Jim Taylor

A ponderer with delusions of grandeur...

Inventing to Remember, Obscuring to Reveal: Surrealism and meaning in popular culture

Aug 022014
 

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The Voynich manuscript (so called) is one of the most profound mysteries in the history of literature.  Believed to have been written in the 15th century, it appears to be rendered in an entirely artificial language and is illuminated with strange drawings, the nature of which ranges from the biological and pharmaceutical to the astronomical and cosmological.  There is no clear consensus amongst scholars as to who authored the manuscript, why they did so, and what its real purpose and meaning might be.  The as-yet undiscovered truth about the work is probably completely mundane, but it’s extremely tempting to think that the unlocking of its secrets might reveal the answer to some deep, cosmic mystery about life, the universe and everything.  Such a reaction is partly due to human beings’ innate desire to seek meaning and structure wherever there appears to be none, but it is also because, particularly throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, works of weird or surreal art which appear devoid of any conventional meaning have – ironically – often been the most effective way to communicate profound ideas which grapple with grand themes like religion, ethics and metaphysics.

Dali’s ‘The Persistence of Memory’

Surrealism as an artistic trend grew out of the Dada movement of the early 20th century, and although the Dadaists’ reactionary opposition to reason and logic meant that their work was largely devoid of any coherent, deeper meaning (that is, if having no meaning cannot in itself be considered a sort of meaning), Surrealism from its earliest days in the 1920s was considered, by contrast, to be a force for societal change, inspired partly by the theories of Karl Marx and G.W.F. Hegel.  Surrealists strove to liberate the imagination and give expression to the unconscious by breaking away from historical conventions in art and literature.  They used dream logic, unexpected juxtapositions and nonsensical concepts to achieve these ends, leading to myriad works of written and visual art which often seem confusing, disorientating and somewhat unsettling.  But there was frequently a deeper meaning to be found beneath the illogical facade, one which could be represented all the more effectively by being divorced from suffocating artistic convention.  Andre Breton – one of the key figures in early Surrealism – saw his technique of ‘automatic writing’ through a Marxist lens, believing it to be a way of circumventing the shackles into which writers and artists had been socialised by the bourgeois elite; the artist Salvador Dali’s eerily contorted imagery was at least in part a reflection of his anarchist principles and his consequential rejection of authority and convention; Rene Magritte’s severance of everyday objects from their familiarly banal context forced viewers to contemplate the nature and essence of those objects and their symbolic representations; and in the work of Surrealist film-maker Luis Bunuel we find – despite his best efforts to avoid any kind of coherent, deeper meaning – a running critique of organised religion.

Magritte’s ‘The Liberator’

These were the eccentric minds that gave birth to a movement, but despite its nonconformist tendencies Surrealism as a style has retrospectively become absorbed into the artistic mainstream, with Dali and Magritte’s paintings adorning walls in populist galleries everywhere, and Brunel’s films widely considered a landmark in the history of cinema.  The subversive influence of these surrealist pioneers persists, however, and has been seeping into popular culture for decades, thanks to a raft of writers, artists, film-makers and musicians who have picked up the baton and set about creating myriad works which not only defy traditional logic and artistic convention, but also deliberately utilise this approach to communicate deeper meanings and profound ideas through their apparently meaningless art.

My objective here is not to provide an exhaustive list of surrealist pop-culture works of the last 50 years, but rather to illustrate the argument that surrealism can very effectively communicate deeper meaning and truths about the real world by using examples from modern pop-culture.  To that end, I shall look at a number of surrealist works from film, literature and music and then consider why they have succeeded so effectively in making statements about the real world and/or grappling with the big ideas of religion and philosophy.  As was the case in part one of this article, this will show why an artistic style often considered to be totally divorced from reality actually provides a very effective way to talk about it.

‘El Topo’

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mind-bending surrealist western El Topo (1970) makes an excellent starting point, illustrating as it does the director’s desire to tackle grand themes in an indirect fashion with a memorable opening statement: “The mole digs under the earth looking for the sun.  Sometimes, he gets to the surface.  When he sees the sun, he is blinded.”  The film’s bizarre plot, which eschews conventional narrative structure, makes strong statements about religion and pacifism through the story of a violent gunslinger who undergoes a strange transformation and becomes the spiritual leader of a band of outcasts and misfits.  Rather than making these statements explicitly, Jodorowsky allows deeper meaning to emerge from sequences of jarringly peculiar imagery, a technicolor fever dream which ultimately becomes a search for divine truth.  We, he is saying, are moles digging in the dirt to find the sun, because to look directly at it would be blinding.  David Lynch, a similarly surrealist auteur, uses an array of nightmarish scenes in his 1977 debut Eraserhead to explore the suffocating, dehumanising bleakness of America’s industrial wastelands, as well the intense anxiety of first-time fatherhood, without resorting to tackling these themes head on.

‘Eraserhead’ – the dehumanising bleakness of industrial America

Notorious British film-maker Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy) uses surrealism potently in his unfairly-derided 1987 film Walker, which transplants deliberate anachronisms such as cars, lighters, magazines and guns from the 1980s into the setting of mid-19th century Nicaragua, the method in his madness being a reminder that US intervention in Latin America (Walker was filmed during the Contra War) was nothing new, and had in fact been going on for more than a century.  A more recent example is Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives, a film which also attracted much critical derision upon release, despite its many virtues.  Explicitly influenced by the work of Jodorowsky, Refn’s film, as we have previously examined, tackles humanity’s capacity for evil as well as meditating on the theme of redemption, using brutally violent imagery and jagged, dream-like storytelling.

Johnson’s ‘The Unfortunates’ – mimicking the randomness of human memory

In literature, too, surrealist techniques have frequently been used over the last half century to engage with big ideas and real world experiences.  Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, widely considered to be the first magic realist novel, features non-linear narrative and bizarre characters in a story which ultimately concerns historical injustice and the nature of truth.  The modern classic Lanark, written by Alasdair Gray, uses a surreal and distorted mirror-image of Gray’s home city of Glasgow as a setting in which to engage with topics as diverse as unrequited love, life after death, suffocating bureaucracy and the terrors of aging.  B.S. Johnson’s 1969 cult novel The Unfortunates was published not as a bound tome, but as a collection of individual chapters which could be read in any order – an attempt by Johnson to convey the randomness of human memory – while another formally experimental book, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, uses disorientating page layouts, multiple layers of narrative and what appear to be frequent non sequiturs in a story which concerns, among myriad other things, humanity’s cosmological insignificance and the subjectivity of all experience.  Grant Morrison’s epic comic book sagas The Invisibles and Doom Patrol frequently use surreal imagery to convey the mind-shattering experience of characters encountering time travel, the end of the world, child abuse, madness and death.

This is what space-time looks like – ‘The Invisibles’ (1998)

Throughout 20th century music, too, there are a number of examples of artists using the surreal to communicate deeper meaning through their work.  The most obvious example is the free jazz movement, which arguably began with the late ’50s recordings of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor before developing into a fully-fledged musical philosophy by the mid-’60s, particularly through the later work of John Coltrane.  Eschewing conventional structures, rhythms and harmonies, free jazz usually features collective improvisation with little or no set score, resulting in pieces of music characterised by jarring atonality, continuously evolving ideas and/or formless, floating serenity.  Free jazz artists’ long association with the civil rights movement meant that many of these confrontational works would become imbued with a deeper meaning, their cacophonous onslaught mirroring the tumultuous struggle for racial equality in ’60s America, but much of this weird and wilfully difficult music was created with specific themes in mind, its creators using the form’s liberating obtuseness to communicate ideas on a grander, more profound level.  Coltrane’s Ascension, Pharoah Sanders’s Karma and Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity are all albums which explore themes of religion and spirituality by eschewing conventional musical structures for the chaotic frenzy of improvised sound, and in doing so attain an unknowable, otherworldly quality which befits their ambitious subject matter.

“Damn the rules, it’s the feeling that counts” – John Coltrane

Surreality has also been used by many musicians in their lyric writing, resulting in a peculiar poetry which bears all the hallmarks of classic surrealist literature.  Frequently these rambling lines of free association and startling imagery conceal thinly-veiled deeper meanings; consider Genesis’ 1974 album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, an epic story of crime, lust and redemption described through a bizarre mixture of mythological symbolism and blackly comic grotesquery, or the work of the late Captain Beefheart, littered as it is with examples of songs which, despite their seemingly impenetrable weirdness, deal with heavy subjects like war, poverty and the holocaust.  One of the Captain’s most poignant tracks is the ludicrously-titled 81 Poop Hatch, a spoken word piece made up of fragmented day-to-day observations from which emerge an overwhelming sense of weariness and emotional struggle, feelings which Beefheart could perhaps not have conveyed so acutely had he relayed them in more conventional, straight-talking lyrics.  These are just a couple of examples, and there are many more, but they serve to demonstrate how the tropes of surrealism have been put to use by the musicians of the late 20th century.

Captain Beefheart

So what is it that unites these disparate examples of popular culture from a diverse range of media?  Simply put, they all utilise the techniques of surrealism – dream logic, unexpected juxtapositions and nonsensical imagery – not just to liberate the imagination, but also to direct it.  Each work approaches a theme or idea of profound emotional, political, philosophical or religious significance in an indirect, tangential way, shearing away the tropes of convention to afford a fresh and enlightening perspective on thought-provoking ‘big ideas’.  Whether it be Alex Cox’s ruminations on American foreign policy, B.S. Johnson’s portrayal of human memory or John Coltrane’s expression of love and gratitude to a divine creator, the complexity or abstract nature of the subject matter demands, in the minds of these creators, an artistic approach which diverges from convention in the most radical way.  But why not tackle these issues head on, if they are considered so important?  Surely a simpler, more direct approach will result in greater clarity of meaning if a statement is to be made by the artist in question?

Not so, say the surrealists, and the counterargument is two-fold: firstly, the structures, techniques and conventions of any artistic medium become stale and cliched over time, rendering the possibility of a truly fresh approach within the confines of tradition remote at best.  A version of this argument was made by Andre Breton in the early 20th century, when he suggested that the conventions of literature had not only become stale, but also a tool of bourgeois oppression; writers had been socialised into working within this predetermined structure to ensure that they could never write anything truly radical or revolutionary.  Whether or not one lends credence to Breton’s class-based theory, it’s hard to deny that getting bogged down in convention curtails artistic possibility, and can contaminate any artist’s study of political, social, religious or philosophical ideas with a stale artificiality, hampering the communication of meaning.

Secondly, and more importantly, it can be argued that the structures and techniques conventionally associated with particular art forms (e.g. linear narrative in literature and film, realistic juxtaposition in visual art), were never sufficient to tackle truly grand themes in the first place.  Why should this be so?  Humans construct meaning to understand the world around them, and conventional story-telling, where effect follows cause and everything has a beginning, middle and end, is a simple, rational way to make sense of our lives, loves, actions and place in the universe.  It is, however, a poor way to grapple with ideas whose content stretches beyond conventional understanding, whether because of socialising factors or simply the limits of the mind.  As one approaches a theme like the nature of God, the experience of remembering, the possibility of objective truth or the veracity of history, conventional structures can become a prison for the artist, because man-made constructs by definition cannot hope to encompass those things that probe at the limits of our understanding.  We cannot, to use Jodorowsky’s metaphor, stare at the sun; instead, we must dig for it.  And we dig by breaking away from the shackles of convention, abandoning the rigid concepts which determine our everyday reality so that we may glimpse something far bigger than ourselves.

This is the reasoning which underpins the politically and philosophically-charged work of many pop-culture surrealists, and from their apparently meaningless films, books and music emerge deeply meaningful meditations on grand ideas, their pursuit of which must be deliberately circuitous.  In this way, appearing to be devoid of meaning actually becomes the best way to communicate it, and just as we always invent to remember, so they obscure to reveal.

FILM REVIEW: ‘Snowpiercer’ (EIFF 2014)

Jun 302014
 

Geekzine’s sole foray to the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2014 was to check out Bong Joon-ho’s multifaceted dystopian sci-fi epic Snowpiercer.  Still to find a distributor in the UK, the film has garnered rave reviews everywhere it’s been shown, due to its intriguing premise, talented ensemble cast and stunning set design.  We sent Jim along to see if this Korean/American co-production lived up to the hype…..

Oppressive societies, environmental catastrophes, revolutionary uprisings, post-apocalyptic survival; these are some of the most tired and overused themes in the history of science fiction cinema, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be used in the creation of an original and thought-provoking story.  As a film, Snowpiercer excels on many levels, but arguably director Bong Joon-ho’s greatest triumph is using such well-worn tropes as the foundation for a story which is as emotional as it is cerebral, and feels like the most original science fiction film since Shane Carruth’s Primer.

In the near future, attempts to stop global warming using a chemical called CW-7 result in the onset of a new ice age.  Most of humanity dies out, but a few remnants survive aboard a gigantic train – the titular Snowpiercer – a technological marvel which remains in constant motion, supporting a self-contained ecosystem and circumventing the frozen globe once every year.  A rigid new societal structure has emerged in this rail-bound world, with the wealthy, decadent first class passengers enjoying a life of leisure in the front carriages, while an oppressed and half-starved underclass live in grimy squalor in the tail section.  The regular acts of brutality meted out by bureaucrat Mason (Tilda Swinton) and her henchmen upon the tail-enders are the sparks which light a revolutionary fire at the back of the train, and Curtis (Chris Evans) and Gilliam (John Hurt) see an opportunity to launch the uprising they’ve been planning for years.  A gruelling, bloody battle ensues as the revolutionaries fight their way inch-by-inch to the front, aiming to take control of the hallowed engine, an object which has taken on an almost religious significance for the train’s passengers.  A drug-addicted security expert (Song Kang-ho) enables the tail-enders to pass through the many doors standing between them and the front, and also offers an alternative vision to Curtis’ revolutionary narrative, one which threatens to change the passengers’ entire way of life.

Part war film, part social commentary, part spiritual journey; Snowpiercer juggles these competing themes and manages to tell a compelling story at the same time.  The world Bong creates, both through inventive scripting and incredible set design, is a twist on the familiar post-apocalyptic survival concept, its originality coming in the form of its train-based setting.  Having all the action take place within the confines of a series of rail carriages creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, and in several scenes when bloody violence erupts there is nowhere to hide from the carnage, either for the characters or the audience.  There’s a healthy dose of weirdness, too; as Curtis and his allies advance up the train, they encounter a series of bizarre miniature worlds, each contained within its own carriage.  There’s a peaceful garden, a breathtaking aquarium, a crowded hairdressers and even a sushi bar.  A shocking encounter in a brightly coloured (yet sinister) school room shows how insidious the rhetoric of the first class passengers has become, and a sequence where the revolutionaries find themselves in pitched battle with a group of masked swordsmen is terrifyingly intense.  These latter two scenes highlight the key strength of the film, namely the ability to marry slick action sequences and big-budget visuals with some surreal subject matter and truly arresting imagery.  Bong wears his influences on his sleeve (echoes of Terry Gilliam’s work abound throughout), but isn’t limited by them.  This is a film that couldn’t have happened without Hollywood, but nonetheless feels in no way part of it; a blockbuster with a truly international mentality, comfortable with both oddness and ambiguity.

The film’s social commentary is, however, rather obvious, and at times the allegories become far too heavy-handed – one particular subplot concerning stolen children feels like satire delivered with a sledgehammer – but in reaching for an original take on this grand theme Snowpiercer gets far more right than it does wrong, and proves once again that science fiction is a highly effective context in which to discuss the real world.  The character types on show aren’t terribly original, either; we’re all familiar with The Idealistic Revolutionary Who Questions His Beliefs (Evans) and The Evil Henchman Who Just Won’t Die (the rather ordinary-looking but nonetheless frightening Vlad Ivanov), but some late revelations about a dark and bloody past bring a healthy amount of moral ambiguity to the film’s character development.  In addition, any cliched characterisation is more than made up for by the terrific performances delivered by the entire cast.  Swinton, Hurt and Song are all utterly captivating, and there are great supporting turns from the likes of Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer and Ewen Bremner.  But it’s Chris Evans, in what is probably a career-best performance, who gives the film its heart, and Curtis’ gut-wrenching personal journey from one end of the train to the other is what elevates the movie above and beyond sensationalist (if beautiful) political fable.

Snowpiercer can be interpreted in many ways: it’s an allegory for global capitalism and its exploitation of the working class; it’s a cautionary fable about respecting nature and tackling pollution; it’s an anti-technology polemic warning of humanity’s hubris and our worship of sophisticated machines; it’s a study of human nature, exploring how every one of us can be both a hero and a villain.  The film can be all of these, but the thing is, for the most part you’ll be too busy enjoying yourself to decide which of them fits best for you.  For all its political and spiritual symbolism, Snowpiercer is also just a damn good story with sympathetic characters and stunning visuals, and that’s a ringing endorsement for any movie.  The statements it makes and the questions it asks are just the icing on the cake, and further proof (as if any were needed) that it’s still possible to make sophisticated and thrilling science fiction films in an age of vacuous, CGI-drenched blockbusters.

TV REVIEW: ‘Penny Dreadful’

May 202014
 

The plot synopsis for Penny Dreadful makes it sound like a cross between Ripper Street and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; an experiment in interbred Victoriana which could go either way.  Showtime’s new series paints a suitably grimy portrait of Victorian London’s supernatural underbelly, where fouler things than Jack the Ripper roam the dark streets and reanimated corpses languish in candle-lit attics.  The first episode introduces us to monster-hunters Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) and Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), as they recruit Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), an American showman with a murky past, to join them in their crusade against a Vampiric menace that’s been terrorising the city.  Along with a certain infamous doctor (Harry Treadaway), the trio begin to show the makings of a fledgling team, but before the first episode’s even over their own dark secrets are threatening to tear them apart.

It’s no spoiler to say that a sprinkling of characters from Victorian fiction will be making appearances in Penny Dreadful (marketing for the show has been keen to emphasise it), and so the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comparison seems an apt one.   The good news is that, in terms of quality, the show is much closer to Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s original comic than Stephen Norrington’s justly-maligned 2003 film version.  Instead of simply assembling a cast of oddball characters and throwing them into a series of action sequences in a period setting, Penny Dreadful takes its time to introduce the main players, and to hint at their complex motivations.  There’s really only one action set-piece in the whole of the first episode, during which we share Ethan Chandler’s sense of shock and disorientation as he makes his first foray into a darker, stranger world.  Much of the rest of the running time is given over to cultivating a sense of creeping dread, punctuated with a few genuinely chilling moments.  A vampire nest’s connection to ancient Egypt, Murray’s quest for his lost daughter and Ives’ past indiscretions are all mysteries which show promise of developing into compelling plot threads as the series progresses.

In keeping with its lurid namesakes, Penny Dreadful doesn’t flinch from gory spectacle, with a graphically dismembered corpse and buckets of blood gracing the first episode, but there’s also a sophistication to its production that raises the show above schlocky exploitation.  Big-budget TV has become an attractive medium in recent years for serious Hollywood acting talent, with shows like True Detective, Hannibal and Fargo boasting some very big names.  Penny Dreadful follows this trend, featuring solid performances from all three leads, and it’s good to see Dalton (obviously the best James Bond) in particular getting some serious screen time again.  In addition, Sam Mendes’ executive director credit lends the show further artistic credibility, and despite there being room for improvement in J.A. Bayona’s (The Orphanage) uncharacteristically pedestrian direction, on the basis of its first episode Penny Dreadful shows an awful lot of promise.

Penny Dreadful airs on Sky Atlantic from Tuesday 20th May   

COMIC REVIEW: ‘RASL’ by Jeff Smith

May 042014
 

A man, wounded and bleeding, stumbles through the Sonoran desert, the sun beating down mercilessly from on high.  He is alone, with nothing but rocks and cacti between him and the horizon.  Stopping briefly to ponder the situation in which he finds himself, he casts his gaze up to the daylit moon, which becomes in his mind’s eye a pebble, falling into a pool of water and casting ripples which ultimately travel to a space somewhere beyond the edge of the page…..

This is the eerie, dialogue-free scene which opens Jeff Smith’s RASL, his first long-form comic book since the Eisner award-winning epic Bone, and the sense of desolation and dislocation which pervade it set the tone for what comes after.  The comic’s eponymous hero, we learn, is an art thief with the unique ability to travel between parallel worlds through a section of sub-space he calls “the drift”.  Stealing priceless works of art in one universe and fencing them in another, RASL seems content to wander endlessly between the worlds, until a violent encounter with a lizard-faced assassin sent by his old employers “the compound” forces him to confront his past, and embark on a race against time to stop a terrifying superweapon inspired by the theories of Nikola Tesla.

Whilst Bone maintained a sense of lightheartedness even in its darker moments, RASL is an altogether more jaded affair.  The hero’s trips through space-time aren’t part of some madcap jaunt, but are leaps into the unknown accompanied by terrible suffering; the series of bizarre characters he meets on his travels are less eccentric and more downright creepy; and the fact that each new universe brings with it nothing more than a variation on the same, desolate Arizona landscape reinforces the sense of hopelessness and the melancholic atmosphere which dominate the book from the outset.  Smith renders this bleak but beautiful adventure story in some of his most gorgeous artwork to date; every page feels drenched in atmosphere, and frequent runs of perfectly paced, dialogue-free panels allow the story to unfold in a simplistic yet compelling manner.  Smith hasn’t lost his knack for creating genuinely unsettling imagery, either, and there are several moments in RASL that will leave you with a faint sense of unease long after you’ve finished reading.

As a story, RASL is a peculiar mixture of road movie, conspiracy thriller and celebration of the life and work of Nikola Tesla.  Smith’s veneration of Tesla can wear a little thin at times, especially when he diverges from the plot to impart seemingly irrelevant chunks of the great scientist’s biography, but for the most part his application of Tesla’s theories in a science-fiction context works well.  Although meandering a little at times, the story contains enough intriguing mysteries to keep readers hooked until the last page, even if some of them appear to remain unresolved by the time the credits roll.  You’re left with a feeling, though, that all the answers you seek can be found somewhere within the comic, if you just look hard enough.  RASL sticks in the mind for a long time after reading, and that surely is the sign of a great comic book.

GAME REVIEW: Bioshock Infinite – Burial at Sea (DLC)

Apr 252014
 

With the release of the second and final part of Bioshock Infinite‘s story-driven downloadable content last month (accompanied by precious little press coverage), now seems a good time to review the package as a whole, and also to briefly look back at the entire Bioshock series.  With the recently-announced closure of studio Irrational Games, Burial at Sea looks to be the last installment in this groundbreaking gaming saga, or at least the last installment featuring the work of Ken Levine, the man who masterminded the compelling and mind-bending story arcs of 2008’s Bioshock and last year’s Bioshock Infinite.

Part 1 of Burial at Sea features a jarring combination of characters and setting which are both familiar to fans of the series, but from different sources.  Seeing Booker and Elizabeth (the former apparently having no memory of the latter) joining forces to hunt for a missing girl in pre-revolutionary Rapture is an intriguing spectacle, and right from the start has the player asking questions about what’s really going on.  It’s a strange melding of worlds; gameplay elements such as carrying multiple weapons and the use of “plasmids” rather than “vigors” are carried over from the original Bioshock, whereas skylines, Kinetoscopes and the appearance of “tears” all carry over from Infinite.  The episode continues in the series’ traditional vein of being a first-person shooter with RPG elements, and as such doesn’t offer a radical departure in terms of player experience.  What it does offer, though, is an interesting story which ends in a shocking twist, after having (as is now par for the course with the series) drip-fed clues to the player about what has really been happening all along.  Whilst being a neat little tale which is fun to play through, part 1 is essentially a self-contained story that does little to advance the overall plot of the Bioshock/Infinite series.  The same, however, cannot be said of the second episode.

While part 1 of Burial at Sea largely serves to set up part 2, the latter is more ambitious with both its storytelling and its gameplay.  Acting as both sequel to Infinite and prequel to the original Bioshock, part 2 closes the link between the two games and further explores the themes of free will, identity and sacrifice which have characterised the series as a whole.  The player takes control of Elizabeth as she makes her way through war-torn Rapture, with a brief detour to a Columbia in the throes of its own revolution, resulting in a much more stealth-orientated adventure.  Limited ammunition and combat skills mean that the player must try to creep up on enemies without being seen, in a manner that’s refreshingly different from the gung-ho approach of earlier games in the franchise.  In terms of atmosphere, there’s a return to the more horror-based vibe of Bioshock, with a cavernous, mildewed department store in Rapture and Jeremiah Fink’s macabre lab in Columbia standing out as particularly creepy highlights.  The game’s unrelentingly dark final act also features a gut-wrenching torture sequence, before coming to an emotional conclusion which, as Ken Levine suggested in several pre-release interviews, offers a strange kind of closure to fans of the series.

Despite feeling more like an addendum to the original game rather than 2013’s Bioshock Infinite, Burial at Sea tells us little that’s new about the art-deco nightmare world of Rapture, except for fleshing out the back-stories of supporting characters like Sander Cohen and Yi Suchong.  It does engage with some of the metaphysical mysteries left unresolved by the plot of Infinite, but still leaves plenty of questions for players to ponder over.  In particular, the story of Columbia revolutionary Daisy Fitzroy is given an intriguing new twist which does a neat job of explaining a rather too-quick character transformation in Bioshock Infinite, one which, whilst thematically justifiable, never sat right with many gamers.  If there’s one major complaint to be levelled at Burial at Sea, it’s that the incorporation of characters and elements from Bioshock Infinite into the setting of the original Bioshock could be seen as an exercise in ‘shoehorning’.  The story of an objectivist paradise beneath the ocean waves, however, was always full of mystery, its indistinct edges blurring into deep shadows which left a wealth of space for spin-off storytelling.  Booker and Elizabeth’s unlikely adventure in Rapture fits neatly within this space, and so manages to avoid feeling like a laboured afterthought.

Top-Best-bioshock-infinite-wallpaper-6

This review, as you’ll have noticed, has concentrated more on the storytelling aspect of Burial at Sea than its gameplay elements.  This is because the greatest strength of the Bioshock series has always been its ability to emotionally engage players with its epic yet intimate stories of crumbling utopias built by all-too-human demagogues.  Many reviewers have complained about the supposed clunkiness of Infinite‘s gameplay, a fault allegedly carried over to Burial at Sea (at least until the switch to stealth in part 2), but such complaints miss the point of the whole experience.  Infinite‘s (and by extension Burial at Sea‘s) gameplay is far from revolutionary, but it does its job perfectly well, and that job is to facilitate the overall experience of mystery, action, adventure and social commentary which the original Bioshock began and which Burial at Sea continues admirably.   Taken as a whole, the Bioshock series becomes an epic morality play about American history and the gruesome dangers of scientific progress driven by ideology, as well as a heart-rending tale of broken families and the (multi-)universal resonance of loving acts of sacrifice.  It is arguably the best example yet of gaming as a legitimate medium for storytelling.

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore’ by Robin Sloan

Mar 052014
 

Newly out in paperback, Robin Sloan’s love letter to both print and digital media, which began life as a 6,000-word ebook, ultimately fails to live up to its promise.  Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore starts strongly enough, with Clay Jannon, a jobless everyman, taking a job in the titular San Francisco-based establishment and discovering strange goings-on amongst the tall, dusty shelves.  The idea of a hapless hero stumbling upon dark and ancient mysteries hiding in plain sight is very Neil Gaiman, and indeed the nicely atmospheric tone of the story’s opening is particularly reminiscent of the Sandman scribe’s work.  But by the time the book’s epilogue rolls into view, there’s an overwhelming sense of an opportunity missed.

Sloan’s problem is that the mysteries he sets up are unravelled far too easily (apart from the book’s central puzzle), and there are too many contrivances underpinning key plot points.  As he investigates ancient codes, hidden cyphers and secret societies, Clay always seems either to have access to a friend or acquaintance with precisely the right skill-set for the job at hand, or to simply stumble across a solution before a few pages have elapsed.  Very little drama is generated by the story, and the simplistic, gung-ho spirit of adventure which pervades the book (as well as all the main characters’ devil-may-care attitudes) makes it feel as though Sloan had designs to write a young adult novel, albeit one with an all-adult cast.  Hinting at deeper and more arcane mysteries lends the story a genuinely intriguing element, but one which is quickly squandered through a series of swift and disappointing revelations.  A good part of the story involves Google (too good a part, actually), and the people who work for them, and it’s difficult to tell whether Sloan is trying to subtly satirise the ever-expanding community of ‘techies’ who now call San Francisco home.  Certainly he sketches Google’s Silicon Valley campus as a dreadlock’d, gluten-free beacon of optimism and progress, but there’s an emptiness behind the technological bluster, represented best by the character of Kat, which actually makes the techies’ thirst for knowledge seem unpleasantly desperate.

Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore is not a bad book by any means, but it is a disappointing one.  Whilst proving an enjoyable and quite uplifting tale, the story also affects an illusion of depth which doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.  The opening pages will make you believe that you’re in for an adventure full of hidden clues and typographical puzzles, but by the end Sloan’s attempts to draw together disparate story elements to create plot twists feel undercooked and tiresome.  A fun read, then, but one which doesn’t live up to its potential.

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