Spy in Our Midst

If you're wondering why my Twitter avatar has been stealing the identities of others, well, blame Valve's brilliant "Team Fortress 2"--one of those countless obsessions that tend to crop up at the most inconvenient moments. But hear me out, blog patrons, I'm going somewhere with this.

For those unfamiliar with the franchise, the parameters of this game are basically identical to its predecessor: a multiplayer first-person shooter that pits two teams, comprised of nine classes (Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Demoman, Heavy, Engineer, Medic, Sniper and Spy), against each other in various wargames. Balance is the key to success--the advantages of one class can be circumvented by the advantages of another--and that's precisely what made the original game so popular. The same dynamic carries over, but a lion's share of the the sequel's lasting appeal lies in its backdrop. "TF2" takes place in a retro-futuristic version of the early 1960s, but what's interesting about this world is that it doesn't really try to parody the era in question. The game carries no pretensions beyond a series of visual and musical cues: it never lets you forget that it is a straightforward fiction created by people born several years after the fact--their idea of contemporary culture dictated by pastel comedies, Silver Age comic books and action movies.

Appropriately, this mentality extends to the purely conceptual inhabitants of "TF2". The classes were updated to reflect this new landscape; the characters in the first game were little more than faceless ciphers, but their '60s counterparts are given personalities based on an Americocentric view of the world. The Heavy is a meatheaded Russian; the Spy is an obnoxious Frenchman; the Medic is a straitlaced, sadistic German--and they all comment on their enemies' performance as they kill them. In an interview with Game Informer, writer Chet Faliszek talks about writing and casting actors for the classes:

"'Team Fortress' was fun, because we knew we wanted to make it sounds like what Americans in the '60s would have imagined these people had sounded like, not what they actually sounded like, which I think got some positive reviews and some negative reviews. Depending on what country you're from, because as we updated each nationality that nationality would be outraged that we got the accents wrong."

However, in terms of visual influence, the creators cite Norman Rockwell, Dean Cornwell and J. C. Leyendecker, all of whom came into prominence long before this period but reflect "TF2"'s aesthetic intentions quite well. The dominant question, then, is not "where are we" but "from where have we come"--and subsequently, we must imagine what forces have led us to this point in time. How did we come to accept these stereotypes? Why do they serve as cultural signifiers for the 1960s? What are these RED and BLU corporations that hire such men to kill one another? Supplementary materials expound upon a century-long war between two obscenely-powerful brothers vying for world domination, but most the specifics are left to the imagination. (The game's production/update blog humorously notes that the game was first created in 1963--the birth year of the modern conspiracy theory.)

After nearly a decade of production and innumerable rebuilds, "Team Fortress 2" was released in 2007 to great fanfare, and it has maintained a steady fanbase since then--thanks in no small part to Valve's savvy marketing campaign. Which brings me to the reason why I'm sharing this game with you, my fellow cinephiles: Valve has produced several promotional videos introducing the viewer to each member of the "Team Fortress" team. They were first utilized as trailers, and now release periodically to celebrate major updates to the game. Over the past three years, these videos have caused enough ripples across the Internet that even those who are vaguely familiar with the game might cry "old meme." But in the interests of crossover (and passing my personal obsessions on to you), here's the "Meet the Team" series. (HD and fullscreen are highly recommended.)

Meet the Heavy (2007) was the first video, released some five months before the game itself. I can't possibly imagine a better way to introduce the concept--recounting the mechanics of gameplay (can you devise a strategy to get past this bruiser?) while clearly stating that it would be driven by a deep sense of personality.




The dialogue flows beautifully, but pay close attention to the body language in Meet the Engineer (2007)--the subtle way that this pleasant, easygoing dude shifts his shoulders and grins as you slowly come to realize what sort of man he really is.

Later profiles would describe the Soldier as a rabid hawk who fought the Nazis independently ("I did three goddamn tours of duty and I wasn't even asked!"), but maybe you can already infer that from Meet the Soldier (2007), which deftly intercuts two similar forms of insanity before smashing them together.

Using a format similar to that of Meet the Soldier, Meet the Demoman (2007) is the first video to directly acknowledge that the characters of "Team Fortress 2" are built on broad stereotypes. Describing himself as a "black Scottish cyclops," the Demoman laments that he is several times removed from the rest of his team--and by placing an angry, depressive interview against the chaos of the battlefield, the video operates as a harsh self-criticism on the use of tokenism in fiction. (The game reaches beyond the setting to further comment on the character's racial politics--a haunted sword called the "Eyelander" would later join pimp hats and afros as the Demo's accessories, further sneering at stereotypes by throwing them in our faces.)




Meet the Scout (2008) also toggles between "documentary interview" and "narrative violence," but blurs the line separating them--his self-congratulatory rhetoric is just as aggressive as his assault on the Heavy. By breaking the fourth wall and addressing the camera on such direct, physical terms, the video introduces the Scout as "that guy" we all know: that guy who's so consumed with talking about how great he is that it becomes a part of why he's so great.




Meet the Sniper (2008) is accompanied by a lovely homage to Lalo Schifrin's title theme from Magnum Force. Most of these videos are in one way or another about the love affairs between men and their weapons of choice. But like the opening title sequence of that film, the video concludes that there are only three things that matter in this world: a man, his gun, and the job. (Whether or not the world outside will understand is another matter entirely.)




We have yet to see Meet the Pyro or Meet the Medic, but Valve filled the gap with Meet the Sandvich (2008), the promo that introduced the titular health item to the Heavy's inventory. By now, the writers are confident that you can recognize their characters--and imagine their hilariously perverse scenarios--without seeing anything at all. The closing shot, functionally identical to the closing shot of Meet the Heavy, establishes that "Team Fortress 2" has developed a culture unto itself.



The same goes for Meet the Spy (2009), which shoves four of its most abrasive personalities into one room without a second thought. This one appears to break the mold set by previous videos--concentrating on BLU characters in an exclusively narrative setting--but it takes an appropriate route by presenting the cutthroat Spy as a man known only by reputation. With that in mind, I like how the video lightly touches upon the fact that these mercenaries are the same characters on either side of the war. Who better to deliver this monologue than the man "closest" to the subject?




Valve has certainly capitalized on the potential that these wonderful short films provide, encouraging viewers to link and share them at their own discretion; while the videos themselves are technically copyrighted, their title cards are labeled with the same notice in fine print: "COPYRIGHT LOLOLOL." Further updates--new items, achievements and voice clips--make direct reference to their stories and dialogue. What's important to understand is that these additions never feel like excessive self-regard or autocannibalism. They simply add to the growing universe of "Team Fortress 2". Is it so difficult to imagine this band of mercenaries watching these videos and studying up on their rivals? Constantly rewriting the rules of their own meta-world, Valve sees "TF2" as as a crossroads between media--a cinematic experience as well as a playable experience.

Because of that artistic malleability, the idea of "interactivity" must be held under close scrutiny. "Team Fortress 2" is an online strategic-multiplayer FPS, so the thing is practically built on player interaction. (Trolls notwithstanding.) Like any good enterprise, Valve pays close attention to how the fans interpret and reinterpret their work--but most interesting is how they incorporate and facilitate those interpretations. One minor example: when players found that they could contort the Spy into a bizarrely unnatural position, Valve referenced the resultant joke as a character taunt.

Fan art has always been encouraged (and design contests have been used to introduce new items!), but one particularly notable outlet is machinima. Through the use of sandbox tools like Garry's Mod, players can fool around with the basic elements of specific video games. Given free reign over character models and environments--with a library of sound clips at their disposal--users can take screenshots, create their own games, and yes, make their own movies. While Garry's Mod and machinima in general have been around for a good long while, it shouldn't come as a surprise that these specific characters have inspired a wealth of fan films. Creative output ranges from the straightforward...




... to the parodic...




... to the bizarre...




... to the surreal.






"Team Fortress 2" films have become an everyday occurrence on YouTube, and every time there's an update to the game, the new material is almost immediately folded into that collective. Of course, none of these concepts are exactly new. Any popular artistic property will produce in-jokes and memes--the very idea of pop culture is built on these foundations. As evidenced by the movie references in those fan videos, communities aren't born in a vacuum. But what really fascinates me about "Team Fortress 2" is how it crafted something so self-contained while laying its influences out on the table. It thrives on a system of give and take. It's a '60s-mod landscape that is at once defined and unrestrained by its setting. it's a cult of personality constructed around characters who are self-admitted stereotypes but completely unique all the same. It makes perfect sense that artists and filmmakers would blossom from this particular subculture.

Further reading/watching: Andrew Kepple's Spy & Pyro (a lovely cartoon that recreates the game in its own image in service to a very silly pun); Valve's "The Insult that Made a 'Jarate Master' Out of Sniper" (a perfect spoof of the famous Charles Atlas ad that introduced a disturbing new item to the game); Joe Horan's Meet the Spy (a fan cartoon made before the official video was released, complete with the popular Spy memes and sound clips); FineLeatherJackets' Sniping's a Good Job, Mate (something like a Kids in the Hall sketch); Scoutellite's Scout Becomes a Satellite (weird for the sake of weird--and kind of amazing).

And speaking of recommendations, you damn well better have read Walter's review of Black Swan by now--it's the most incisive analysis of Aronofsky's film that I've read thus far.

Make Room! Make Room!

"You are tearing me apart, Lisa!"

Last week, I saw The Room for the first time. I had been aware of its dodgy reputation for a long while--friends in Hollywood had told me about the perplexing billboard that stood there for a good five years, as well as the various midnight screenings that took place around the Los Angeles area--but there were two roughly concurrent assessments of the film that finally prompted me to sit down and watch it. The first was Newgrounds' "The Room Tribute", a Flash game that recreates the events of the movie as a 16-bit RPG. The other was Alex Jackson's brief paragraph in a comment on the FFC Blog: "Speaking as a 'bad movie' buff, I actually hated it. Made me feel like it would be cruel to laugh. The content is just not abstract enough to benefit from Wiseau's ineptness." Whether it was bad or merely "bad," this was something that I needed to have in my life. Now, I'm hardly an authority on bad movies, but it's always fun to hunt down the most infamous titles and find out how you react. Sometimes you laugh, sometimes you cringe, and sometimes you find something worthy of honest appreciation. One of the biggest surprises was Phil Tucker's Robot Monster, which was so many kinds of fucked-up that, deep down, it seems somewhat aware of its own ridiculousness; not blinded by Ed Wood's giddy appreciation for cinema, but a story that needed to be told nonetheless. It was only a matter of time before I got around to The Room, but I can't remember the last time I reacted so violently to a "good" bad movie.

The follies of The Room are well-documented: characters repeat the same lines with bizarre regularity; subplots involving breast cancer and a violent drug dealer are forgotten almost as soon as they're introduced; character motivations seem to change mid-sentence. I have to disagree with Alex on one major point--it would be cruel to laugh, but only because the movie is impossible to comprehend. A man, Johnny (actor/writer/director/producer Tommy Wiseau (he gives himself a title card for each role)), his "future wife" Lisa (Juliette Danielle), his "best friend" Mark (Greg Sestero) and his surrogate son Denny (Philip Haldiman)... it's true that the film's attempts at narrative are meager and straightforward (woman cheats on her fiancé with his best friend), but the execution goes beyond the pale. No matter how "good" The Room was supposed to be, or how much entertainment value it could provide as a "bad" film, I had no idea what I was watching. The film assumes that we know the characters more intimately than we actually do--did the final cut accidentally leave out a reel? The image looks a little out of place, a little too hazy, for something released in 2003--was it shot in 1987? The first half-hour alone features three sex scenes with the same woman, complete with some repetitive R&B--did Wiseau start out with a porno and fail spectacularly? Why do these people spend so much time playing catch with a football? Why do they fall down so often? Why? Why? Why?

Now, I haven't seen Best Worst Movie, so I can't say whether or not that film provides insight into the phenomenon of "so bad it's good." I have, however, seen Troll 2, the film whose fan base it documents. The dialogue is improbable and the leaps in logic are simply too far to make, but I don't recall ever being bewildered by the structure of it, exactly. It always feels broken beyond repair, but never outright dismantled. I laughed at Troll 2, but The Room's most inexplicable moments are lobbed at the viewer with such aggression that my first instinct was to curl up into a fetal position. The very least of these moments burrowed deep under my skin: when characters call each other "chicken," they don't cluck, they cheep--and Wiseau cheep-cheep-cheeps so many times throughout the movie that I began to wonder if he was making fun of me. Yes, watching The Room confused me, frightened me, and made me just a little paranoid. It's as if there was a joke, and I wasn't sure who was playing it, or whom the intended target was. Wiseau is a somewhat terrifying figure in his own right. He's a mysterious character whose background is fuzzy at best, with an accent that's impossible to place. How did he finance this thing? Again, the details are vague. Wiseau apparently wants to maintain some control over his image. (A one-sided "interview" with the director on the Room DVD also suffers from the movie's most glaring technical flaw--several lines from Wiseau's pre-chewed lectures have been looped in ADR.) But one thing's been bothering me ever since I met The Room with wide-eyed incredulity. If it's so unfathomable and the artistic failure is so complete--and, furthermore, if I can't laugh at it--why can't I regard Wiseau with the same sympathetic eye that I offered the fictional Joaquin Phoenix of I'm Still Here? "They don’t understand The Room was done intentionally to provoke the audience," Wiseau once told LAist, and that was certainly the impetus behind Phoenix's act. But while The Room certainly provoked me, I never actually believed that it did so intentionally. I feel that, if Wiseau ever tried to tell us that his escapades were a hoax, I would ferociously reject that claim. Why? If I embrace the fake clown but deride the real clown, doesn't that make me just as ignorant as Hollywood's condescending Oscar mill?

"I'll go off and beat off and you can lick the seat off. Later, muchacho."

Part of the problem has to be that Wiseau is difficult to pin down in terms of precedent. In fact, the closest approximation to The Room that I can imagine is a parody of bad cinema. More specifically, a collection of cartoons produced by Something Awful in 2008--the saga of Peezle Ward. What began as an April Fool's Day joke eventually blossomed into a full-blown series about a fictional hack writer who has penned "more than 10 but less than a billion short stories." By "adapting" Ward's scripts in a brusque monotone, Dave Kelly and Josh Jones attempt to understand artists like Wiseau and pick apart the reasons for their failure. The first few episodes (Lawyer Street, Escape from Satan's Ass) establish Ward as obsessed with very important issues without knowing how to approach them: "I know rape is a very sensitive subject, but I believe I handled it very tastefully. It changes Frank forever. In the end, he believes in God. That's called character development. The self-rape was an analogy for time travel; I call it quantum rape." The rest of them (Ghost Unit, Fire Killers, Brave Aeronauts and Christmas in Essex) revolve around one all-conquering hero whose professional brilliance excuses his personality: "That black family thanked me for saving their lives. They didn't care that I had to hack up a dog to do it. May I remind you, officer, it was a black family."

Of course, it takes zero effort to link a dearth of talent to an enormous ego. But the Peezle Ward series tackles the very basic components of The Room by forcing its characters to spout exposition in long strings of static dialogue. More fascinating, and more important to this conversation, is how that dialogue is comprised almost entirely of circuitous insults from the author's surrogate/Mary Sue, Pete (or Tim, or Pip). The profane stream of consciousness mirrors Wiseau's belligerent direction quite well, and by the end of each cartoon you understand Ward as a terrible writer, a screaming misogynist, and utterly self-absorbed... and then you anxiously click over to the next installment, unable to look away. How will Pete stick it to his superiors this time? How will he (improbably) save the day? It makes just enough sense to force you into wondering where it's all coming from, and where it's all going. The series is a great satire because it's completely engulfed by the original source(s)--and if it doesn't completely decipher films like The Room, it explains their allure all too well.

"The Room Tribute" finally puts the rest of the pieces together. The player takes on the role of Johnny, and the game is presented exclusively from his point of view as he wanders in and out of the story proper. Plot holes are filled where necessary--the player has to take drug dealer Chris-R to the police, and we're there when Johnny learns that Lisa has accused him of domestic abuse--but most everything else is taken verbatim from the movie. (It even faithfully recreates the plodding soundtrack in chiptune.) An inventory and a turn-based battle system nominally make it a video game, but these conceits don't actually add up to a challenge. Collect spoons! Make sandwiches! Catch the ball! Throw the ball! Push your best friend! It's more about reacting to the silly plot than anything else. Johnny starts off with some six million dollars, and he never spends more than two hundred--not including the $50,000 used to pay Denny's college tuition in a single, negligible instant. So how can he possibly complain about an elusive promotion at the bank? By utilizing, and then ignoring, the interactivity inherent to the medium, "The Room Tribute" engages a conversation with the player/viewer about how Wiseau ignores nearly everything necessary to create dramatic tension.

"The Room Tribute" succeeds so well not just because it highlights the oddities of The Room, but because it acts as an interpreter of sorts. Now, the game cannot make sense out of the movie, per se. The new dialogue stands so far apart from the recreations of Wiseau's script that it cannot dilute the wackiness of the original work. Rather, it presents The Room as a supernatural dreamworld. An earthquake cuts the characters off from the rest of San Francisco, defining the playing field in a move reminiscent of "It's a Good Life." Levels are divided into days, and most of them begin with a sequence inspired by the ending of "Super Mario Bros. 2". Every store in the four-block area is operated by the same woman (the owner of the flower shop in the movie), who always makes it a point to mention that Johnny is her "favorite customer."

The game goes to great lengths to demonstrate that Johnny is everyone's favorite--the banker's favorite employee, the cops' favorite citizen, San Francisco's favorite donator. To drive the point home, it's soon revealed that Johnny's big, "confidential" client at the bank is none other than Tommy Wiseau himself. Despite the fact that it sees the movie as beyond all reasonable logic, "The Room Tribute" knows that if it operates within a dreamworld, it must be Wiseau's dream. Again, that's hardly a revelation, but what the game does is isolate Wiseau's ego and labels it as the lone source of all that wackiness. The conclusion is that The Room isn't bad because of the stilted dialogue--it's bad because Wiseau has so little respect for the cast, the medium and the viewer. At the end of "The Room Tribute", the player can either act out the climax of the movie with Johnny, or lead him outside first. In the latter scenario, he will take his anger out on the various people who have wronged him throughout the week. As he says in the film, "Everyone betrayed me; I'm fed up with this world." Tommy/Johnny is the hero of the story, the saint and the martyr, and that's all the more obvious when he becomes a video game protagonist from the late '80s/early '90s... one who barely does anything to deserve canonization.

What all of that means is that by "interpreting" The Room, "The Room Tribute" also cuts through the bullshit that makes it so difficult to approach. In the final analysis, what's so hard to grasp about an act of transparent narcissism? Portaying him as strange, artless, and not of this Earth, the game does see Wiseau is a provocateur, but not in any way that matters. "Joaquin Phoenix" was a passive character until we responded negatively to his public antics, and from there he revealed our prejudices about art and movie stars. With this big film about big important things ("do you understand life?"), Wiseau came out swinging, demanding our accolades right from the start, like a spoiled child. His artistic aggressiveness comes not from the inanity of his work, but from his self-satisfaction, and weirdness aside, that just makes The Room a run-of-the-mill bad movie. He prodded his audience, and contrary to his later claims, I don't think he ever expected them to prod back. True to his ego, he took in all in stride and grabbed all the attention he could get. The joke that drives "The Room Tribute" (ostensibly another outlet for Wiseau to exploit) is that it's the only tribute that The Room could possibly warrant. I laughed--and it was a catharsis that I desperately needed.

A subsequent viewing of The Room held no additional surprises for me--indeed, despite having a grand old time playing "The Room Tribute", I didn't take much joy from watching the moments that I now recognized as cult iconography. The veil of nonsense had been lifted, and the husk that remained just bored me stupid. I can't say anything for the midnight showings--they might be fun, after all--but they've given Wiseau license to peddle this film as an intentional comedy. No one actually believes him, but it's the mystique of the ultimate bad movie that keeps it alive, and that's far more than what the real movie deserves.

Scott Pilgrim vs. Your Face

Not pictured: giant sandwich board labeled "Remember this?" and "Get it?"

Edgar Wright is easily one of the smartest pop-culture mavens working in the movie industry today, which is why his latest film feels like such a betrayal: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (hereafter Scott Pilgrim) is perfectly content to drown itself in 16-bit graphics and comic book flash-bang because, the movie happily concludes, it never had all that much to say in the first place. Shy, mumbling Torontoan Scott (Michael Cera, natch) is a bassist in a shitty garage band who falls head over heels for American delivery girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). However, before they can commit to a serious relationship, Scott must fight and defeat seven of Ramona's former sweethearts, a super-powered "League of Evil Exes" organized by record producer/final boss Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman). It's supposed to be a coming-of-age story as told within the context of an arcade game, but it can only make one statement to that end: fifteen years ago, you were much younger than you are now, and you played video games that were much less sophisticated than they are now. Struggling to articulate the synchronicity between youthful immaturity and pixilated graphics, Scott Pilgrim defaults to hipster detachment--so endlessly amused by its central metaphor (the difficulties of life and romance re-imagined as a linear, Capcom-esque fighting tournament) that it doesn't care to explore what that metaphor means for this new generation or its hopes and desires.

The popular joke around the Internet is that most gamer-geek humor revolves around one tired concept--"video games are not like real life"--and Scott Pilgrim rehashes that tired concept with stunning fidelity. It really, really wants you to see it as ridiculous and absurd: time and again, we are reminded that people do not actually burst into coins after they've been defeated in a fight; that people do not actually "level up" after they've learned an important life lesson; that Michael Cera probably cannot leap twenty feet in the air and perform "64-hit combos." The problem is that this is all weightless navel-gazing--the movie doesn't see anything worth examining in these aesthetic signifiers beyond simple recognition. (Worse still is when it simply lists off a series of pop culture icons: Scott's band, Sex Bob-Omb, features two musicians named after members of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and they sing a song that may or may not be called "Launchpad McQuack." Taken from the graphic novel, you say? That doesn't make it any less jarring.) Even Sin City--the epitome of style-as-substance and Scott Pilgrim's closest antecedent--amplified popular noir elements (guns, dames, monochrome) to emphasize the relevant themes (sex, machismo, heartbreak). So when can we discuss video games as elaborate, dream-like fantasies? Or, say, as the only appropriate outlet for a number of colorful, larger-than-life personalities? Never, as far as Scott Pilgrim is concerned. Want to know why Roger Ebert gives video games such a hard time? It's because of juvenile, masturbatory fan-crap like this--lauding the medium not for its aesthetic/thematic content, but for the popular conventions. It's only "fun" in the sense that you can name the game from which a specific sound effect originates.

That's precisely what Wright tried so hard to avoid with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz--in those films, he was always interested in figuring out why zombie/action flicks affected us so deeply. Scott Pilgrim merely congratulates its target audience for playing video games and being all meta about it, and, even worse, those congratulations come at the cost of any human element. You'll notice I have yet to mention that Scott has a few ex-girlfriends of his own (teenaged naïf Knives Chau (Ellen Wong) and Envy Adams (Brie Larson))--but that's because Scott Pilgrim isn't really about anyone or anything, except the feeling that you're part of some exclusive club. This movie is a rebel without a cause in the truest sense of the phrase: a vague collection of culture-fed images, so desperate to draw a line between "them" and "us" that it has no idea what enemy it's supposed to be fighting. * (out of four)

The Perils of Dirk the Daring

As the primary competition to the House of Mouse in the 1980s, Don Bluth's films offered a dark and manic alternative to a pandering children's formula, but their lasting appeal more often stemmed from the fact of the animation itself--secure in the knowledge that, when it was allowed to run wild and free, anything was possible. When the time came to settle down and deliver a few ponderous lines of dialogue, everything screeched to a halt, but the plot, the characters and the humor occurred naturally when everything was thrown into a frantic chase. Bluth kept his films alive through forward momentum, and one can find the ultimate enforcement of this philosophy in "Dragon's Lair" (1983), the first coin-op laserdisc game and an early contender for the claim that video games were capable of legitimate artistic expression. It may stand as one of co-creator Bluth's best efforts because, by necessity, it has been trimmed of all the narrative fat. Far more importantly, however, it gave him the opportunity to forge an entirely new perspective on his work, and his audience, that could not be accomplished by the standard rules of animated film.

The original plan came from game designer Rick Dyer, who was looking for a way to give computer games a bit more visual appeal than the computers could accomplish at the time. He created a series of mechanical and computerized devices--"Rolodexes" and rolls of cash register paper, graphic adventures that featured hand-painted illustrations--but, unfortunately, they didn't catch on with toy companies. He eventually developed the idea for the fledgling medium of laserdisc, taking a concept called "Secrets of the Lost Woods" to Bluth's studio. Hoping to rework an animated movie as a coin-op arcade game, Bluth and Dyer later described the creative process between their respective teams as "throwing rocks over the fence"--a careful compromise between aesthetics and feasible gameplay. It was a process that eventually produced the tale of Dirk the Daring, the "valiant knight" who ventured into the titular lair to save the Princess Daphne. The game would send the player to a random chapter on the disc, a random room in the lair, upon which time Dirk would blindly stumble into danger. The player's input was tied to sequences we now call "quick-time events"--a series of miniature cinematics whose completion depended on the player's ability to press the right button at the right time. In the originator of the idea, the control scheme entailed the four directions of the joystick and a "sword" button.

Objects around the screen would occasionally flash to point you in the right direction, but the correct input often relied on some esoteric detail in the animation: Dirk has just put his sword away and there's no time to unsheathe it again; the tumbling stack of goblets will surely wake the dragon when it hits the floor. Making the right moves would allow that piece of animation to continue uninterrupted, until it was time to move on to another random chapter. The wrong input would abruptly end the scene, taking the game to another chapter depicting Dirk's screaming death--consumed by flames, run through with a sword, devoured by a sentient blob of oil. In contemporary and modern interviews, Bluth describes "Dragon's Lair" not as a game so much as an "interactive movie" that tricked you into believing you had control over Dirk's actions. But there was also a sense of urgency that Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books could not achieve--whether or not your progress was predicated strictly on your ability to "twitch," you were still an integral part of the experience. You would not be able to watch the movie all the way through if you could not twitch properly, and there was a palpable chance--nay, a probability--of failure.

The plot was no more complicated than any of the other premises that defined the early days of video games, damsel-in-distress fluff that had little weight beyond life and death, success and failure. But it was precisely that transparency, that self-conscious adherence to formula, that made "Dragon's Lair" so compelling as an interactive work.¹ There are moments in Bluth's narrative films, both before and after "Dragon's Lair," that seem dismayed, bound as they were by the necessities of static scripts and happy endings. No matter what inescapable perils he could put Fievel and Mrs. Brisby through--sent into the inner workings of a plow, or halfway down a cat's gullet--he had no choice but to let them live every time. What Dyer and "Dragon's Lair" provided was a world where Bluth could subvert the formula he introduced--to forge a bond between life and death that relied strictly on talent, chance and memory. Bluth has tried similar tricks since then; even a cliché mess like Anastasia (1997) presents a desire to defy the rules of human existence as told by history. However, his closest narrative approximation to the game may be All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989), a film that thrived on glorious unpredictability. Following the lead character's death and ascent to heaven in the first ten minutes (and a song entitled "Let Me Be Surprised" before he made his way back to Earth), that picture was fraught with tonal inconsistencies predicated on the very real possibility that someone here was going to die. Not-quite-anthropomorphic dogs change color at will, trapped in a constant juggle between safety and danger--death, and hell, loomed over the proceedings in a way that other animated films consciously suppress.

But it was in "Dragon's Lair" where Bluth could truly disavow those boundaries. Dyer and his team mapped out an extraordinarily simple story, one of good triumphing over evil, but it was the player who was ultimately responsible for seeing it through. It was a matter of trial-and-error (even if the chapters were randomized to individualize your trek through the lair), but because you ostensibly knew how it was "supposed" to end, it was your job to pay attention, your job to see the movie to its logical conclusion. Perhaps the same could be said for Mario's quest to save Pauline from Donkey Kong, or Pac-Man's quest to eat every dot in the maze, but there was little sense of conclusion to these early games, because they were designed to continue indefinitely--even in the event that you could clear the screen of threats, the girl would get kidnapped again; there would be another maze of dots to navigate; there would be another frog to guide across the street. Failure was the only possible conclusion, so who could point fingers? A high score was the only true measure of your success. "Dragon's Lair" nominally kept track of your score and your life total, but they were arbitrary numbers. There was only one real objective, and that was to finish the movie in piecemeal fashion.

Similarly, the specific level of "control" given to the player meant a very different perspective on the protagonist, and that made Bluth's cartoonish approach so important to the experience. Dirk was given enough personality to segregate himself from the player, but still exuded such helplessness that his fate was placed squarely on your shoulders. His only form of communication was a cowardly shriek, and his deaths were detailed to look so painful and pathetic that you had no choice but to laugh... and then maybe feel a little guilty for it. In the words of Bluth's producer and partner Gary Goldman, he was "our Charlie Chaplin," an ersatz Little Tramp who had very clear goals and could prompt laughter and sympathy upon defeat. Of course, it was really your defeat; he was the just the one suffering for it. Pac-Man and Mario were strictly ciphers for the player, and therefore couldn't reprimand you too harshly if they were killed by an errant obstacle. Your failure was their failure, and their death sequences only expressed a mutual sorrow that you couldn't complete the task at hand. Even rough contemporaries that followed a linear path, like "King's Quest"--which featured sharp, sarcastic messages as your character died some hilariously awful death--could not capture that sense of duty, because you and your avatar were acting in concert. Simultaneously linear and random, "Dragon's Lair" kept you at an arm's length and forced you to play by its rules, which made Dyer's "illusion of control" the most interesting aspect of the game's metaverse.² Although he had been given a course of action that was strictly predetermined by an uninterrupted sequence of animation, Dirk was only "Daring" in the sense that he did everything you told him to do.

With this in mind, the game creates an interesting paradox between the player's action and inaction (indeed, wrong moves often resulted in death sequences distinct from those determined by no action at all)--and by participating in that paradox you took it upon yourself to resolve it. Without your help, Dirk is a hapless schmuck with no survival skills; with your help, he's subject to poor "advice" that threatens his destiny as dictated by the script. The "game over" animation was an absolute riot, and one that emphasized how the individual player was to blame³--his arms folded and his face twisted with scorn, a zombefied Dirk dropped in from the top of the screen and faded into a skeleton, which then dramatically collapsed into a pile of bones. Whether you failed to guide him or sent him off the beaten path, the message was clear: if you got the poor boy killed, it was your own damn fault.

That was particularly important to remember when Bluth physically resurrected that pile of bones for another go, another life in another random room. That particular conceit of video games ultimately made Dirk as unflappable as the Tramp (and his relationship between life and death as unpredictable as that of Charlie B. Barkin), but there was nothing to this world beyond what was already there--Dirk and the lair. There's something strange and self-contained about it, and you became an intruder and an interloper in what should have been a simple rescue mission. Contrary to the idea that viewer/player interactivity confused artistic intentions, "Dragon's Lair" established it as the crux of its artistic intentions. The particulars of what the player was capable of were indeed determined by logic, but the "logical" endgame was almost beyond the point. Ultimately, you made Dirk the victim, the fool or the hero. Try again, if you must; redeem yourself and make him the hero. With the lines between fiction and reality suitably blurred, that sense of responsibility--in this instance, responsibility for the fate of the Everyman--may be what we're looking for in video games when we demand an emotional connection to a work of art.

Naturally, the success of "Dragon's Lair" would pave the way for inspirations and imitators. A minor genre of laserdisc games would follow several years into the waning days of the arcade as well as the burgeoning days of the (CD-based) console. Two such games were animated by Bluth's studio: "Space Ace" (1984) and "Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp" (1991). Neither was as successful as the original, perhaps because their higher budgets and lusher backgrounds complicated the issue a little too much: maybe they were too linear and narrative to foster that precise distance between the protagonist and the player--or maybe the idea of Dirk and Daphne escaping the Dragon's Lair to produce children (and a sequel) was too far-fetched. The original "Dragon's Lair" offered little in the way of premise and gameplay, but they were still there, and they suggested that you could artistically immerse a player by calling attention to his vicarious role in the action.

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¹ "Dragon's Lair" satirically confuses its threadbare plot with mythical tropes: Dirk does not ride a white horse, but he is carted around by a flying suit of bard; and his ultimate quest is to rescue the aggressively objectified Princess Daphne. (Her shapely figure was literally taken from the pages of PLAYBOY, as the production could not afford to hire models.) In that sense, the game may represent a subtle parody of its homophonic counterpart, Dragonslayer. Don't forget that the titles of both game and film are written in the same typeface.

² "Dragon's Lair" also assured that the player could not maintain too much distance from both game and film, in case they had memorized the patterns--along with the random chapter and scene selections, the disc contained animation sequences that were mirrored images of other scenes, which meant that you had to pay attention and make sure you were going in the right direction.

³ Rather than utilize the exact same screen across the entire game, Dirk's "game over" death was always matted over a background representing the room in which the player lost his last life. Your failure was, indeed, an individualized one.