Disposable violence

American lawmakers Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton want the Centers for Disease Control to investigate if violent games cause violence in people.

Yep. That's right. Civil war coming in Iraq. War possible with Iran. Privacy rights being shredded. Abortion rights being eroded. Fiscal security deteriorating. And that's what two of the most powerful Democrats in the U.S. Senate want to have the CDC see if killing people on screen is going to be harmful. All this despite what could be the largest open clinical trial in the world, with millions of people playing games and no viable correlation between a gamer and a killer.

As you can imagine, gamers on the Internet are all in a tizzy about it. At first glance, I was too. Lieberman has had a bee in his bonnet about violence in gaming even since you could pull a fatality in Mortal Kombat. Clinton has distinguished herself with getting all hot and bothered about Hot Coffee, a section of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that had to be hacked out of the source code to make playable. It's a waste of time and money, and only done by craven politicians who want to pick on something smaller and weaker while giving them the moral high ground of "doing something for the children." I've lost track of all the time I've rolled my eyes about violence in movies or in video games or on TV. I've defended violent games on the principal that a great game isn't great because it's violent or filled with sexual content. It's how the subject matter is handled. A great game will make the violence and sex in context, while a bad one goes down the sad road of exploitation. Case in point: the massively successful GTA series against BMX XXX. Which can you still find on store shelves? And more importantly, why?

I was ready to fire off an angry letter to Clinton and Lieberman, full of vinegar with claims that they can stick their legislation where the sun doesn't shine, or how I've been gaming for 25 years and I have a clean criminal record. No killing, no speeding, no drugs, no pimpin' hos. Nothing. My buddy Josh? Plays the most violent games on earth. He's a general manager of a furniture chain, and became a proud father in 2005. We went to see the "Doom" movie the day it came out and giggled ourselves silly at the cheese. I was ready, though, angry and righteous, and ready to give Joe and Hill both barrels (figuratively, of course).

And then a divine sunlight of wisdom pierced the clouds and gave me another answer, one that can't be argued with. A surefire scenario that would shut down moral prigs and opportunists like Lieberman and Clinton.

Let the CDC investigate gaming. Go right ahead.

Let the CDC field interview gamers, designers, developers...everyone who plays consoles or MMO-style titles. Let the CDC scour police reports and video game stores and urban myths and lawsuits and anything else it can find. Let's have the CDC researchers determine once and for all if games cause violence, and (here's the kicker Joe and Hill, you two should lean and listen very closely) when the CDC researchers come back and say that video games and violence can't be linked in a reliable and scientific manner, then no lawmaker can allege that video games are too violent and that they are a problem for society. Ever. Again. That's it. Close down the circus. End of discussion. Joe, Hill, find another straw man to beat on. Because if you get on this topic again, we'd know you are lying. We know that you are just out there to promote some lame moralist agenda when you should be tackling far more important things. Poverty. Women's rights. Privacy. That little ongoing war thingy you both voted for. Remember that? The little skirmish where real people point real guns and there are real deaths. Are you that out of touch?

Which brings me to another simulacrum. "Jarhead" is coming on DVD, and if you blinked in late 2005, you missed it when it was in the theaters. Based on Anthony Swofford's memoir of being a Marine in the first Gulf War back in 1991, it's a hollow, flat, dusty-yellow malescape of confused sexuality, anger, isolation and pain, especially when the action is set in the Saudi Arabian desert. There is homesickness and frustration peppered with the reminder that you could die at any moment, and yet it's sculpted with a near-palpable boredom. The film's essentially a travelogue, since there's no sense of peril or danger throughout. No sense of character evolution. We have no idea of who Swofford (played by a Jake Gyllenhaal who channels Edward Norton from "Fight Club") is or was before joining the Marines. We know he had a terrible home life. We know his father fought in Vietnam. He joined the Marines as an escape, but since Swofford knew papa wasn't right after Vietnam, you never know what the escape is.

But pay no matter. Swofford finds his groove as a sniper, mindlessly picking off targets, nearly threading the needle by almost putting a round through where the last round went. Swofford the machine. Swofford the long-distance killer. Swofford the lonely bookish type who suddenly can speak Arabic. Swofford the growing irrational. The trouble with Swofford is, we have no baseline, no understanding of Point A to see if he has fallen down or oddly gotten his life together, the archetype played via the Zen specter of Jamie Foxx, who recruits Swofford into the world of How to Spot Someone From A Long Way Away and Kill Them. Swofford eventually falls into the pack mindset with the rest of his platoon, filled by the Cliche Warehouse. The hick. The Hispanic. The vulgarian. The best buddy. All the way down to the cool African American sergeant (Foxx, who steals the film away from Gyllenhaal without trying).

Swofford goes to war. Swofford loses his mind in the desert. Swofford sees the fabled "highway of death," where hundreds of vehicles full of retreating Iraqis were immolated, likely by the U.S. or allies. Swofford sees death and empathizes with the enemy. Check it off the cliche list. And then Swofford heads off on a secret mission to find the end of the movie, which more or less eludes him and us.

What "Jarhead" lacks is a third act, some payoff for the ordeal. Swofford doesn't go as a character as much as he has his emotions put through a blender. Since we know Swofford made it home to write his memoir, we know he isn't going to be killed. Since we know that the Desert Storm groundwar took 100 hours, we know this isn't going to be a long, horrible slog. In real-time, thousands of Iraqi soldiers surrendered to the U.S. and allies. The war was over before it began, and so we are left with the troops celebrating the end of the war in a pagan display of bonfires and raw aggro, and Swofford standing castrated, mourning over being unable to have fired his rifle. Was Swofford's quest to kill? Did he fall into the quest? Is this the movie attempting to say that everything that was in Swofford is gone, to be replaced by a warrior who needs to be justified by killing? We never get a straight answer, even at the end, when Swofford returns home with the same numbed expression as when he left. The hero's journey is a null point for the viewer, and it's only when the hero returns home that something quakes. The audience can start to make out the landscape, and a relevance sets in. Swofford in the civilian world. Swofford out of his uniform. Swofford as one of us.

And yet, in the five minutes left after Swofford returns home, the film lurches down a gear. It's generic, distant, a movie on Ambien that only slides awake at the end of the tale as Swofford, back in the states, tries to merge back with American living. A colleague is dead, and Swofford flash-appearances at his funeral, where a few tears come out. It is a sentence that falters in a story-teller's mouth. There's not enough bravery to look headlong at what the preparation does to the human soul, and what the experience of combat does to further twist human beings. "Deer Hunter," a film that was a strange favorite among Swofford and his crew in the movie, did.

Here's what I think happened. I think Hollywood took a look at the summary of the memoir, noticed the current Iraq morass and greenlit the project before they could think twice about the substance. They made a movie about a war that was already a media spectacle. The special effects were more fascinating than the soldiers. There was no push to go beyond the war itself. The war the main character, and Swofford had a walk-on role. The result is a film that's as empty as the desert Swofford and his mates wandered in, looking to kill.

Say what you want about violence in video games. At least video games attempt to give you closure. And video games don't make themselves out to be important cultural documents of reality. "Jarhead" doesn't lie, but it doesn't have the strength to tell the truth about war and being a soldier, about what it means to be a killer and then try to stop. Swofford was trained by the government to be a killer. A video game didn't do it, but we did, the taxpayers...so we could have a warrior fight for us in a war more about oil than freedom. That's a sinister violence we really should look at and study.

It's hard being a blogger

Apologies for the lack of updates as of late. Very busy at home and at work. Still considering my "Jarhead" review, which I have to get out before my "V for Vendetta" critique Wednesday.

Stupid real life, always getting in the way of blogging. And writing. And gaming. And world domination.

From the Department of Missed Opportunities

I have no idea why this is not going be a launch title for this.

Monday

I'm allergy-free, having sneezed and slept it out of me all weekend. Did taxes and found out that we at Stately Ryan Manor are getting some money back, which will be ideal since I'm going to be part of a Nintendo mini-media day at the end of the month. Imagine going to grandma's house and seeing all the goodies she baked for you, laid out and glistening in some sanctified food pornography. That's what the Big N does for quasi-gamer/journalists like me. The meeting comes about a week after Nintendo sensei Satoru Iwata gives a highly anticipated speech at the Game Developers Conference, and about six weeks before E3, which is akin to Christmas to gaming geeks like moi. Lots of questions about the upcoming console (now due out about the time of Sony's upcoming behemoth) as well as the oft-delayed new Zelda title, "Twilight Princess." My co-worker (who formally reviews games at my job) and I need to start our plan of attack. This year is going to be big for video games. If we play it right, we might get a glimpse of Things to Come six weeks before all the hammers drop at E3.

Caught "Jarhead" on DVD. Will have a review soon. I'm still mulling it over in my head. So far, the sands are shifting to a negative result. Nothing really clicked, all very marginal, but very flashy and well executed. Sort of an "I get it, but I don't care."

Have a new-ish boss here at work (she was my boss about six years ago, and now we are working together on a new project). So far, so good.

Nothing to say about the Oscars, except I thought Jon Stewart did a good job (for the parts in which my wife and I tuned in). That, and the Academy can bite themselves for the incredibly condescending lecture (given by a visibly bummed-out Jake Gyllenhaal, who was snubbed for Best Supporting Actor early in the evening) for watching movies in theaters instead of in the comfort of one's own home, on DVD, where one can skip the ads, pause for toilet break, and (in my opinion) have a better picture and sound than in most theaters. Plus, no rude theatergoers behind you, whispering "what did he just say?" or "Why did he do that?" The best part about the Academy snit-fit? Here's this plea to come to the cinema to watch epics, and what wins Best Picture? "Crash," an ensemble film about race relations. The acid-tipped kicker? Film critic Roger Ebert is circulating the theory that "Crash" won because it was filmed for TV, and thus looked better when the DVD screeners were passed out to Academy voters.

So, to recap, the Academy begs you to go to the movies, and then awards the top prize to a small-scale drama.

Irony...I wish I knew how to quit you.