Okay, “welcome back,” this was Davey’s pick so I’m up first here:
Ready Player One is a dark fantasy movie depicting a mid-21st century future where 20th century baby-boomer-authored mainstream American pop media fails to wane in relevance. Where this body of media once had a flame mainly tended by Gen X nerds, whose isolationist, elitist identity congealed at the meeting points of nostalgia, consumption, bitterness, and trivia in the 1990s, in RP1’s year ~2050, this media is now worshipped by all young people and ruthlessly referenced in words, gestures, winks, and callbacks. Furthermore, this nerd consumer elitist identity is now a kind of skillset.
In a 2005 Angels of Light song the Swans guy sings “let the wind wear away / the words cut in the stone” and boy do I identify with that. I love the idea that there’s gonna be a future generation that truly is just not going to give a fuck about Star Wars, and that sometime after that, that there’s gonna be a generation who has no idea who Harrison Ford is. That time keeps passing, that stuff has its time, and that stuff is doomed to shrink to infinitesimal size en route to eventually disappearing completely is, in my opinion, unequivocally good. This movie depicts a nightmare where this process somehow stops, frozen in time at Ferris Bueller references. Not that Star Wars or Ferris Bueller are “bad” (both are fine), but the notion that either represent “peaks” and not “starting points” is deeply cursed.
At the edges of this movie are threads about the global economic/daily life repercussions of everyone living in an always-online pleasure matrix, but the movie doesn’t get too far into it. When Scott Pilgrim or whoever takes over the matrix in the end, he turns it off for two days a week, because “everyone needs to spend a little more time offline,” and then it shows him kissing his girlfriend, like, welp, that’s all that follows from that decision. I’d watch a movie set in 2020 that explores just this: what if a single individual controlled every internet service provider on earth, and decided that it’d be better for the world if there was no internet for anyone on Tuesdays and Thursdays?
It’s funny to think abt Spielberg making a movie in 2018 that in a large way is a fantasy “about” how his era of classics are gonna just keep being relevant endlessly into the future, and within that, to include a part where they go inside The Shining (1980). That Spielberg’s weird ode to himself includes a lengthy side-ode to Kubrick felt strangely elegiac, giving the sense that Spielberg in his “I’m never going to disappear” movie is also acknowledging “and yet I was never the greatest.” It seems possible to read RP1 as being “about” the relationship between these two directors, where Simon Pegg is Spielberg and Mark Rylance is Kubrick, but tbh I don’t really care about this beyond kind of wanting to rewatch AI (2001). I also kept thinking abt how sick it would be if they went inside Barry Lyndon (1975) instead of The Shining, and stood like MST3K characters in front of that movie’s epilogue screen.
I coincidentally watched Paul (2011) last week, a wooden movie that’s also about Gen X-flavor nerds as heroes, is also with Simon Pegg, and also explicitly addresses the continuing relevance/legacy of Spielberg, and the utility of pop culture references as a meta-language for producing further pop culture media. At best, some people use samples like this to create a black hole energy that collapses into a whole new thing; that’s postmodernism/hyperreality for ya. But at worst, as in these movies, the references are just like a dvd collection at some uncle’s house – stacks of recognizable things taking up space.
Ready Player One is about a multiplayer virtual reality game called the Oasis that’s so good and the world outside so shitty that everyone plays it constantly. After dying, the creator sets up a contest where the winner will get control of the Oasis and a bunch of bucks. The contest is played by doing deep dives into the creator’s favorite pop culture and looking for clues. A kid (Wade Watts, the kind of character whose name you need to look up the next day) solves the first clue after five years by “going left”, a game design idea that was groundbreaking when Metroid did it in 1986 but didn’t really strike me as something that would take the world’s collective gamers five years to figure out. This kicks off a race to win the contest, with Wade and his plucky crew on one side and a giant corporation run by an evil CEO on the other. The corporation plans to blanket the game world with ads if they win the contest. Wade wants to keep it exactly as it is, a monopoly on all entertainment that has been shown to be so addictive as to bankrupt people and drive them to suicide. The moral stakes of this situation struck me as more of a Spotify or Apple Music kind of problem than an end of the world kind of problem, but I thought it was best to just go with it.
The film’s world has a ton of pop culture references but no evidence of any new pop culture created after 2018, possibly because the advent of the game has completely arrested the adoption of any new characters or stories, since the game’s world is fixed on the pre-2018 tastes of a dead old white man. Maybe Ready Player 2 will be about the people creating the art that was being ignored while everyone else was hunting for pop culture clues? Could be good!
This seemed like a weird movie for Spielberg to make, though I have a theory as to why he did. He created the blockbuster, then spent decades making money, but he hasn’t had a genuine hit in a while. He’s a great filmmaker still doing great work (check out Bridge of Spies (2015) (also with Mark Rylance – TB) it rocks), but what people on the business side are convinced people want to see is recognizable IP. So Spielberg decides his next movie will be about a world where the only thing that matters is knowing your IP, and if you know it, you become rich and powerful.
There’s one part of the movie I thought was actually captivating – when the characters go into an interactive version of The Shining (1980). Great movie, box office bomb, and one that most of the extremely pop-savvy characters in the movie declare themselves to be unfamiliar with. The amount of craft and care put into replicating scenes from the movie is mind boggling, far surpassing any other part of the movie; the whiplash from these to the climactic VR war that follows is insane. Meticulous reproductions of shots in the Overlook followed closely by a dark messy looking CGI battle intercut with shots of people wearing VR goggles flailing in the streets, followed by an Iron Giant/Terminator 2 death scene mash up, followed by Mechagodzilla fighting a Gundam… all things that feel like the opposite of The Shining. So I thought, maybe RP1 is a self-contained critique of what passes for blockbusters in the modern age, all references and noise, made for the suits by someone who knows better but wanted to prove the point. That, or it’s just a normal bad vapid movie? It’s a mystery I fear may never be solved.