After You’ve Gone: Thoughts On Burial At Sea

By Paul Casey

Part One

I love Lost. I love Prometheus. I love Bioshock. Suspension of disbelief is a crutch for people who have a failure of imagination. Hammering something down and making it more comprehensible is not an inherent positive. Presenting a story that provokes confusion and forces the brain to engage in a creative way is not a failure of talent or of planning. It is an artistically rich approach that many actively seek out in opposition to what they are told are the true “reality” based goals.

Breaking Bad is apparently a high water mark of television. It will be used for many years by insecure, would-be tastemakers as a reason why a show like Lost is the worst thing to happen to television. It is not particularly important to them that Breaking Bad only has two compelling characters, that it is riddled with clichés it feels unusually proud of, that the audience is forced to endure paper-thin plot movers given an unfathomable amount of screen time. This is fine by me because the show has an up side and is one of the better entertainments of its kind since Jack Bauer decided to indiscriminately torture every asshole he came across.

For these tastemakers, though, without that plastic cover of respectability, their main joy would vanish. The joy is that Breaking Bad is above and everything else is below. Show me any of the same people hailing 24 as the greatest TV show of all time and I will give the argument more credit. Lost, for all of its issues, had more creativity in a single episode than Breaking Bad had for its entire run. Lost was brave; Breaking Bad was utterly safe. The prizing of mystery above all in Lost and how it allowed the imagination to exist unfettered in that world is worth a dozen crunchy gangster shows. We do not value the same things you do. There is no consensus, so stop pursuing one.

Looper was a lousy movie. It was lousy Science Fiction, too. Here is a movie that gets barely anything out of a great premise. It shows contempt for the genre in its dialogue. “I don’t want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we’re going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams with straws.” You’re right! Time travel movies are ridiculous! But hey, we’ll watch it anyway ‘cause Bruce Willis has a gun and shoots it a lot. I can tell my Sci-Fi hating buddies that there is none of that Science Fiction shit in it! It’s good ‘cause there’s big, shooty, action scenes!

Prometheus got a lot of confused bullshit sent its way, non-coincidentally directed at Damon Lindelof. This is in spite of the fact that he was responsible for the best parts of the script. It was his idea to play on the philosophy of Blade Runner. Humanity is, for the first time, in the same role as the replicants. They face capricious, self-involved creators and can’t quite make the link. The final line from Elizabeth Shaw to David—“I guess that’s because I’m a human being and you’re a robot”—is brilliant.

People got angry that it didn’t make sense to them. They disregarded it as sloppy writing. They were happier with something more realistic (read: dull, meathead, anti-science fiction) like Looper. It wasn’t sloppy; it was a work of great imagination and showed a fearless love for the genre. If to get that we need to sacrifice realism, fuck it. It is one of the most visually remarkable movies of the last decade and the best Science Fiction since The Matrix. The birth scene is the distillation of everything great about Body Horror. The lighting, pacing, and performance of that scene are perfect. Elizabeth Shaw is one of the great leads. The final Gene Rodenberry speech is what Science Fiction is all about: inspiring, hopeful, and forward looking:

“Final report of the vessel Prometheus. The ship and her entire crew are gone. If you’re receiving this transmission, make no attempt to come to its point of origin. There is only death here now, and I’m leaving it behind. It is New Year’s Day, the year of our Lord, 2094. My name is Elizabeth Shaw, last survivor of the Prometheus. And I am still searching.”

The Last of Us is a better piece of work than Breaking Bad or Looper, but attracts much of the same kind of snobbery. The delivery is sublime. Every element of the experience speaks to the skill of Naughty Dog. Being in that world is why it is compelling. It is the immersion that drives the thing, not the depth of the characters, not the plot, not its philosophy. That a movie adaptation has been announced suggests there is some confusion over why The Last of Us was a success.

Here is a game that is built on every single apocalypse zombie re-tread. The characters are from any Romero knock-off. The cover is Cormac McCarthy but the content is Lucio Fulci all the way. And you know that’s fine with me because Lucio Fulci knows just as much about delivering an apocalypse story as anyone. What is problematic about this kind of thing is not that The Last of Us wishes to dress a genre story in coattails and cummerbunds, but that in doing so it feels it can disregard that genre. This is the hook for the sorts who would spit on City of the Living Dead as being a perverse work for the underclass. Here they can revel in the gore and destruction of the zombie story without the fear of having to defend their moral fortitude.

The Last of Us, as we were told until we puked, has a purpose for the violence. Because God help you if you enjoy a zombie story for the gore and the thrills! What an idiot you are! What a complicit soul in murder and torture around the world! As I mentioned in my Best of 2013 list back in December, there was a suspicious lack of morally concerned articles examining the extreme level of violence in The Last of Us. Bioshock Infinite, however, got a litany from concerned writers like Chris Plante from Polygon who asked “But what about my wife?” Where do you even begin with such condescending bullshit? It is foolish to criticize the game based on the alleged turnoffs of one woman, and then inflate that into a larger meaning. It’s particularly dumb to beg the question of what wives and women want. The enjoyment of horror is not related to gender; it has everything to do with individuality and personal taste.

The lesson to be taken from Bioshock Infinite is do not express beauty at the same time as expressing violence. Those things don’t go together. Be grim and grey and contain zombies. Then you can smash in men’s skulls with bricks and set people on fire and everyone know in their hearts that they are morally protected. More importantly, everyone’s wives and girlfriends and imagined delicate sensibilities everywhere can sit down and enjoy it, too! We have witnessed much human life spent on discussing why being overtly sexual or violent in video game fiction is not a sign of maturity. This has been true as the medium struggled to step up and address issues that were not as easily understood as high scores. There is nothing more childish, however, than the adult who condemns the swear word. The sorts who spend their time considering how they can get in a position to better censor others. The sort who is confused at anything remotely challenging containing sex or violence. It is from the same schoolyard; it’s just from a different crowd. The crowd who desperately want to be grown up but who come across about as sophisticated as McG in a tie.

Listening to these people does not lead to higher art being made. It leads to classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist, and every single thing Miike Takashi has ever done being put in either the CHILDISH box or the PERVERT box. The challenge for critics and writers is not how they appreciate things long since entered into history as Important, but how they react to new things that don’t have that luxury. These people are not only moral cowards, but also foul writers and critics.

If, as Roger Ebert said, Quentin Tarantino takes exploitation movies, “digests their elements and reforms them at the highest level of their ambitions,” works like Breaking Bad, Looper, and The Last of Us spit on those ambitions while stealing their lowbrow tricks to hook an audience. In taking a phony, superior posture they allow their audience to do the same. They are Harry Potter books with adult covers. The talk around these works is a lesson in how not to direct criticism at other art. Don’t use trash to get at trash. If you want to be a highbrow sort, be legitimately highbrow. Be a real snob, with the abstruse, inhumanly cynical credentials to back it up. Don’t get fooled by genre fiction that pretends it isn’t genre fiction. All that makes you is another rube in the muck. While we’re here loving trash outright and unashamedly, you’re trying to make us believe your shit sandwich with expired Grey Poupon makes you Gore Vidal.

Part Two continues on the next page.

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