of narrative of figuring out how it does what it does.

And it’s interesting, having these two things in my head, ’cause John Wick plays with narrative contrast on a scale that very few films manage. Nearly every major scene is contrasted against something else through the use of quick cuts and alternate points of view. It’s a core part of the film’s visual aesthetic: scenes that would otherwise consist of a single character sitting down and narrating are given life by shots of other characters preparing to go to war, or stepping into a new situation that will set up their next scene.

Scenes that would feel flat are suddenly laden with tension, simply by contrasting what the audience knows with what the character knows. Not a technique that’s easily transferable to fiction, since we lack the conceit of voice-over, but I’m curious enough to go looking for people who attempt to replicate the approach.

And, with that, I return to my bunker, my brain full of writing things to ponder as I start hashing out a voice and a plot for this project.

The Marvel/Audi cross-over comic appeared in my Facebook feed this week. For those who haven’t seen it yet – presumably because you haven’t yet trained the Facebook algorithm to show you the geekiest damn thing possible at any given time – the short version is this: Audi has a lot of product placement in the upcoming Captain America: Civil War film. They are building on that.

Part of the way they’re building off that is a custom, eight-page Avengers comic that places Audi cars front and centre. You can read it online, for free, ’cause there is no point in trying to get people to pay for that shit.

There is nothing particularly mind-bending about the comic. In fact, it’s exactly what you’re expecting from the concept: the barest minimum of a storyline, character beats that remind you that you’ve been watching movies with all these characters in them, and a couple of really on-the-nose moments where they talk about the technology in their cars and Black Panther being king of the road.

What’s fascinating is the comic’s existence.

I mean, it’s not like this is new idea. I knew Hostess Fruit Pies were a thing as a kid, despite the fact that they were never sold in Australia, simply because there were a series of Fruit Pie strips in my comics where Spiderman or Captain America fought a particularly cheesy villain, defeating them by the application of snack foods.

It makes me particularly happy you can find all these strips online now.

But in the space of thirty years, that kind of product placement has moved from snack food aimed at pre-teens to high-performance luxury cars.

If you ever need a representative example of how pervasive the spread of geek culture has gotten, that is probably it.