Damn Documentaries

I'm watching a documentary on a video-game, in which players participate in the Columbine massacre (as either of the mass-murderers), and the ensuing controversy/outrage/discussion (which I only vaguely recall hearing about however many years ago it happened). 

  

What I notice about the film is the interview subjects' annexation (or misuse?) of the game to argue tangential beliefs. Aside from the talk-radio caricatures ("freedom of speech, damn it!"), there's a feeling that some guy has created an artifact (a thing — in this case an art thing, so a thing that's also sort of an ambiguous statement) that dozens of more interesting people have attempted to define as more interesting than it happens (or seems) to be; I've harbored similar feelings toward certain graduate students and Jacques Lacan. 

This bothers me, because (ignoring the radio-hosts who are as vocal as they are misinformed about their first amendment rights) the substantive arguments would be valid, were the work better... or rather, the arguments are, themselves, valid, but they suffer in that they're associated with the specific example that's being used. 

  

I accept that this could be my bias, in that the game's creator struck me as not unlike Shepard Fairey... which is to say someone who displays an astonishingly superficial understanding of his art (maybe they're both just poor speakers). Though, I should note that the game's creator doesn't claim a deeper understanding nor a pointed intentionality behind his work, which became championed by others as an amalgamation of documentary film-making and video-game design that raises questions about our society's refusal to allow for artistic expression in certain interactive mediums. I should also note that these intellectuals dismiss another game, one modeled after the Virginia Tech massacre, whose creator is considered to be sort of a dip-shit. 

 

Still, it worries me.

The trouble seems to be that the controversy surrounding bad art is being used as the catalyst for a defense of what art (even bad art) has the potential to be, which is to say vapid art is having depth applied to it by critics and its audience — which I think is great (eg: my appreciation for comic-book superheroes and Harry Potter), except it rings hollow in this particular case. 

Let's say I want to defend the medium of comics, but the only source I can cite is Family Circus. While I might feel that graphic narrative engages our brain in a unique and powerful way (it does), that it allows for the instantiation of typically silenced voices in a social arena, and that comics will remain relevant until (and possibly after) humans have been swallowed by some massive cosmic event, even if I were good enough to justify these claims relying upon only this dependably milquetoast strip (and I just might be), I wouldn't be able to escape the feeling that, as there are better examples, no matter how deep my insights are, my claims are diminished by the association with a piece of work that is so blissfully vacuous.

  

.....

  

I have, since beginning this point, finished the video-game movie, skipped through a conservative response to Michael Moore, and began watching a documentary on the media's lack of coverage of the civilians mutilated and killed in Iraq. 

  

It is, as the film seems to suggest (though, not specifically), difficult to focus on whether a particular video-game is a suitable example of a genre's artistic potential while images of young people dying march relentlessly across half of my screen.  

 

Images of one tragedy are distracting me from discussing the validity of how certain people happen to be discussing the ethical implications of engaging in a video-game which contains images of another.

  

.....

  

I have now been made to feel sad and ineffectual. My urge is to find a chocolate cake and eat it. 

   

I am resisting this urge.