The oldest possible joke

Band names from my front page posts. A holly-jolly procrastinator.

L and the Task Force (vocally varied synthrock, with costumes — like the Epoxies, but less deliberately annoying; may spell it “Taskforce” for what they feel is added eighties flavor)
The Lurid and the Holy (straight-faced, but not humorless, early-nineties goth)
The Takarazuka Revue (disappointingly generic all-male Portland quartet you find on Emusic)
Mirror Universe Spocks (not actually a real band)
Baby Zaza and the New Obscurity (pop)
Viktoria (acoustic metal)
A Sword (ironic metal)
A Low Bright Area (shoegaze)
A Fifty-Foot-Tall Man Who Intones Into A Microphone Implanted Directly In His Throat As He Fondly Gathers The Player Into His Giant Lap (just that)

Japanese names rendered surname-first are the new Twitter.

I’ve fallen off on CF lately — first because of EEODN, and then because my post-Death-Note obsession, the manga of Urasawa Naoki, doesn’t lend itself very well to critical chatter. This is for a weird-but-common reason: Urasawa is too complete a writer.

Death Note, for all its quality, is full of holes. Or maybe the word I’m looking for is “loopholes.” As I’ve said too often now, its creators are disinterested in the characters’ moral dilemmas; indeed, they seem disinterested in the characters as characters. They write character exceptionally well — Light is a lost cause, but if you scratch the task force and L, you can get pretty far before you hit the hollow center.

But Ohba and Obata are genre guys, so they don’t spend a lot of time hammering at the characters for their own sake; they just give them actions, drawing from a well of plausible motivation as they might from ink — character as tool for advancing story — and let the fans sort out the tears and the early family life. I appreciate that sometimes. I’d rather do some of that work myself.

Urasawa is another story. The cast of Monster — a good comparison; it’s also a serial-killer story two steps from realism – are very exact and well-examined characters;  they have intentionally complex psyches; they worry about their souls. The joy of Monster is soberly watching a great literary mind at work, rather than deliriously heckling a brilliant storyteller.

I couldn’t imagine writing about Urasawa at length. He’s already done it. As with most great literary minds, he is his own best critic. And he is pretty “great,” not just in quality but also in his basic atmosphere and aura.  Monster and Urasawa’s later series, 20th Century Boys, remind me of Victor Hugo in their energetic sprawl, their aesthetic glorification of research, their excess of character and characters, and their massive slabs of theme — is it right to take any life, even an evil one? Is there such a thing as an absolutely evil human? Are we saved by grace or by works? Is that the Pope on that bridge?  – all of which is welcome; very few people want to write anything like Hugo these days, with his very old-fashioned literary use of both the lurid and the holy.

Urasawa is something very, very special and rare, and he can draw. But I couldn’t spend half an hour discussing his great creation, Dr. Tenma; I could easily do so for Ohba/Obata’s Near, by far the least interesting Death Note character, simply because “what in God’s name does he even want?” is a question Urasawa has actually answered in the text.

A few writers — like Shakespeare; I’ll think of another example in a moment — have the skill to make their characters at once fully-fleshed and perpetually able to be reread and reconsidered. For everyone else, no matter how skilled, we have this split between two kinds of literary pleasure.

(Tenma above at left; Near at right. And no, apparently, neither of them wants to be The Prisoner.)

Art on no money

We’ve also been watching Revolutionary Girl Utena, the anime of my youth — it holds up, though to adults, the bad jokes are funnier, and the intense barrages of symbolism less exciting. The portrayal of adolescence is still the best I’ve ever seen, at least with regard to my adolescence, whose physical resemblance to The Rose of Versailles played out by the Takarazuka Revue was far slighter than Utena’s, but which was still the precise kind of desperation for a poetic adulthood played out in lurid practice by the gorgeous, naive, swordfighting denizens of Ohtori Academy.

Watching the series as an adult, I was also much more aware of its ingenious cheapness. Apparently at the height of Sailor Moon’s power, its primary director could get greenlit to make whatever he wanted — but he wouldn’t necessarily be meaningfully funded, and the result is a series full of stock footage, fight scenes told largely through stills, and epidemic back-of-the-head shots.

But Utena doesn’t look bad. I’m convinced that Ikuhara could pull off an exciting fight scene using only stills; half the work is already done by the elaborate heavy-metal choruses, with bizarre lyrics pulling from both mythological and more prosaic sources, which he commissioned from J.A. Seazer to accompany the duels. The Art Nouveau set designs also helped; the school looks so good that you want to see those backgrounds again. And  the story is repetitive by design — the cycling of the characters’ problems, their hopeless families, the strange ceremonies they enacted, the occasional abrupt breakage of the theme — so that watching the repeated scenes also became part of the ceremony. It only sounds unbearable.

Ikuhara’s animation staff picked their battles well, too. What time was spent actually animating new sequences was spent very carefully. Thus, there are very few moments in Utena when a character drawing looks hasty or off-model, and that helps to make all of these decisions look deliberate, uninfluenced by the prosaic concerns of money and daily life, and far from their origins in budgetary need.

No matter how gifted, you alone cannot change your shirt

I can’t help but notice that each succeeding Death Note medium, post-manga, is dedicated to blowing increasing amounts of warm, yellow sunshine up L’s ass.

Even the anime falls victim to this, though the anime’s work with L was so note-perfect that it’s a purely positive example.  I’m never sure that the manga writer knew what he had in this character — even though he obviously knew he had something – and the writers of the anime adaptation were the first to make L more than a wide-eyed quirk machine. But the later films and the novel, in turn, take that elaboration much too far. They actually end up exposing massive gaps in the character’s basic design, and they get confused about genre in a really unappealing way.

First of all, both of them make L the de facto protagonist, even given a relative lack of screentime — and this is ridiculous, because it effectively reverses the original writer’s clever decision to focus the story on Light rather than L. Telling the detective story from the killer’s perspective is not original to Death Note, but it’s still a good subversion. So is the subversion of distancing the reader/viewer from the quirky, Holmesian detective through the device of his enemy, rather than his sidekick.

It’s not a disaster to ignore this, provided you’re aware of why it was done. I don’t inherently see why you couldn’t do a great story about L alone. He could easily be dropped into a hundred genres. And I recognize that this is what the later writers were trying to do: the film creators tried to use him in an action flick, and then a melancholy horror movie; the novelist tried to plonk him into a ghoulish L.A. noir. In the process, they both displayed some level of genre-savviness and awareness of the challenges, the basic questions of character that they faced in uprooting such a person from his original storyline.

(In brief: who will be L’s foil, or can poignancy or plot be extracted from his lack of a foil? What does he want, even if the answer is “cake”? Why does he want it, even if the answer is “he’s hungry”? How can we take a classical Great Detective character and make him act like an action hero, or a noir dame, or a directionless youth, without sacrificing the essential traits of that character type — extreme brilliance and a horror of the social — without which he is almost nothing, unless further work is put into developing him?)

But they never really answer these questions, with the result that the film and novel are pornography. There’s nothing here but a popular character being put through all the usual motions and all the expected scenes, with special focus on depicting his greatness and/or kindness. Yes, all of this was gussied up with a couple of big twists, some more openly autism-inspired characterization points, moderately interesting narrative layers involving Mello — but essentially, these stories are about L saving runaway planes and hugging smaller detectives. Which is to say they were about Sherlock Holmes kicking cocaine and undergoing analysis with Sigmund Freud. It can be realized well, but it requires expert hands to humanize the Great Detective. Archetypes are strong, and writers are small.

(Disclaimer to the link: I haven’t read The Seven-Per-Cent Solution since I was a teenager, and do not know if it’s aged particularly well. I do remember it being pretty good, though.)

Like all one-character spinoffs, the film and book have a propagandistic, eulogizing flavor, a tendency to reduce everyone to physical type — much like the ways we represent historical politicians to children.

They’ll need a chart in here

I took a break from thinking to watch Death Note, which, on the face of it, is one of the most astonishingly misanthropic, hateful pieces of art imaginable. I’m not really talking about the fact that the main character is a murderous eugenicist with fantasies of godhood; the villain-hero is a storytelling device, a bit of a slow finger-breaking for the audience (“Do you empathize now? How about…now?”) — not a pulpit for the creators, and  I think we can all recognize that.

No, the shock comes from the series’ disgust with humanity. It is impossible in the world of Death Note to be both brilliant and entirely good, and as such the “good” characters are fairly ineffectual — while the brightest and most competent are deeply compromised extremists at best.  In sum, it’s one of those hell-series where you flip open the creators’ skulls and see nothing but dubious people doing things to dubious people; sympathy for these characters is possible, but empathy for any of them is slightly subversive. And I have an awful suspicion that the creators explicitly mean Ryuk — the observing demon with his frozen grin endlessly open for more “interest!” and “entertainment!” at the cost of the remotest moral investment — to represent the viewer.

Of course, there are pockets of optimism — within the series’ profound misanthropy, there lurk a few moments of kindness, fondness, genuine love between characters; a good deal of surprisingly lighthearted humor.  We are not meant to understand this as redeeming, of course.  Almost the opposite.  But there’s enough humanity that the viewer can empathize, and there are real rewards in that empathy.

For one, a series like this, which closely examines the minds of the major players in a massive historical turning point, offers a striking perspective on precisely why international history is so full of horrific tragedy, despite being largely made by well-intentioned geniuses.  That sounds like a cold reward, and so I should clarify that I primarily watch Death Note for the funny detective, but it’s true.

Of course, I didn’t see any of this at first, because the wish-fulfillment is too staggeringly appealing. True, like anything that appeals to everyone’s fetishes at once, parts of it can’t help but appear silly to nearly any viewer. It might be the extremely unsubtle media satire; it must be the presence of far too many detectives; it might be the pure organizational porn of headquarters and aliases and acronyms and charts and a helicopter (actually, sorry, two helicopters).

For me, the problem is generally with the anime’s disinterest in particularly considering the emotional ramifications of characters surveilling each other, or torturing each other, or being chained together, or whatever. I can buy most of the general grotesquerie, or a-ten-year-old-boy-wrote-this-erie — even the scene with the skyscraper and the ten million dollars, which has the additional excuse of actually being a prepubescent child’s idea onscreen. I just have a problem with the scenes in which the characters apply all of this spy-stuff to each other, while hanging out. That would have subtle personal consequences. Often we see them, but that only draws attention to the times when we don’t.

But despite all of these complaints, this is the first anime to really engage me for years; the first story to engage me for months. (I’ve had a bit of a dry spell.) The premise is cosmically brilliant, the execution perfect enough that its horrifying flaws really don’t come up on a first viewing. And then there’s L.

He do the police in different voices

If I were a few years younger, I would’ve cracked like an egg on my first encounter with L, because it turns out that every private fantasy I’ve ever had about myself, especially the ones I’ve actually tried to act upon, is a ripoff of this character.

Within reason, of course.  My quirks are not his. I wear different clothes every day. I’m not a curiously obvious Christ figure.  But I am a somewhat isolated, tic-ridden person.  And of course, that’s the dream — an isolated, tic-ridden person who is consistently listened to and understood to be a competent adult, who is allowed to pursue his single-minded aesthetic of anonymity and falling off of chairs — and who doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s received this consent, because he has more interesting things on his mind. Social permission is not his priority — neither getting it nor caring enough to defy it.  This is my very obvious fantasy. If it’s slightly childish on my part, it’s only because it’s so unrealized.

And it turns out I’m not alone, obviously, because L is the fan favorite.  Men throw themselves at him; women want to be him; androgynes copy his favorite refined sugars; animals snuggle his feet. This fact taps into something interesting and disturbing: this is a lot of people’s fantasy, apparently — some in one sense, some in another — and yet very few of us act on it in any meaningful way, even though all it implies is the most basic level of acceptance and self-acceptance.

Yes, I know:

Humans are so interesting!

Get out of my mind.

Anyway, Death Note is an outstanding diversion.  You should really watch it.  During the first part, you’ll enjoy watching displays of raw intelligence foaming from the mouths of the leads; by the time they reach the kind of intellectual deadlock which this situation would realistically demand, you’ll just be emotionally involved — even though there’s not much creator effort to make the series emotionally involving.  In fact, it’s a bit like watching 10 Spocks collide, only some of them are Mirror Universe Spocks, others are alternate-universe human Spocks, still others are little blond boys, and so forth.

shantih shantih shantih

I will admit that this out.com article on the blonde pop star whose name rhymes with Baby Zaza is the best argument I’ve read that she’s the embodiment of postmodernism. It’s true. She is a mind-bending whirl of influences. She steals like the hurricane; she is everything and nothing, a mirrored disco ball reflecting the tiny desires of millions -nay, brillions!- of fans. I say this sincerely. She is apocalyptically famous.

Unfortunately, all that means nothing, because postmodernism is dead. It died decades ago, with the rise of Andy Warhol — a thought that brings to mind the famous moment in Watchmen, when the heroes are abruptly told that the villain enacted his evil plan “thirty-five minutes ago.” They are left standing with their fantastic, useless toys dangling in their hands, in shock. It’s already over. The moment a subversive idea becomes popular is the moment it dies, and postmodernism was already pretty popular before the pop star whose name rhymes with Maybe Baba arrived -out of breath; covered in gold dust and wearing a borrowed bra- to become its belated messiah.

Now, what the fuck was postmodernism? This is not a joke or a philistine complaint; since it’s such a complex term, it’s a question we all must answer individually. Personally, I define it as it seems most often used: a philosophy holding that to be perfectly and elaborately allusive is the highest aim of art, that meaning beyond the superficial is an illusion dreamed up by pompous Victorians — and that all of this is to be celebrated, because in the absence of possibility for change, our only options are celebration and complaint.

That’s an exciting idea, but not for long. It’s true that its foundation was strong. Allusion is a cornerstone of good art; then we have the genuine headiness of the idea that nothing means anything, that we’re all essentially failed moral actors. I don’t want to belittle the strength of this idea. There is a good deal of truth in it. The only problem is that, once you believe it, it’s hard to believe anything else at the same time, which means you’re missing out on a crucial part of critical thought.

To believe anything from this position of freeing hopelessness, or to leave said position entirely, requires us to become people of faith — an increasingly stigmatized decision for modern intellectuals, which is why many intelligent and vigorous people have believed in nothing for decades. You can look at them in museums. Also, unfortunately, in universities and libraries and cafes and parks and private homes. These are perfectly intelligent, wise people; it’s just that they’ve decided that nothing they do can have the remotest effect on a yawping and bizarre universe, and the only fit topic is, indeed, how yawping and bizarre it all is.

This is boring. Anything is boring which refuses to engage. And when I look at a pop star like the one whose name rhymes with surprisingly few neutral-sounding words, all I can think is: we should be done with this. We should be beyond a point now where we are dazzled by a commentary on a commentary on a commentary. Nothing is ever interesting which exists only for its own sake — and the great example is fame-for-fame’s-sake, even if it’s fame-for-the-sake-of-parodying-fame. There is nothing clever about parodying something that’s already parodic. All you’re doing there is tapping into a rich vein. It helps to be a sharp needle (to switch veins, from ore to blood) — but it’s not required. Other recent pop phenomena, women who don’t seem all that sharp, prove that readily enough.

What would interest me more would be a New Obscurity. How such a movement might work, I don’t know — whether its members would simply reject traditional publication, or would reject publication entirely; whether they would dress in plain gray clothes or dress as wittily as they might otherwise, only refusing to photograph themselves or be photographed. I don’t know if they would prefer to be invisible or despised. I certainly can’t find an example in my own life, since I can’t separate fame from success any more than most of my contemporaries.

I say “most” because I’m convinced that there are New Obscurantists already, and perhaps have been in every century; you just haven’t heard of them. But because of the way we were raised, New Obscurity is impossible for most of us. Perhaps that’s actually best; you’d spend so much of yourself resisting the desire for raw recognition (with its attendant scent of postmodernism’s corpse) that you’d never write about anything else.

But if we want to resist it to a reasonable degree, I think an insistence on our own terms will help. Artistic fulfillment, and a sense of power over our work, can help to keep us from despairing if we go unrecognized and thus fail the official culture’s test of worth. If we work carefully, producing what we want without a specific eye to being seen at any cost, we can still quietly grab the rest of the world, all that she hasn’t yet (in partnership, of course, with the many fans and thousand predecessors and corporate identities she represents).

So, like most arguments which start out big, this one ends small, and with the usual little individualist plea: please deny this woman, in her human and metaphorical forms, by producing things with some kind of perspective, and occasionally for yourself alone.

PS This post has been obviously influenced both by “Three Guineas” and Thief (the plot of which eventually concerns itself with a secretive faction of warrior librarians, a sort of New Obscurity Militant, though they end up failing because they don’t really have anything to say).

PPS If I’m going to link to it, I have to take at least a token moment to complain about the Out article’s fervent belief that it speaks for the entire “gay community” by attempting to speak for those camp-oriented,  assimilationist, apolitical, postmodern-minded individuals who happen to be homosexual male fans of the pop star.

Out is theoretically aimed at both men and women, and more importantly, it’s theoretically aimed at everyone who may enjoy the company of their own gender from time to time — which must make it awfully hard to write for, much like writing for a magazine aimed specifically at strict heterosexuals who have nothing else in common.

To the tune of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”

Critical Failures (which is what I’m called in my private life) was in New York and then, after a brief break, in Portland. This extensive course of family-mandated and personal travel doesn’t explain why I’ve been conspicuously silent, but it probably hasn’t helped.

The real reason is that I haven’t been particularly inspired lately. I’m seeing a lot of things and consuming a lot of media. Some of the media has been good, and some of the things have been remarkable, but the good things have tended to be the kind that don’t benefit from elaboration. Likewise, the mediocre ones haven’t been the kind to suggest long posts on their potential improvement.

So here’s a simple list of what I’ve been thinking about, just to clear my mental cache.

This post eventually gets around to a long discussion of “Red Tide” by Neko Case

I just realized I could’ve done a whole series of awful “Criminal“-related titles for these Thief posts – the Thief II one could’ve been  “I’ve been a bad, bad girl/I’ve been Karras with a delicate man,” and, of course, the morality post, “I’ve done wrong, and I wanna suffer for my sins.”

Hindsight.

Anyway, it’s probably for the best. It’s easy to ruin a great song by associating it too much, even jokingly, with something literary or nerdy. I’ve already done this to Neko Case’s deadpan cover of “Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth” by connecting it with Thief’s dangerous nymph Viktoria, but like Viktoria I have no regrets.

I’ve obviously drifted quite a distance from this blog’s original music focus, for the simple reason that my short- and long-term obsessions are rarely musical and I’m better at talking about other things (unless the musicians are Kristeen Young and Morrissey and so on, people whose writing is knotty/plotty/referential, and therefore more suited for a fiction person like me). But while I’m talking about Middle Cyclone, “Red Tide” is the best thing I’ve heard since Music For Strippers:

It feels so dark and inexorable. I think it’s about the abuse of nature, and how so many romantic and nostalgic American images are inseparable from that abuse (“there’s a smell here of gravel, and cigarettes lit/when the match made them sweet/when the engine turned over…”), and then she twists it all into an apocalyptic sketch, which all makes me wonder if “that was a day…to remember” is a reference to my childhood obsession, the Titanic. If so, it’s very subtle, and therefore the only good kind of Titanic reference.

The fevered “I want to go back and die at the drive-in/die before strangers can say/’I hate the rain, I hate the rain!’” (a strongly musically emphasized line, spoken in obvious passion, which is interesting given how much she distances herself from this strange remark in the actual lyrics) gets at some kind of truth about Fifties nostalgia, a truth that -if she’d spelled it out- might have been dubious and dull. Instead it hits like a hammer to the side of the head. Which I’ve recently experienced quite a lot in virtual form.

All I need is a good defense, ’cause I’m feeling like a criminal.

In true fantasy fashion, this concludes a trilogy of posts which will eventually have one more sequel. The past two were about why I loved Thief II; this one will be about why I can barely stand Thief III, and I’m leaving things open for some eventual commentary on the first game. After a break.

First, for the record, I know it’s not called Thief III, but Thief: Deadly Shadows. The studio’s refusal to use a numeral -one of their many attempts to appeal to new players by avoiding the appearance of a sequel- is only one of the silly naming issues that plague the series, starting with the pleasantly literal title (after I finish Thief, I may play a couple of rounds of Violent Guy, or even load up Puzzle Solver for old times’ sake), continuing with the vague subtitles (in our house, we cut to the chase and simply call the games Thief: The Dark Problem, Thief: The Metal Problem and Thief: Deadly Problems) and inevitably cumulating in Eidos’ much-giggled-over, probably not-even-serious decision to call the next sequel Thi4f. So I’ll stick with “II” and “III,” if that’s okay with you, and let our respective gods sort it out.

I also know I’m in 2004 right now. I was in 2000 earlier; we’re still moving forward.

So here you are, making a sequel to a beloved duo of aging PC games. You know they already have a dedicated fan base, but you want to expand your audience; you’re also doing a console version this time, and you’d really like to streamline this game -a relic of the late nineties, with its massive nonlinear levels- into something that’s both comfortable on a console and appealing to people who aren’t familiar with all the mythology. How do you do that?

Apparently, you change your steampunk noir to something that is, at least spiritually speaking, a fantasy RPG. And that means -for our first Deadly Problem- derailment for the main character. This sounds strong, but the transition from a noir hero to an RPG hero is more drastic than you’d think, and a character derailment can be devastating to a game so driven by a certain kind of wish-fulfillment.

See, noir heroes are essentially passive. They’re highly competent characters, but the Man is always in their way; he needs their services, but he won’t give them a home. In Garrett’s case, he spent most of the first two games being ushered from one mission to another by political forces far beyond his control or understanding. His egoism, empty wallet, disdain for others and surprising naivete left him wide open to flattery, unlikely financial offers, and other obvious manipulation.

Whereas RPG heroes are essentially active. In fact, they always have to be the most active characters in any room; the only ones brave and smart enough to take the risks and make the hard decisions. Now, it’s not impossible that Garrett could be an RPG hero. He’s enormously charismatic and well-drawn for a game protagonist – but those standards are not high; outside a system where the reader/viewer/player is expected to do serious imaginative work, he’s still largely defined by what he does. That means an easy re-definition. And he wants his independence badly, which could very easily lead to a more dominant plot role (especially if he snaps from frustration, as he already sort of does at the end of Thief II).

My problem is in the execution. For sneaky, downtrodden Garrett to be believable as an active hero -while remaining vaguely recognizable as the character we know- the game has to use some narrative tricks that rarely come off well: surrounding him with characters more passive than himself, and stretching his existing motivations too far. It’s true that the Keepers are deadlocked by definition, and that Garrett at the end of II is strongly motivated to find out what they know and how he can push things in a favorable direction. But when it comes to the scenario where the game lost me -the Keepers are meeting; Garrett is with them; he proposes a plan which is briefly considered and then ignored; he sweeps out, coldly saying, “you’re forgetting something: I don’t take my orders from you”- you’ve gone too far; you’ve re-cast the character.

It’s not because what he does is out-of-character (though its consequence is shockingly so). This kind of instinctive “you’re not my dad!” sulk is part of his accepted pattern of behavior, especially regarding the Keepers, and he even did something similar at the end of Thief II. The difference was that -unless someone failed hard- the II storm-off was not presented as a heroic moment, but as Garrett simply flipping out, being irrational. His alliance with Viktoria and her priestesses, despite their ugly past, had been solid and productive, even friendly; he left solely to preserve his independence, missed the fight, nearly ruined everything, and only came back to save the world because his friend pleaded with him. If this was meant to reflect well on him, I’m missing something, but that’s precisely why it was good storytelling: the game kept you empathizing with the character even as he acted idiotically.

This worked, I think, because Garrett’s character in Thief II is (once again) about a specific kind of player wish-fulfillment. You’re burnt-out, you’re broke (at the start of the second mission, Garrett bemoans his brutal landlord and his recently dashed dreams of retirement); everyone runs all over you; you have no physical advantages over other people, and you have a lot of difficulty dealing with them in conversation. Your only solace is knowing you’re the best at what you do. In other words, the game valorizes, though not beyond reason, the kind of person who might enjoy playing it.

Whereas Garrett’s character in Thief III is about another kind of wish-fulfillment: telling your dad off. Being the only person who ever gets anything done around here; the only one who’s ever right, who takes the risks — but mainly telling your dad off, because you are not a slacker, and you do have self-control (the Keepers actually totally do accuse Garrett, in nearly so many words, of being a slacker and having no self-control).

Besides (Thief III continues) – your real friends appreciate you. All you have to do is leave the house to know it. All the other criminals are your buddies; they think you’re brilliant – the women throw themselves at you; the men pretend to be you to impress the gullible. (Contrast to Thief II, in which you had more realistic contacts – friends, respectful and less-respectful co-worker types, and guys who’d sell you out without a second thought). Anyway, you’re the fucking best at what you do, and that’s not just a consolation, that’s what you are.

If the execution had made more sense, Garrett’s increased autonomy could have been a logical character evolution. But since you’re being asked to relate to being Garrett in such a completely different way -to see him as an opportunity to feel bold and well-admired, rather than empathize with him as a slightly idealized version of you- the game doesn’t seem like a logical offshoot of its predecessor. The character doesn’t connect with his past self, even though he’s still voiced by Stephen Russell, a fifty-foot-tall man who intones into a microphone implanted directly in his throat as he fondly gathers the player into his giant lap.

It doesn’t help that there’s also been a huge sideways turn in the worldbuilding. I mentioned that one of the things I liked about Thief II was that it reproached bad moral decisions with pathos rather than punishment, and III does that too, but not as well. The pathos tends to come in the form of being told off; killing is no longer inherently horrific. This is mostly because they take your sword away, and now you can only kill by backstabbing people, which is quick and quiet and doesn’t give you a sense of the weight of what you’re doing. Sure, it was silly for a thief to carry a sword in the first place, but it’s a damned videogame; if I can suspend my disbelief that Garrett can carry an infinite number of goblets, than I can suspend my disbelief that he can carry a sword.

The world is also different in more concrete ways. Many of the interesting trademarks of the Thief II universe -the things that would’ve signaled this as a sequel with the same traits- are missing: the mixed-gender guards (with the interesting sense that the female ones were particularly zealous and brutal, moving into a newly open field and eager to impress); the rapidly modernizing city; the long, claustrophobic underwater sequences; the sense of dangerously supernatural, rather than controllably magical, forces at work.

Now here Garrett is with magic gloves that let him scale walls like fucking Spider-Man. He also drowns on contact with water, and dodges a conga line of interchangeable dudes in chainmail. And it really is jarring that, suddenly, most women in the everyday world are wenches of some kind. The only women whose response to you is asexual are the lone female criminal and the over-50 set (who are also, for some reason, all British).

I realize that to explain all this, I need only return to my mantra of “the game was trying to appeal to new players; it had to take a more conservative turn” — but why does this have to be so? All players were new players once, and somehow the Thief series still has a fan base. Even if you have to Year Zero it, what’s to stop you from using elements from the older games, given proper explanation? Where, for example, is the Mechanist technology from Thief II? It wasn’t all destroyed in the end of the game; it had been installed all over town, the whole society was rapidly technologically evolving — but nobody alive now has the savvy to fix it. Omitting it is not just an inexplicable worldbuilding decision; it’s a great missed opportunity for atmospheric decay. Robots in growing disrepair, inexorably dimming electric lights, perhaps even some trouble with Garrett’s mechanical eye (whose continued perfect functioning is beginning to mystify me).

But the real punch in the face of Thief II is the changes in the City. This, even more than the changes in Garrett’s character, even more than the backslide into medievalism, is what kills the noir.

I know that people complained about the breaking-up of the city levels -with those awkward portals connecting them- to accommodate the Xbox’s memory. This alone is a problem, but the real issue is simply that the City is not big enough; not dark enough; insufficiently inhabited. In the second game (where you essentially parachuted into all your missions) it was a hellish, organic maze, dark and unpredictably guarded, with defined public spaces, squares, courtyards and varied, accessible roofs; in the third (where you have to hack through the town on your way to every mission, and therefore see the entire world, such as it is, every day) it’s a low, bright area which is plainly trying to appear organic, but doesn’t, because you always remember one of those damned mystic-smoke transition points in your immediate past and anticipate one in your future, and also because it looks like fucking Hogwarts. Why does the light sparkle? Why is the sense of scale gone? Where are the squares and alleys? Why does this city have no public spaces, no market, financial sector, and almost no commerce of any kind?

Especially that last. Virtually the only transactions that take place are in thieves’ stores. Explain that whole idea if you can: purveyors of illegal items maintain clearly marked storefronts; the ubiquitous cops never enter their unlocked doors. Sure, you had a screen to buy water arrows in II as well, but I always assumed -I don’t know- that you got them in the backs of bars from guys called Creepy Pete. Or from seedy, well-hidden storefronts that posed as antique shops. Or something other than a Mae West impersonator behind a single counter with five items on it.

Honestly, you shouldn’t even have that much focus on how you get your water arrows. The more that happens, the more the player wonders what the ever-loving fuck water arrows are.

I realize that I’m leaning way too hard on Thief III, just as I was slightly too gentle on Thief II – I’m willing to forgive a lot of flaws for a believable world, and I’m very unsparing when disappointed. If I were a little less focused on character and a little more focused on technical strength, I think I’d have a very different (and much kinder) perspective. It might also help if I finished the game.

Related:

I liked this take on the Thief series, looking at it specifically as a trilogy, and discussing its “strangely life-affirming” nature.

This article on Ken Levine -the force behind Bioshock, and apparently heavily involved with Thief as well; I know so little about development, Christ!- is a great contrast to my Thief vs. Bioshock post on morality systems. He’s comparing the same games (though the first rather than the second Thief), and also with an eye toward their portrayal of morality and religion, but through a completely different lens. It’s worth reading just for the point about writers using Bioshock as a universal negative contrast, of which I stand justly accused.

Th1ef, Thi2f, Thi3f

Finished Thief II. I loved it like family, but I can’t say it’s my new favorite game — I hated the last level so much that I asked my partner to finish it for me; this may be a sign that I’m not going to blow the dust off Thief II and lovingly place it in the shadowbox beside Portal and Half-Life 2. I mean, that’s how you’re going to top ten hours of staggering, if not always fully realized, ambition? Two hours of factory work?

Well, fine. I admit it is very ambitious factory work.

But like I said, it’s still a brilliant game, one from which I would like to learn. Even nothing else about it were good, I’d be impressed that Thief II can leave so much of the drama to the player’s imagination (the game’s all about what you think about in the agonizing pauses, while you wait in a closet for the guards to calm down) while still relying on cutscenes to get the player from mission to mission, having Garrett chat to you every time he has an idea or needs to pee, and bugging the player with a shopping list of “objectives”:

Garrett will die if he doesn’t drink some milk soon. Find some milk in the fridge.

The guards here are very fast. Try to move slowly to defeat them better.

Failure is the mark of an amateur. Don’t fail or your mom will know.

The game gets away with this constant interference because it prioritizes so well; it leaves reasonable tasks -such as, oh Jesus, reading the map- to the player, and lets the character do the rest. Essentially, instead of playing a character where the required disbelief-suspension is “this violent man can get shot every day,” you play one where the required disbelief-suspension is “this sneaky man can hide effectively by standing against a dark surface; he can also figure out the plot, which is a good thing, since I’m busy maneuvering him clumsily through the doors upon which he continually gets stuck.”

(I am happy to report that, by 2004’s Thief III, the developers had successfully transformed Garrett from an invisible block to a grotesque marionette, and therefore you can now get through doors 100% of the time.)

Anyway, that brings me to my main point, which is that the writing of Thief II is really good. Yes, it all leans toward the hokey, we all know that; most game writing does (and maybe has to; is there an Uncanny Valley for words? Is this why literary realism rarely works for me?). But the plot is an extremely solid supernatural mystery. The worldbuilding is straight but self-aware fantasy, and surrounded as we are by fantasy that’s either parodic or unintentionally parodic, that’s an impressive thing. It is especially nice that the religions make sense.This is partly because they’re straightforwardly ripped from medieval Catholicism and generic paganism, but why not, if you can execute it well? And with a base that everybody understands, you can riff and expand on things freely — hence the convincing sense of tradition when Karras expounds, even somewhat esoterically, on the gospel of the Builder.

Speaking of which, some credit probably goes to the direction, but Stephen Russell’s voice acting (as smooth, sarcastic asshole hero Garrett and the perpetually disappointed-in-you, Droopy Dog-sounding, bizarrely approachable villain Karras) is outstanding and does much to carry the game. If you read these lines, they do exactly what they should. When he says them, they’re nuanced, tragic and often quite funny. It’s a performance I’d put with Ellen McLain’s in Portal.

I actually think Russell is even better as Karras; the performance breaks every reasonable law of voice acting (starting with the fact that it’s plainly a cartoon voice; ending with the fact that Karras has a very limited emotional palette, ranging essentially from “me” to “ME!”) — and still manages to contain an enormous energy and pathos. Part of it is that, due to technological limitations and storytelling prowess, you barely ever see Karras. Instead, you hear him on a loudspeaker, or as the recorded voices of his clunky steam-powered robots. The contrast between his silly voice repeating the same three lines and the robots’ brutal lethality, all encountered at unpredictable moments of unrelated tension, is very effective at generating new moods and shades of nervousness. It’s an entirely mental effect which, again, the gaming industry has spent the ensuing nine years trying to replicate with increasingly complex AI.

(Valve later used the chatty-invisible-cartoon-villain trick in Portal, and seems also to have lifted the idea -and some of the content- of Karras’ final speeches during Half-Life 2. It’s not like the developers of Thief II invented the loudspeaker, but the similarities are striking. Not that I mean any criticism by this. It worked just as well the second time.)

Where to end? It was a great game which, quite often, I wanted to murder. It was slow, hard to get used to, klutzy, with a hero who can’t put down useless items except by throwing them with the full force of his personality. (It’s hard to tell the gold candlesticks from the iron ones when you’re in a hurry, and it is precisely when you are in a hurry that it’s least helpful to fling them against the wall and make a giant clanging sound, Garrett. Honestly, you are like a petulant goddamn child, and if you do that one more time, I’m not sticking a keyboard in your butt and making you do stupid things anymore.)

But on the other hand, I actually thought that! These characters feel real, to the point (even) where you gleefully want at least two of ‘em to get a room, and you normally hate unresolved co-worker/partner love/hate sexual tension like the lazy, stupid characterization device it almost always is. Every person who writes fiction can learn something from this game. I’m not sure exactly what, but I’ll keep thinking about it.