Age of the Executive Auteur

The Auteur as a figure in entertainment is dead. Grown strong on digital production, a more artistically bankrupt creature emerges in their place. It is the Executive Auteur, and it's coming soon to a theater near you, whether you like it or not.

Art Beyond AI

AI art is here. How the hell are artists actually supposed to respond? If proposed answers all feel like dead ends, maybe it's time to look beyond art: to politics.

In The End We All Do What We Must: Universal Paperclips, Clicker Games, AI, and Agency

Remember Universal Paperclips, that clicker game? Remember turning the human race into paperclips? Ok, so, what if you just... didn't? What would that choice tell us about game design, agency, artificial intelligence, and people?

Room For You Inside: Pink Floyd In Quarantine

You barricade yourself in your hotel room; it becomes a fascist rally. You write a concept album about your alienation; it becomes the Thatcherite Revolution. You live in modern luxury; it becomes a mad haunted house. This is a story about Pink Floyd's The Wall and the culmination of half a century of No Alternative.

Content warnings for discussion of quarantine, isolation, apartment horror, drug abuse, mental breakdowns, neoliberalism and its brother, fascism.

The Trash World of Ideology: Thor Ragnarok Wants You To Destroy America

It's a StIT Thorsgiving Special! Feeling harried by your racist relatives? Hide in the bathroom, pull up this essay, and talk turkey with me about how Thor: Ragnarok really does seem to think Marvel, Disney, and America all need to be destroyed!

Image extremely helpfully provided by EssayofThoughts

An Eternal Golden Helix Fossil: Three Years On, What Can We Say About Twitch Plays Pokemon?

Three years ago I wrote an academic article about Twitch Plays Pokemon. The article was never published anywhere, but despite that blow to its notability TPP continued on, and is still going three years later. This week, I take a look at this article, which in many ways is a predecessor to my Reload the Canons! series, and comment on what I got right, what I got wrong, and how the issues surrounding TPP have shifted and changed over the past three years.

Reload the Canons! is an ongoing Storming the Ivory Tower project where I play through The Canon of videogames. Except I'm not playing the original games. Instead, I'm playing only remakes, remixes, and weird fan projects. This is the canon of games as seen through the eyes of fans, and I'm going to treat fan games as what they are: legitimate works of art in their own right that deserve our analysis and respect. You can support Reload the Canons! and my other projects on the Storming the Ivory Tower Patreon. 

A Galaxy Very, Very Near: Are Time And Space in Rogue One Core to its Resistance Narrative?

Rogue One is a film about resistance and domination, time and space, environment and technology. Can linking these concepts together tell us more about the film's science fiction storytelling... and reveal something about our own forms of contemporary resistance?

If The Train Stops We All Die: 2016 In Review

2016 sucked. Let's talk about Snowpiercer, clipping., and seceding from a broken reality.

All art in this article is by Kathe Kollwitz, queer revolutionary socialist engraver.

Crazy Noisy Bizarre Town: Mob Psycho 100, Diamond Is Unbreakable, and... Post-Shonen Anime?

Mob Psycho 100, like comicker One's previous work One Punch Man, has a premise that seems to undermine core aspects of Shonen narratives... or even action narratives in general. Coincidentally, the current arc of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Diamond Is Unbreakable, has developed in ways that also disrupt traditional storytelling. Might we call these two works post-Shonen? And what can a 1961 short story by Kurt Vonnegut tell us about what these shows are trying to do?

Everyone Hates Grant Ward: Strung Up By Your Own Bootstraps

"You didn't tell me he was this crazy."
"He's really stepped it up a notch..."

There's a fascinating contrast in episode 21 of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD between big bad John Garrett and big... good Agent Coulson that effectively conveys the basic messages of SHIELD and Hydra. These messages are worth considering in light of the wider conversation I highlighted on Monday about how utterly loathsome Agent Grant Ward is. After all, Grant Ward wasn't "born evil" as the show has put it over the last few episodes, he was made that way by Garrett. Understanding the ideology that Garrett instilled in his subordinate, and what that suggests about SHIELD and Hydra, is essential to understanding--although not necessarily forgiving!--Ward's actions and character motivations and how they relate to the show's wider themes.

There will be some mild spoilers here for the show's finale, which debuted last night, but I'm trying to keep them largely to a minimum, and none of the really major moments will be spoiled, just some of the kicker lines (of which, because this is a Whedon project, there are many). Still, if you haven't seen the finale yet, you may want to hold off reading this article till you get a chance to get caught up.

Creating As The World Falls Down

As a kid, the part of Jim Henson's famous fantasy film Labyrinth that always freaked me out wasn't a part full of strange monsters or weird settings. It was a sequence towards the end of the film when the protagonist, Sarah, has escaped from a strange illusory costume ball (literally--she's stuck in an actual crystal ball) into a vast junkyard in which, strangely, her bedroom sits, with all her toys. In her room, which sits separate from the rest of her house, she is handed toy after toy by a strangely unsettling junk-covered creature.

The sequence is unnerving in part simply for the intrusion of elements of the Labyrinth environment into the mundane setting of Sarah's room, and perhaps that alone is enough to explain my consistent feeling of discomfort during the scene. Special shoutout in particular to the moment where she opens the door, expecting to see the hallway, and instead comes face to face with the blasted wasteland and the bustling figure of the junk woman.

But beyond that simple disorienting intrusion of the labyrinth into a recognizable home environment, there's also, I think, the recognition that at no other point does Sarah come closer to failing in her quest, and the implications of that are fascinating to me.

Love Me, I'm A Liberal: Arrow and Faux Leftism Pt. 2

Last week on Storming the Ivory Tower, the evil villain with a tragic backstory Penstroke the Terminator, having gathered a team of supervillains, was attempting to use the dread power of close reading and critical analysis to destroy Arrow. The show, not the character. Having explored the various ways in which the character Brother Blood serves as a representation of more radical leftism on the show to be attacked in favor of at best weak centrism and at worst pro-corporate, pro-1% ideological positions, Penstroke the Terminator now brings forth two more villains in order to demonstrate, once and for all, the failures of The Arrow Show!

Can anyone stop this madman?!

Stay tuned after these messages from our corporate masters!

BWAAAAOOOOM SERIOUS JOURNALISM FOR SERIOUS MODERN SUPERHEROES

Liberal from a Distance: DC's ARROW and Faux Leftism (Part One)

No, Lord Humongous, there's no point in raiding any oil refineries at this stage of the plan. Yes, I know, but you'll just have to--

Wait, wait... it looks like our... guest... has finally woken up.

No, no, don't pretend you're still asleep! The sedative should have worn off by now. I know you can hear me. Why don't you... open your eyes?

Pictured: a media producer's worst nightmare

Yes, you understand now, do you not? You recognize my face and know the true meaning of fear! For I, of course, am the dreaded Penstroke the Terminator! 

And I have vowed to destroy... Arrow.

Breaking the Habit RPG

For a long time now I've been fascinated by the way games suggest certain modes of play, modes of behavior, narratives, and, ultimately, ways of understanding the world. As games as a medium grow in cultural prominence, it's always worth taking a step back and analyzing just what games are teaching, not just from a lit crit kind of perspective often mobilized in these conversations but from a purely play-oriented perspective.

It's especially relevant in the case of a game like Habit RPG, which is explicitly built to help you reorder your existence. The game's premise is simple: it provides a framework whereby you can gamify your existence. You create a customized system of tasks to complete and rewards--in multiple forms--that you receive upon fulfilling them. The interface is simple, with three major task classes--repeated habit-formation classes that have simple plus/minus inputs, daily tasks that are checked off (with rewards for completing streaks of those tasks), and one-off to-do tasks that you simply add once and complete once.

The core of the game, however, is the interaction between these three task classes and an RPG-like system whereby you gain experience and level up for completing tasks, and lose health for failing to complete them. There are other bells and whistles--costume upgrades that can be bought, pets that are randomly dropped by defeated tasks--but that's the core gameplay. You complete tasks to level up. The reward system is hooked right into the same system that has been used by diverse entities such as skinnerboxy Facebook games or the maddeningly addictive click and wait games such as Candy Box, Cookieclicker, or A Dark Room: Humans seem to really like big numbers turning into bigger numbers.

The central logic behind the game is that a habit takes, according to the site at least, 21 days to build or break. Thus, built into the system are rewards for streaks of 21 days. Tasks change color as you complete (or don't complete) them, which allows particular interactions with certain abilities (i.e. spells that when clicking on a different colored task provide a different amount of XP). The game thus offers both instant and long-term rewards for adhering to the tasks you set for yourself, which of course contrasts to the often arbitrary, hard to discern, intangible rewards for good behavior in real life.

It's already been quite useful for me, ensuring, among other things, that I actually bother to eat three times every day, no matter how depressed or lethargic I feel. Oh, and I've got a perfect streak of waking up before ten every day, which is pretty remarkable. Even something as seemingly untamable as sleep habits can be rewired if you're provided with an external reward system. It's pretty great! It's even helping me slowly but surely get over my anxieties about actually replying promptly to people's messages.

All in all, it's a good game, and I see no reason to dig deeper into its workings. See you next week!

Yup just look at my cool pixel avatar and don't read further! Nothing to see here folks!

Our Love Is Synthesis: Muse, Marx, and "Madness"

Let's talk about Madness.

Specifically, the song Madness by Muse and its accompanying music video.

It's actually a favorite of mine, as is the song. Muse on this track really shows off their versatility--they're a band that's often been compared to a mashup of Queen and Radiohead, but here they sample stylistic elements from Dubstep to pretty excellent effect. You can never say, of Muse, that they don't push their boundaries.

In a way, that's kind of what I want to talk about tonight. I think the idea of pushing and finally shattering boundaries is essential to a lot of what Muse does, and is certainly central to what's going on in this video. The video is fairly simple in construction--it shows a man and a woman in a subway station, circling around each other and finally sharing a pretty intense kiss. This is intercut with images of the band, and images of a riot. Now, we could read this simplistically as just Muse's attempt to build energy throughout the song by using these images of violence--as an adrenaline-boosting strategy--but (surprise, surprise) I think there's a lot more to these juxtapositions than simple appropriation of images we've seen frequently in the media over the last four years.

To get at what Muse is saying with this video, though, we've got to turn (again, surprise, surprise) to some theory.

Specifically, we need to understand the idea of the Hegelian Dialectic... or at least, the Hegelian Dialectic as interpreted through interpreters of Marx. Yeah, already things are getting a bit dense. Look, the problem here is that Hegel, the philosopher that came up with the notion we're going to discuss, isn't necessarily the most important person to write on these ideas. Rather, it's his ideas interpreted through Marx (essentially the father of Communist thought) and through Engels (Marx's collaborator), and then filtered through other thinkers, that we're most interested in. Honestly, some of what I'm going to be discussing is also filtered through my own interpretation of what other scholars have told me, so this is pretty far removed from the source.

This actually works in our favor, though, because what comes out the other side is a highly symbolic, highly romanticized understanding of Hegel's ideas, which fits well with a reading of an emotionally-charged piece of art.

"Get to the point!" you howl and wave your flagon in my general direction!

Don't be impatient! You can't start being an Antithesis until I present my Thesis! You're jumping ahead!

Which is really what the Hegelian Dialectic--or, for Marx, the Dialectical Materialism--is about.

There's a Thesis--this is a state of being, a power structure, a dominant idea.

Then there's an Anthithesis--the alienations and contradictions and things left disenfranchised by the Thesis.

And then, when the two ideas come together, as when your beer sloshes into my wine while you're waving your cup around angrily, they create a Synthesis, an new form that arises from the clashing of a state of being and its contradictions. For Marx, who's going to be important for this essay, these referred to material states of being--i.e. the thesis is a way of ordering society that leads to a series of problems and people who have been disenfranchised--antithesis--resulting in a revolution of the ordering of society. The synthesized society then becomes a new thesis with its own contradictions.

Of course, no one actually agrees on anything about the Dialectic. Some scholars even claim that Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis has nothing to do with Hegel's real ideas! It's basically a giant, hideous mess.

But we don't care about any of that, because regardless of their source, the Dialectic is a powerful, powerful meme, with resonances built deep in Western history (compare, for example, William Blake's idea that you need to merge Heaven and Hell in order to create something new). It's less important to me what Marx or Hegel really, truly said and more important to see this powerful notion of a thing smashed against its opposite in order to create a new thing.

What does this have to do with "Madness?"

Only everything.

Let's talk dialectics.

"Madness" is really not a song about madness alone.

It's a song about an opposition.

Love... and Madness.

That structure is repeated everywhere throughout the video and song.

First, we have the lyrics themselves:

And now I need to know is this real love,
Or is it just madness keeping us afloat?
And when I look back at all the crazy fights we had,
Like some kind of madness was taking control

Here's where the opposition is most explicitly stated, but the other verse has a similar structure to it--a state is posited, and then madness is reintroduced into the song. The states of being are worth examining though. Most significant, of course, is the suggestion that one of the two possibilities is "real love." This, to me, seems like the dominant idea or Thesis. We could extrapolate a bit here and suggest that this is a traditional, stable, picture-perfect relationship. It is easily understood, orderly, and genuine.

This notion is paired in the video with two major things: the male character (notionally linked to the male singer) and the militant police state. Look at the header for this section: the video makes heavy use of the "montage" technique, which is widely known in pop culture as "that thing where they show a bunch of clips of people doing stuff really fast so that it seems like lots of stuff is getting done," but which really means a series of cuts between different footage meant to draw out associations between the things depicted. It's a major feature of early Russian cinema (sometime I'll have to get Sara to write something with me on that--she's done research in this area), incidentally, while we're on the subject of Marx. Here, the montaging is used to draw a connection between the man and the riot police. As he walks down the side of the subway car, his motions are intercut with shots of the marching riot police, and finally the sequence concludes with a shot of the woman followed by the police.

So, the thesis here is both the male figure, and the spectre of state power and repression.

This is pretty wild, actually. "Love" being linked to an army of riot police marching in time to crack the heads of the proletariat, or to a guy following a woman through a subway station? Kind of Orwellian, and more than a little creepy, no?

Well, maybe. There's more going on here than what's apparent on the surface, though. First of all, the suggestion in the song is that the concept of "real love" has become a constraint, a box within which the implied relationship is not fitting comfortably. Love is an absolute ideal, a perfect state, just like the state of law and order upheld by the noble police force. The video and song paired together, then, suggest that the Thesis here has started to crumble due to its own rigidity and inability to deal with... what? Well, the Antithesis, in its tripartite form.

The Antithesis is Madness. Here, the comparisons fit a little more readily. Madness can be seen as disorder, chaos, disruption. It is commonly linked to artistry in part because of its potential to upset expectations and preconceptions. It is the entity that won't fit comfortably within an established box like "Love" and "Law" and "Order."

And in this video, it is the disenfranchised rising up from a state of poverty and repression and just straight up wrecking shit.

But what's interesting to me is the fact that the Antithesis is given subjective privilege within this song. The speaker is the Thesis, the Male, the State, Love, but the subject of the song, the driving force within the song and within the video, is the Antithesis, the Woman, the Proletariat, Madness. The word "love" only appears in the second verse. Before that, the idea of love exists only as an implication, a prior assumed state, just as the society we exist within is an unexamined entity that is only given form when it is contrasted with its shortcomings. Similarly, the man and his stated doppleganger is given focus in the second verse. The scenes in the clip above come from the first segment of the song, where, again, montage is used to link the woman notionally with the rioters, passing through the subway backdrop (and what a perfect image of the dream of order opposed by the material reality of crowding, poverty, and refuse!) as a primal storm of upheaval.

It would be easy to read the interactions between the man and the woman here quite shallowly as a creepy dude following a hot chick, but she is, quite explicitly, flirting with him constantly, daring him to come closer while simultaneously seeming threatening. The song, the speaker, the man, and the State, are all overwhelmed and driven by this force that they don't fully understand and don't know how to react to.

Muse's sympathies clearly lie with the antithesis--fitting, for artists. The antithesis offers the possibility of something new and unexplored (like, say, the possibilities of using dubstep techniques within the context of an anthemic Queen-esque rock band's ensemble?) and, rather than a sign of things going horribly wrong, it is a captivating force.

And it is this captivating force that will ultimately take control of the song, the video, and the world.

Can we just take a moment here to talk about how great the structure of this song is? The dubstep qualities to it set up this really excellent sense of expectation which is continually deferred. Normally, in a dubstep song you expect to have some sort of buildup until the bass is proverbially dropped and Skrillex is out another Italian Upright. But in this song, we wait around perpetually for the climax. Just when we think it's finally maybe about to start after the second verse, we get shunted off again as the music tones down again for a stripped back sounding and relatively simple (especially compared to some of their other work) guitar solo. This is in stark contrast to Follow Me, another track on this album that has a much more traditional buildup and break structure including dropped bass and all.

For this song, then, Muse wants to tease us.

For this song, they're drawing the foreplay out... just as the aggressive flirting is drawn out throughout the video, until we finally reach the climax:

But now I have finally seen the end
And I'm not expecting you to care
But I have finally seen the light
I have finally realized
I need to love
I need to love

The confusion throughout the song and video are finally getting resolved, as the woman grabs the man by the jacket and the riot police finally clash with the protesters. Form itself becomes distorted at this point as blurred figures merge into one another. Here, again, love reappears, but it seems to be undergoing some process of redefinition that makes the early question of whether or not it is "real love" immaterial or irrelevant. The singer needs to love, regardless of how it is interpreted.

And in that moment, synthesis occurs.

Come to me
Just in a dream.
Come on and rescue me.
Yes I know, I can be wrong,
Maybe I'm too headstrong.
Our love is Madness

Not, "our love is like madness" or even the earlier "is our love madness," "our love IS madness." I love, love, love that in the video at this point it's very clear that the woman is pulling the man into the kiss. She is the one with all the power here, and it's... it's not even just sexy, it's downright breathtaking. At this point the sexual subtext of the video is barely even subtext anymore. It's basically just straight up text. I mean, the video ends with:

...Which I'm pretty sure is basically the universal movie signifier for "We just fucked." And in the background someone gets hurled against the wall of the subway car. Alright.

The suggestion, then, is that the social upheaval seen in the video is analogous to the kind of emotional turmoil experienced in the song, where the singer has to reconcile himself to a love that doesn't fit within his narrow understanding. Love IS Madness in the end, and the singer acknowledges, as the state ultimately must, that it "could be wrong" and may be "too headstrong," too in love with authority, too tied to existing power structures.

We have here nothing less than a romanticization and eroticization of revolution and uprising. By drawing these notions parallel to one another, Muse suggests that social disorder like we are experiencing now should be seen as an exhilarating start of a confusing, as yet undefined state of being. In that sense, despite the heterosexual pairing in the video, I might even suggest that the video is queering revolution by comparing it to the kind of unstable, rough, contentious power dynamics that you might find in BDSM (not without precedent in theory, incidentally--theory writers, it turns out, are kinky as fuck).

Synthesis is therefore both threatening and compelling, a creative force that we should welcome rather than fear, as the Thesis might.

I really can't quite express just how brilliant I think this video is. It's working on so many levels at once, and it's impossible to say just which is supposed to be the metaphor and which is supposed to be the thing represented. Every set of notions can be switched and jumbled around with another set in a kind of orgiastic mating of symbols. And, of course, it's hot as hell. God, that moment when she just sort of digs her hand into his shoulder... [bites lip]

The point is, this video and song are built entirely upon the Dialectic--the Thesis is confronted by an Antithesis that it can't easy absorb back into its prior state, so it needs to adapt and be changed in order to reach a new stable point. These individual components, though, are reflected across an array of symbols and actors within the narrative, to the point where the nature of the song itself becomes indeterminate and suggestive of new possibilities.

It is in that uneasy territory between opposing things that both art and interpretation hover, finding unity and opposition again and again, madness keeping it afloat.

Human theorists would never be able to adequately diagnose the relationship between the Antithesis and her Thesis. But troll theorists could immediately place it as a dead ringer for kismesissitude. They would think we were all pretty stupid for not getting it. And they would be right. Follow stormingtheivory.tumblr.com for updates, random thoughts, artwork, and news about articles. As always, you can e-mail me at KeeperofManyNames@gmail.com. Circle me on Google+ at gplus.to/SamKeeper. If you liked this piece please share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, MySpace, or whathaveyou, and leave some thoughts in the comments below.