The Colbert Report: The Most Cunning ARG You've Never Heard Of

The Colbert Report:  Flying Completely Under Your Radar.

1712141975_8d7e6172ed

I’ve been thinking about this for months, years in fact, watching The Colbert Report. Launched on October 17, 2005, satirist Stephen Colbert’s portrayal of Stephen Colbert, right-wing pundit (an homage to Bill O’Reilly), and know-it-all Wikipedia editing expert, is so seamless that the ‘performance’ of his faux character is almost forgotten. Search him online (forget Wikipedia today folks!) and it is virtually impossible to find interviews with the ‘real’ Colbert. Think back to his appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner 2006, billed as a Special Edition of The Colbert Report, where he delivered a masterpiece parody of the George Bush era and what he termed the “No Fact Zone.” Now, with his ongoing shaming of the Federal Election Committee (FEC) and the absurdities or criminalities of Super PACs in the US electoral process, he’s done a flurry of interviews this past week, again in character, with George Stephanopoulos and Ted Koppel. In each of these interviews, the extremism of his character is marked by some absurd proposal or claim that foregrounds the artifice of his performance. Watch his exchange with Stephanopoulos here:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/stephen-colbert-runs-president-talkss-geo....

Now if you’ve never thought about The Colbert Report as a transmedia ARG, pause for a moment. What Colbert has done is promote a fictional character with a subversive agenda across multiple platforms: the TV show, multiple websites (www.colbertnation.com, www.nofactzone.net/, http://www.indecisionforever.com/). What he’s doing definitely stretches the model of the ARG (hey! wait! Is there a single model?). But it’s definitely transmedia & cross-platform and he’s had complete buy-in from his audience:  he’s led an activist rally in the 2010 March to Keep Fear Alive (see its companion website, http://colbertrally.com/), and successfully solicited who knows how much $ through the contributions to his Super PAC that, as he repeatedly points out, he will not have to report on legally for an undetermined period of time. Yet this performance is only now being commented on widely as a performance: ABC news just today ran an article on Who is the Real Stephen Colbert? 

Colbert’s control of his performance and the media’s responses to him has been absolute and to get a sense of how he has created a storyworld in which his character exists as unchallenged, watch his September 2011 interview with Al Gore, who does the unthinkable on live TV by commenting on ‘your character.’ Colbert is clearly aghast and in character, crushes Gore with "finger quotes." Or watch Colbert’s interview with Frank Luntz October 2011 on how to set up his Super PAC focus group and sell the message that Corporations are People Too. Here, Colbert slips into his highly racist Chinese character, Ching Chong Ding Dong, and says: “I’m not responsible for anything my character says.” This moment is genius as it reveals the strategy underlying Colbert’s parodic persona. That he is now raising serious debate in the US as to the validity of Super PACs, generating numerous articles and news reports is an indirect homage to the persuasiveness of his performance over time.

Colbert’s application and appearance before the FEC was a fascinating moment in his ongoing ‘alternate reality performance.’ One, for Colbert, he was surprisingly monosyllabic and undemonstrative, whereas outside the hearing, he was emphatically the satiric pundit. That moment in the hearing however, raised the question of who exactly speaking before the Commission. As, if it was the character, then the legality & authority of the FEC were being mocked & challenged - technically a dicey move - yet watch him immediately after speaking outside to the press. Colbert played that moment ambiguously because he had to, but he also didn’t commit or reveal himself as the real Stephen Colbert.

And, given the specifics of the ruling as to what Viacom and Colbert’s Super PAC, Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, could and could not do, Colbert has neatly circumvented the restrictions on broadcasting outside of his show or network by allowing the net to do the job for him as his Super PAC negative campaign ads can be watched on multiple sites, including YouTube, and as embedded content in multiple news reports (Take that! SOPA!). If you haven't seen them, catch the latest Super PAC commercials here: Mitt the Ripper and Vote for Herman Cain

Colbert has used his comedic position to introduce new words to the lexicon, ‘truthiness,’ ‘anchor baby,’ and now it’s starting to look like his relentless and inventive challenge to the Super PAC might actually galvanize change. If he’s successful, I can’t wait to see what he tackles next.

 

You can read the Federal Election Committee's Advisory Opinion from June 30, 2011 here: 

http://www.colbertsuperpac.com/advisory/Advisory-Opinion.pdf 

And, if you haven't been following this, here's a great recap by Sarah Mimms:

“Federal Election Committee rules on Colbert’s Super PAC application”

by Sarah Mimms, June 30 2011

http://nationaljournal.com/hotline/fec-rules-narrowly-on-colbert-request-20110630

“In filing his initial request for an advisory opinion, Colbert sought to take advantage of an exemption traditionally used to allow media outlets to report and comment on campaigns and endorse candidates without having their work considered “in-kind” political contributions, triggering filing and disclosure requirements with the Federal Election Commission.

The request came down to one essential issue: whether Viacom can legally donate production costs, airtime and use of Colbert's staff to create ads for the so-called super PAC, to be played both on "The Colbert Report" and as paid advertisements other networks and shows.

The commission said no, ruling that once ads created using Viacom resources were broadcast on other networks, Viacom would have to report them as political contributions.”

 

What I’m looking forward to in 2012 - Part 1: Prison Dancer! Interactive Web Musical (new video & links added)

 

I’m assuming you’re all over this by now as this new web series & video trailer have been getting tons of global buzz in the last few days. But if you don’t know about it, you should.

 

Inspired by a real video of 1500+ prisoners in the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines dancing en masse to Michael Jackson’s Thriller (49+ million views), Prison Dancer is a 12 part interactive video series that will launch in March 2012. The trailer launched on YouTube six days ago, is now over 50,000 views, and has been picked up as viral video of the week by Fox News, “hot” on Trendhunter, and featured on Australian TV. Part of its appeal seems to be what co-writer and director Carmen De Jesus describes “as one of the first post-Dr. Horrible “made for web” musical web-series.” You know from the trailer that this is going to be a funny, campy, no-holds-barred production that will play up the romance and the drama in a way that reminds me already of John Waters’ musical homage to the 50s delinquent teen movie, Cry Baby (watch that one for an early singing Johnny Depp!). 

 

Now, one genius aspect of this production is its in-built global reach. Produced in Toronto, it taps audiences across national boundaries. One of the series’ stars is Mikey Bustos, a superstar in Canada and the Philippines who Americans might know better as “that guy who did the Filipino accent tutorial on the Internet.  

 

Producer Ana Serrano took a moment to answer a few questions and now I’m totally intrigued!:

 

SO: Prison Dancer is described as an interactive web series - that could mean interactive video where web videos have some kind of interactive interface to play with content flow or it might also include interactive participatory strategies for crowdsourced, fan-generated content - without giving too much away, are you playing with the latter idea? It would seem to be a genius project for that.

 

AS: We are playing with both ideas. One of the key interactive tools we are using is Youtube’s annotation tool. This allows folks to turn Youtube videos into clickable assets. For Prison Dancer, most of our episodes have interactive branches from them. However, these branches either provide more backstory to the characters or allow our audiences to engage with experiences they can then use to claim as their own and share back with the community. Think karaokified musical.

 

 

SO: As you say in your Toronto Star interview, this is “a perfect property for online because it was inspired by a web video,” the phenomenally popular Filipino prisoners’ YouTube version of Thriller. It was originally written as a play for stage and you give a little detail as to the long term vision, three seasons & maybe a Broadway Show, and Prison Dancer seems to have real substance as a cross-platform project. Is there a possibility of transmedia story extensions as well? It looks like this will be a story with multiple characters and easily multiple storylines, given the setting. Oz meets Glee but pitched WAY happier than OZ. And with three seasons in mind, that would seem to give you some scope for a really amazing transmedia story.

 

AS: yes, I think the possibilities for extending character storylines well beyond the web series and stage play are enormous. The original dancing inmates already have virtual lives.  It’s not far off to see either the “real prisoners” or characters inspired by them to be hooked on their Internet notoriety and hence want to continue building a rapport with an audience rabid for their dances. So yes, part of what we are playing with is who these characters are and how they may actually be interfacing with the Web audience as individuals.

 

 

SO: Another really fabulous aspect of Prison Dancer, with what little is known so far, is that the project already has a trans-global audience, especially with the story being set in a Filipino prison and being a Canadian production. Have you and the writers given any thought as to writing for specific regional audiences? Or, if you write for a global audience, do you feel there are any specific considerations to keep in mind? Or do you just make the best damn web series you can and see what happens?

 

AS: We have very specific audiences in mind — Filipinos both at home and abroad; LGBT; and Glee/musical lovers (which arguable could be seen as slightly mainstream these days...so call it young women.) So we are writing and creating experiences with those audiences in mind only. Our thought is if we can satisfy this niche yet globally distributed sets of people we have the possibility of crossing over.

 

 

SO: Have you thought about the fact that both this current project and the CFC's interactive feature film are set in prisons? Is there a wacky backbone of interest or theme(s) running through these projects for you? 

 

AS: LMAO have not even crossed my mind! But one of our themes is really about this idea of second chances. It’s a slightly subtle take to the classic underdog story. We’re creating a story not just about underdogs, or “losers” but about people who “lost their way” (as the first song “Point of View” says) and then finds it again by changing their “point of view” of what’s worth living for. (listen to the song to get the gist though you’ll here more of the lyrics in episode 1.) Which when I talk about it like this is also similar to the themes we explored in Late Fragment. So perhaps I am attracted to redemptive tales.

 

      

So props to Prison Dancer and to the launch of Ana’s independent production company, Prison Dancer Inc, co-founded with Carmen De Jesus and Romeo Candido (who penned writer of the lyrics and music and is co-writer of the book with De Jesus). I love it when smart people do smart work.


Mikey Bustos gives a peep inside the production here:

 

 

And if you haven’t seen the original viral Prisoners of Cebu Thriller it’s here:

 

 

Other great posts on Prison Dancer here:

 

http://www.8asians.com/2012/01/06/viral-like-sars-prison-dancer-the-interacti...

 

http://www.channelapa.com/2012/01/prison-dancer-the-interactive-web-musical-t...

 

 

Tactility 2: The Beauty of Older Forms

Tactility 2: The Beauty of Older Forms

 

I love the collective aesthetic of these videos that play with silhouettes, paper & wood, and colour palettes that borrow from Dutch masters & Victorian illustration. To me these four videos want to cluster together

 

Cirque du Freak

 

http://motionographer.com/theater/yuco-cirque-du-freak-titles/

 

A Series of Unfortunate Events - end credits:

 

 

A Short Love Story in Stop Motion

 

 

When I am King

 

The Digital Writing is on the Wall

The Digital Writing is on the Wall

 

I’ve been mulling on the the potential of the web for film distribution for a while & I’m sure many others are too (Lawrence Lessig, Brett Gaylor,...numerous others).

 

 

Watching M.I.A.’s 'Born Free online crystalized ideas that have been floating since I watched Spike Jonze’s 'I’m Here' on its launch day.  And having to watch at 6:30 am to keep my preferred ticket wasn’t ideal - but I did it - which says something about the success of the campaign or about my geeky obsessions. 

 

http://www.imheremovie.com/

 

Both Jonze & Philips’ Cinema created an online presence for their films through teaser campaigns, trailers, & pings to fans. Philips’ use of Facebook has been highly active with numerous teasers, challenges & postings about location specific events. And both projects now stand as highly successful models of how to bypass distributers. The Absolut sponsored site for ‘I’m Here’ has increased its bandwidth to handle the volume of views and the film is now running on two hour cycles.

 

http://www.facebook.com/philipscinema?v=app_295019128299

 

M.I.A.’s video was released on the web without a specific host site & I’m sure everyone involved knew it would be quickly pulled from Youtube. Having the video removed for graphic content is an obvious value in the publicity generated. The violence however really is no more excessive than many a war film I’ve watched in the last decade and the premise of targeting a specific group because of a physical feature is very close to the one used by Jane Elliot in her ‘brown eyes/blue eyes’ anti-racism exercise and captured in the 1996 documentary ‘Blue-Eyed.’ Now that the video exists on multiple sites the only drawback I see is the challenge of tracking views. 

 

Whether you think ‘Born Free’ is a commercial grab or a genuine artistic statement or both, M.I.A’s video is another step towards direct distribution on the web. Video views may or may not drive up sales (it hasn’t cracked the top 200 on iTunes yet) but the number of sites hosting it & views will likely keep climbing. Very few artists exist completely outside of the commercial sphere and now, 2010, we are starting to see artists using the web & commercial partnerships to get their work out in ways that still maintain the integrity of the artistic work. In the last few months, we’ve seen a number of directors using the web to launch careers & projects. 

 

Ricardo de Montreuil’s just-launched short film, 'The Raven,' has been generating buzz as much for its low budget of $5000 as for its high quality.

 

 

And Fedez Alvarez’ release of his 5 minute trailer for ‘Panic Attack’ got him a $30 million deal for a feature with Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures in fall 2009. 

 

 

If the digital writing is on the wall, and that wall is the existing system of distribution for filmmakers, the wall is also starting to crumble and artists have a real opportunity to not only affect but to decide how the future structures that mediate between artists and audiences take shape. So fellow artists, I can’t believe I’m going to quote Reagan, but, Tear Down That Wall! and start making something new.

Scope | Issue 4| Film Reviews

Issue 4: Film Reviews

Memento

Dir: Christopher Nolan, USA, 2001

Switching

Dir: Morten Schøjdt, Denmark, 2003

A Review by Siobhan O'Flynn, University of Toronto at Mississauga, Canada

Christopher Nolan's neo-noir thriller, Memento, has generated polarized responses: fans who love the challenge of grappling with the puzzle of the film's fragmented structure and those who are turned off by either the frustration of the effort required to piece the story together, or a dissatisfaction with the story that is or is not eventually recovered. Within new media studies, Memento's non-linear structure has received a flutter of comments because, in Jon Dovey's words, the film is an example of what he has suggested is "a narrative structure that might respond to a spatial analysis….[as] a film that is of the cultural moment of hypertext". Dovey's comment, offered in "Notes Towards a Hypertextual Theory of Narrative" (2002), is predicated on the opposition of film as a passive medium set against the active, immersive, involvement of the interactive piece. What he does not pursue in depth is an exploration of the spatial, interactive experience of this "passive" film that occurs in the viewer's active decipherment of the film. Paradoxically, the lessons gained from a "spatial analysis" of the film occur despite Memento's supposedly "passive" medium. Watching Memento can be highly interactive, and the more adept the viewer is at maintaining multiple story lines, the more involved in the story recreation, the more satisfying the experience can be. As such, the film can in fact model an alternative focus to the current, reductive approach to narrative in new media studies and a key insight into the authoring challenges of writing narratives for new media works.

For the filmmaker working in new media, interactive movies are the Holy Grail, where interactivity is at once the gimmick with the potential to lure curious users, and the potential cause of the alienation of those users. Easy to imagine, interactive cinema suggests the combination of the gut-wrenching, emotion twisting, edge-of-your-seat power of cinema with the addictive thrill of action/reaction found within games. What could be better? We get a story and we get to play with it: "You choose what will happen next!" Or, as the recent X-Box game, Fable, announces: "For every choice, a consequence." The idea of combining the attractions of film and game is clearly heard in Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for the Twenty-First Century (2004), the new how-to work by interactive screenwriter and theorizer, Andrew Glassner, in his call to new medium creators: "In our quest to develop a new medium, I believe we should aspire to something that is capable of deep human expression….I am excited by the idea that we can develop a new form of expression that is capable of not just entertainment but depth". Why then, haven't interactive movies become as ubiquitous as cell-phones? The challenge for creators of interactive movies is how to overcome the inherently disruptive act of interactivity, of shifting from one story line to another. In giving up control of the plot, the interactive filmmaker must relax the control of the disclosure of information necessary for traditional plots. The absence of a tightly controlled structure presents the creator with the problem of how to construct a narrative that can generate the same (or similar) effects of the traditional plot (drama, suspense, conflict, climax, and character arc, to name a few) when the sequence of the telling is constantly disrupted. If we follow a story that no longer adheres to a linear, author-driven sequence, we risk losing the impact or suspense of the masterfully plotted thriller or melodrama or comedy.

The emphasis on an Aristotelian notion of the function of story and plot established what has been a long-standing opposition of narrative and database within new media criticism and practice. Lev Manovich declared, in an oft-quoted statement from The Language of New Media (2001), that:

As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world.

Manovich's distinction between database and narrative defines narrative as a sequence of events held together by a discernable sense of causal relationships thereby generating an understanding of consequence and meaning. This definition has remained consistent in most critical examinations of the problem of narrative in new media, wherein "narrative" and "story" are used interchangeably. Yet the Aristotelian distinction between story as the chronological sequence that can be reconstructed from the plot and plot as the often non-chronological sequence of events found in the telling, does nothing to resolve the problem of interactivity, and in fact places the focus of attention on the wrong element. Creators are faced with a vista of either random, user-generated, causally unconnected plotting or the nightmare of endless branching vistas of obsessively plotted multi-stream stories.

The major stumbling block for creators of interactive works has been working with the two central elements of story and plot, and story has been the focus of much recent critical writing on narrative and new media. The paradox of this new medium is, however, that while the technology is constantly improving, amazing graphics, mobility within a virtual space, interaction with beautiful graphics and a fully realized virtual world are potentially meaningless without a good story. However, the contemporary critical focus on story, or as it is often phrased, narrative in new media, will never adequately overcome the problem of interactivity disrupting the "story" because of the reductive approach to story adapted consistently via the same ur-texts of literary theory. When new media theorists or creators turn to literature as an old media modeling a "passive" textual experience, almost universally, discussions focus on the Aristotelian opposition of story and plot. What has been left out are discussions of the non-traditional novel, of the function of language, style, and the poetics of metaphor, symbolism, etc.

Memento's noir story and cast of characters are entirely conventional. A man, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pierce) seeks revenge for the rape/murder of his wife (Jorja Fox), only to find himself duped by the corrupt cop (Joe Pantoliano) and the femme fatale (Carrie Ann Moss). Even the dual function of the protagonist as the detective/criminal, which the audience is confronted with in the opening sequence, is as old as Oedipus Rex. Nolan's innovations within the genre are the "condition" of his protagonist who is unable to create short-term memories and the disruptive structure of the film that replicates Leonard's fragmented experience of time and the world for the viewer. Even Leonard's condition is arguably a new twist on Oedipus' fatal flaw of ignorance. The structure, however, has received critical praise, and Nolan received an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. The film disrupts chronological time by intercutting multiple time lines and possible-alternate story lines. The first, "Z" to "M" backward time-line is established in the opening sequence and Nolan makes this story line instantly recognizable by shooting it in colour. This sequence starts chronologically after the key violent encounter that opens the film and Leonard's significant change into a tailored suit. The colour sequence further functions as Leonard's "external" journeying through a benighted urban landscape of diners, bars, abandoned buildings, and various motel rooms. The second, b/w sequence, moves from "A" to "M" in a forward moving time-line that is intercut with the colour sequence. In this claustrophobic, increasingly paranoid sequence, Leonard, in his original "grunge" clothes, sits in a motel room, surrounded by the maps, polaroids, notes, and tattooing equipment, he "scripts" his world from. The reconstructed "A" to "Z" story which the viewer reassembles from the disruptive shifting between seemingly distinct yet connected stories, is complicated by suggestions of contradictory details that destabilize the "truth" of Leonard's limited perspective. One such instance is the story of Sammy Jenkis, a man with a mirror condition to Leonard's. This story is embedded in the b/w sequence as a story that Leonard tells repeatedly in order to explain his own "condition." Yet as cinephiles will know, Nolan destabilizes the "truth" value of this story with a subliminal superimposition of Leonard's face on that of the bug-housed Sammy, suggesting that Sammy's story is Leonard's own. This fleeting vision, more readily accessible on the DVD, leads to the unhinging conclusion that Leonard's "story" and the action of the film may exist only within his mind.

Despite its traditional format, Memento has earned a level of cachet in discussions on how to theorize interactive cinema because of its fragmented, dislocating structure. By rights, the film's constant disruptions of the story line(s) should alienate viewers, and in fact, it often does. For some viewers, however, the experience is arguably more immersive because the engagement with solving the puzzle demands that the viewer maintain three or more separate and interconnected story lines simultaneously. What the viewer assembles is a spatial mobile of suspended story fragments that intersect and alter each other through the course of the viewing. Dovey's emphasis is on the viewer's "contemplation [of] the static reality of a number of events that have already occurred and then to try and make sense of them". The focus here is on the reconstruction of the static "story" from the fragmented plot. This Aristotelian approach to "story" is pervasive in writings on narrative in new media.

Memento's structural challenge is also no innovation. Literary works such as Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, Annie Dilliard's For the Time Being, and V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World all present fragmented narratives constructed of intersecting story lines and/or thematic threads that challenge the reader to create a sense of a unified whole, in answer to the question, how do all these discrete and seemingly different fragments relate? In the viewing experience of the film, however, a viewer is forced to consider not just the story or narrative but the question of how meaning is generated on various levels that can exist independent of the linear story, more usefully thought of as narrativity. When the access to or comprehension of an horizontal, chronological story line is complicated or blocked by the fragmented work (traditional or interactive), the reader/user is forced back to a consideration of what Dovey and many others have termed the vertical axis of narrative that is concerned with the generation of meaning at the level of theme, symbol and metaphor. From the standpoint of the creator, all of these devices are again as old as storytelling itself, as much a part of Beowulf's "word hoard" as the epithets, similes, metaphors, and ritual set pieces that formed the "database" of the epic poet.

Within the disrupted text, the reader/user engages with the text/world hunting for patterns, echoes, repetitions and inversions, much like Leonard Shelby, all of which function to create associative links between otherwise distinct fragments or episodes. Contrary to Dovey's assertion that Memento "invites us to contemplate the static reality of a number of events that have already occurred," Nolan's film offers not a contemplation of static elements but of narrative fragments that are dynamic, mutually affecting and unstable in terms of the meaning attached to each. This understanding of the interrelation of story and narrativity also counters a long-standing opposition within new media theorizing.

Morten Schjødt's interactive feature film, Switching, winner of The Cyberloup-IPL New Media Award 2003, also challenges the user to reconstruct a story from a fragmented narrative. In this made-for-DVD work, the viewer/user can "switch" from moment to moment by hitting the "enter" button. The film is designed to suggest an intuitive "switch" window in moments where characters become introspective. Schjødt's decision to use the cinematic moment in which a character turns from external interaction to internal contemplation as the "natural" moment to switch nicely integrates the content with the interface technology, while also suggesting an implicit belief in moments of narrative closure in which we will naturally be ready to move on. However, the DVD allows the user to "switch" at any moment; the user decides when to "end" the experience. The switching experience itself allows the user to move chronologically through short temporal sequences that move forward, then loop back and then move forward again with variations. Some sequences are highly realistic, others hallucinatory, and reactions to the piece read it variously as one story with variations, or multiple parallel story lines with minor differences. Either way, because the sense of temporal relation and causality is unhinged, particularly by the combination of realistic scenes with hallucinatory ones, the question of narrativity resurfaces in terms of what other elements can generate meaning within but especially across fragments.

The story, however, is again entirely traditional. We follow a Danish couple, Frida (Laura Drasbæk) and Simon (Rasmus Botoft) in encounters before and after their break-up. The cast of characters include Frida's sister, Anna (Kaya Brüel), who has designs on Simon, and an oddly knowing waitress (Lærke Winther Andersen) who works in the café all the characters habituate, and who is also interested in the rejected and downcast Simon. The wolfish Patrick (Johan Widerberg), a Swedish DJ in the café, introduces further sexual tension, as he too becomes involved with Anna. Nationalist tensions are also raised in a scene at the urinals in which Patrick derides the size of Simon's "little cock".  Clearly, Patrick's self-satisfaction has as much to do with a sense of Swedish superiority over the Danish Patrick as with the relative size of their organs.

The film "begins" in the conventional sense of having a clearly articulated beginning, with a fade-in to the POV of Frida, driving through an underground, fluorescent lit tunnel in the title sequence. The film then alternately cuts to a close-up of Frida washing her face in the café washroom or Frida waking up in the daylight looking for Simon who then brings a cup of undrinkable coffee, or Frida waking up at night with Simon beside her. Other scenes are also presumably possible "beginnings," but these seem to be the common "start" scenes. The website for the film describes the relationship of these two waking scenes as a "vicious circle in which they [Frida and Simon] are trapped." In an optimal user experience, the user "switches" in an anti-linear way through various moments of the chronological "story," building a reasonably coherent sense of the spatial story outside of the iteration itself. As with Memento, the user then builds a spatial cognitive mobile of suspended story fragments that interact and reconnect with each additional story fragment. In extended viewings, the film's disrupted chronology plays with our sense of relationships as functioning simultaneously within and without time. Memories return and invade the present, the future is disrupted by the past. As Simon tells Frida, "Time is relative. It's always related to before and after." Further, the notion of time as a constrictive force, as the cycle of suffering, death and rebirth or samsara is introduced in Frida's gift of The Buddhist Bible to Simon after their break-up. The idea of samsara emphasizes the interactive experience as a "vicious circle" without an ending.

The interactivity can be intriguing, particularly with certain scenes that seem to remain unexplained within the overall trajectory of the film: a hallucinatory bug experience of Frida's in the woods; and a waitress who serves coffees then begins to strip. The film seems, however, to not use fully its potential for narrativity in the way that recurrent details, like bugs, washing, and showering echo across fragments but don't seem to resolve into any more meaningful, or insightful relationship to the story. This gap may simply be an obfuscating directorial choice in the same territory as David Lynch's hallucinatory, meaning-resistant films. "Switching" can also trap the film in increasingly constricted loops so that one is forced to watch sequences over and over in decreasing units of time until through some seeming haphazard stroke of luck, the film releases the viewer and switches into a new sequence. Another dissatisfaction arises from the DVD's scene selection function. Here, as on a standard DVD, the user can choose to watch the story scene by scene. Unfortunately, this option can also reveal scenes which the user missed in the creation of his or her narrative. This "reveal" can leave the user in the ticked-off position of being made aware that she or he has missed potentially crucial scenes and/or sequences.

These structural "bugs" can seriously disrupt the user's immersion in the film and unfortunately, whatever spatial model of the narrative the user has created up until that point can get metaphorically jettisoned with the shift to frustrated compulsive pressing on the "enter" key. This is a serious flaw that presumably interactive filmmakers want to avoid. When Switching works, the experience can be as immersive as viewing Memento. At its worst, I'd stick with the more "passive," traditional, director-controlled form of Memento any day of the week.

my essay on Memento as a model for designing interactive narratives

Transmedia storytelling is future of biz - Entertainment News, Film News, Media - Variety

Transmedia storytelling is future of biz

Studios create mythologies, multimedia worlds

A June 2009 Variety article on transmedia storytelling with comments from Jeff Gomez of Starlight Runner on the transmedia development of Avatar.

"The company's work "goes beyond your typical bible," Gomez says. Starlight Runner creates "megabibles and mythologies" contained in oversized binders full of images, chronologies, storylines, character profiles and descriptions of such details as geography, vehicles and weapons. "We teach the studio, other divisions of its parent company and its licensors how to bring these characters to life in a way that's true to the original platform."

For example, Starlight's mythology document for "Avatar" facilitated the extension of that property to the vidgame arena via publisher Ubisoft, which plans to release an Avatar game that, like the movie, will be available in stereoscopic 3-D.

Starlight began its relationship with "Avatar" via an introduction made by a senior studio exec with considerable franchise familiarity just as production on the film was getting under way.

"We always try to extend a property to other experiences," says the exec. To do that, he adds, it's important to "look at what the essence of the property is, what people are responding to, and re-create that in other ways."

"People are realizing that this kind of concerted implementation is one of the most powerful ways to convey messages," says Gomez, who worked with Disney on "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "Tron," and with Fox on James Cameron's "Avatar." "For them, as for most of our clients, we make sure the universe of the film maintains its integrity as it's expanded and implemented across multiple platforms."

I love that Jeff Gomez emphasizes the integrity of a project. How many adaptations/transmedia developments have flopped because they have betrayed something essential that the core fans love?

Avatar's Kitsch Conscience: Why This Is A Bad Movie & Why We Should Still See It

Ok, so this has been bugging me since I finally saw Avatar last week - As I sat watching the onslaught of cinematic & cultural cliches I couldn't decide which camp Cameron's Avatar falls into based on T.S. Eiot's distinction that 'good poets borrow, great poets steal.' If we took away the technical brilliance of Avatar I know I couldn't sit through it, without howling with the disbelief that kicks in watching unapologetic kitsch on the scale of Showgirls, Any Given Sunday, and any of the other movies that have ranked as some of the high budget worst films of all time. And because the technical delivery is so brilliant, so immersive, so seductive, I had to go back to Susan Sontag's "Notes on 'Camp'" and the knowingness of camp's viewing everything in quotation marks and Whitney Rugg's analysis of kitsch in order to lay to rest the fact that no matter how gorgeous or ground-breaking the technology is, this is one bad movie. 

So for those who are pounding their keyboards in disbelief, pause for a moment and think about kitsch as the hallmark of works produced for a mass audience and 'as a type of creation that reaffirms rather than challenges the collective norm, a source of sheer entertainment in opposition to the elevated perception generated by high art.'

Granted, the distinction between high art & popular culture collapsed decades ago, and Cameron's undeniable technical achievement in skinning his actors into the 3D immersive experience could arguably be enough to justify viewing this film as genius. And arguably, Cameron's mastery of popular narrative form is demonstrated in Avatar's pastiche of countless other sci-fi stories, though I would counter that Cameron is no Joyce or Tarantino. What is lacking in the dizzying swirl of extra-textual references is any reflexive engagement with the genres (action movie/sci fi) or the form (technology's double-edge of life enhancement vs. environmental degradation) or the cultural context of American consumerism in which Avatar is produced.

A further comment reminds us that kitsch cannot be conceived as distinct from the dynamics of power in a given society in that the term was used increasingly 'to describe both objects and a way of life brought on by the urbanization and mass-production of the industrial revolution' directs us to think about both the 'aesthetic as well as political implications, informing debates about mass culture and the growing commercialization of society.'

Viewed in this context, Avatar's environmental message boldly foregrounded in the plight of the Na'vi is countered by precisely the technology that makes this fantasy so alluring. I am not the first to comment on the irony of the expense of realizing this virtual experience in the context of environmental concerns. And where the film fixes Jake Sully's physical disability through the quantum magic of the Ewya Tree, we in this world do not have the opportunity to transfer our 'souls' into other forms on other planets in order to escape the consequences of what Eisenhower foretold as the dangers of the military-industrial complex.

Perhaps what was most galling for me in Avatar was the complete absence of any recognition of how hollow the innumerable cliches spun throughout the film are, which again is the very definition of kitsch. The invention of the term, 'unobtanium,' marks the creative deficit of the storytelling in the deliberate waiving of any metaphorical richness that might have been embedded. As is, it is a term that signals the writer's conviction that audiences can no longer respond to symbolic language and it demonstrates a lack of trust in the intelligence of the audience and in the power of an intelligent story (Eywa tree & seeds aside). 

One might then weigh the the gain of disseminating an environmental message against the environmental footprint of the film (production & that arising from screening the film and the car cultures that support suburban multiplexes). And one might say, ok, maybe the paucity of the story is offset by the delivery of this green message to a much wider audience than Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth can ever achieve. The recent sell-out success of the Ewya seed sold on etsy.com attests to what could become this year's pet rock, kitsch with a conscience (see post below).

The question I would rather pursue is whether Avatar should be the model for the next wave of 3D entertainment that the focus on 3D TV at the 2010 Consumer Electronic Show so clearly heralds. And if we are at the point of another massive technological shift, do we really want 3D experiences that are solely driven by a technology that renders us rapt & passive consumers of narrative pap?

Now I had to ask myself what I would have written into the story, if I were on the team. And what I would have wanted to see would have been a more layered awareness of the complexities of the human plight that serves as the backstory, the death of our planet which presumably has impacted all of the human players on Pandora. Adding this complexity could have brought the characters into the 3D of human experience rather than the 2D cut-outs the film dishes out as reassuringly familiar types. Something that could have touched on the profound paradox of our time in the schism that exists between the extraordinary inventions that herald the 21st century as an optimistic sensorium of ubiquitous computing and the digital divide that determines who has access to this new era and who does not.

So if we are at the brink of another tipping point in terms of where our consumer and entertainment driven culture will move next, we should be aware of what may be the unacknowledged caution in Avatar. Unlike Jack Sully, we are still bound by the physical world, still geolocated by the physical coordinates and condition of our bodies. Rugg's thinking on kitsch points to the danger of this fantasy when he writes:

'Kitsch tends to mimic the effects produced by real sensory experiences [compare simulation/simulacra), presenting highly charged imagery, language, or music that triggers an automatic, and therefore unreflective, emotional reaction.'

This might not have been your response to the film but I know I experienced the lure of the unreflective in the cinematic lizard portion of my brain. Let us not forget that the immersiveness of Avatar's simulated world, both in the human and Na'vi realms, is designed to render us acquiescent, and that the disaster that haunts dystopic visions of our future so pervasively that Cameron doesn't even bother to fill in the details, is one that we can still choose to respond to. Assuming that we are moving inevitably towards a virtually enhanced and/or enabled existence is to accept the demise of the physical world we know as predetermined. And so I would choose not to accept Cameron's vision of the future without critically assessing the paths within and without the film that lead to Pandora. And don't get me started on the choice of name for the planet which may be in a meta-critical way brilliant in its implicit reminder to think of the consequences of our actions before we realize them.

Counter-arguments welcome! Convince me.