I want to talk to you about criticism. I don't mean the sort of criticism you incur when you walk into your parent's living room in a tube top and miniskirt at thirteen (or, as it happens, at thirty-three) or the kind the police will give your sense of humor when you inhale half a can of paint and take a shit on the hood of their squad car because "that shit would be totes ridic". I mean legitimate criticism, specifically of the art world.
Now, to clarify, I'm talking all manner of art and things that can be loosely defined as art. So, your books, your poems, your movies, your music, your painting, your sculpting, your artistic but utterly functionless buildings, your television shows, your video games, and your theater. I am not talking about fashion or reality television because my personal definition of art doesn't include these things. Also, at least when it comes to fashion, I don't understand their terms.
However, the forms of education and entertainment (as most of the art I've mentioned can be one or both) I'm talking about are just a framework. The meat of this is in criticizing them. You'll find book and movie and t.v. reviews in most respectable magazines and newspapers, in addition to volumes upon volumes of reviews, critiques, and slanderous venom-spitting on the internet. Those are important to note. Additionally, you'll find yourself confronted (if you study literature as I did, for instance) with scholarly criticism, which is more than deciding whether or not something sucked more ass than the gritty reboot of Rainbow Brite. Scholarly criticism often focuses on a piece from a particular perspective, and there are as many of them as there are black folks at a KFC in Harlem.
Of course, with this variety, you'll encounter some bullshit. In fact, a ton of bullshit. So many metric tons of bullshit, they could easily be scuplted into the Dubai of Bullshit. Let's begin.
Take, for instance, Left 4 Dead 2. This is a first-person shooter that entails essentially blasting your way through hordes of zombies in a post-apocalyptic world. With the continued mainstream popularity of zombies and their ilk, through films and television (most recently AMC's original series The Walking Dead) these monsters have found their way into our culture and bonded themselves there. With insertions of zombies into artistic works, from the aforementioned visual media to sculpture, performance art, and literature (notably World War Z and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) zombies have become a sort of artistic medium all their own. Agree or disagree, it really matters little. My point, is the criticism this game, and others like it have received. Willie Jefferson from the Houston Chronicle wrote, in a review, that many of the infected creatures in the game appeared to be African-American, and implied a racist undertone in the game. While another "journalist" alleged that because Resident Evil 5 was set in Africa and (obviously) the majority of the creatures were African, that the game was overtly racist.
Fucking, really? Look, Left 4 Dead was set in New Orleans (another point of contrition for the fuckhead writer because of the widespread destruction "remniscent of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina") a city with a diverse population. Including colored people. One of the protagonists, I should also mention, is black. In Resident Evil, one of the central protagonists is also from the area. How the hell is that racist? Furthermore, why are we reading racism into something that isn't meant to convey that kind of theme? Here, some films, like some television shows and video games, are meant to be profound. Their stories carry messages, they involve deep thinking and evoke emotion. These games are supposed to be about two things: Scaring the shit out of you, and mowing down hordes of monsters. There is a dehumanization in these types of media because portraying any protagonist murdering hundreds of people via gunfire is no way to market a product.
So you're calling something racist that has no intrinsic ability to be racist. If you omitted character models because of skin color that would be fucking racist. It would be displaying a total lack of immersion and confidence in your product out of fear of criticism from some half-wit hack that failed a literary analysis course in college for confusing every drawing of a sword with a man whipping out his dick.
Speaking of which...
Fuck feminism. More specifically, fuck people that read things from a feminist perspective that have no business reading a fucking phone book, much less a piece of classical literature. How can you look at Shakespeare or Milton or fucking...Beowulf from a feminist perspective? Or a communist perspective? Or any one of a dozen other perspectives?
You'll call swords and scepters phallic symbols and read a mysogynist attitude out of a piece of literature, or a work of art, that was created long before the idea of feminism. That's not only an excercise in futility, its utter, batshit insanity.
My point is that in order to criticize something in a relevant, logical, meaningful way, you must first take into account what it is you're looking at. Art, for all its imagination and creativity and forward-thinking, is still bound pretty strictly by the time period and cultural beleifs in which it was created. Beowulf didn't include bold, strong-willed female warriors and undertones of free exchange economics because Anglo-Saxon women were not warriors and they were subservient to their men and free exchange hadn't been invented yet. So you can't look at it from a feminist perspective because that perspective is irrelevant. You can't examine it for economics because bartering and earning posessions through acts of heroism aren't legitimate ways to build an economy.
So, if your culutre treats women like property, or looks at warriors as barbarians and scholars as gods, you will naturally be inclined to portray those roles in your art. Another culutre can't come along and say its wrong or bad, or anything really, based on their own culutral beleifs. To do so is foolish. It's like fundamentalist religious sects calling our Hollywood movies blasphemous because they don't include a "Praise Jesus!" or a cry of "Allah!" in every other line of dialogue. It's like Japan claiming every martial arts movies ever made is slanderous of Japanese culutre. In other words, fucking retarded.
Take your source material into account before you comment on it. Make sure you're attributing themes and attitudes and messages that are appropriate for the material. A video game about slaughtering zombies or an epic poem about a viking adventure are not valid places to inject profound emotion and complex thought.
Besides, black zombies and white zombies both want the same thing.
All we wanna do is eat your brains.
Subsequently Yours,
-S.R.
No comments:
Post a Comment