varieties of american space: richard wright

[This post is part of the Production Design Blog-A-Thon, running through May 25. Please consider joining us with your own post on the topic.]

I know I promised to do a post on Aline Bonetto, but before I leave the US for sunny France I wanted to do an appreciation of one more person who has an eye for uniquely American types of spaces, specifically, production designer Richard Wright (no relationship to the American novelist).

Richard Wright's work has mostly been with director David Gordon Green, in a partnership lasting four films: George Washington, All The Real Girls, Undertow, and Snow Angels. This partnership, incidentally, seems to be coming to an end as both Wright and Green branch out: Green is taking a turn in the Apatow machine with Pineapple Express (forthcoming), and Wright has been bringing his hardscrabble Americana aesthetic to acclaimed indie features like Great World of Sound (2007) and Chop Shop (2008).

The future doesn't really matter either way for our purpose here today, which is to look at the first product of the Green / Wright partnership, George Washington. Production design is crucial to George Washington for the same reason it's crucial to Punch-Drunk Love: because the film is deeply concerned with space. Specifically, American varieties of space:

Space is explicitly discussed in a few different ways in George Washington before it reaches the ten-minute mark. "This place is falling apart faster than we can do anything about it," complains one character, while another remarks in dreamy voice-over "I like to go to beautiful places, where there's waterfalls and empty fields, just places that are nice, and calm, and quiet."

The film might initially seem to be privelging the position of the complainer, because while we don't see any empty fields or waterfalls in the film, we see no shortage of what we might be considered ruin:

But ultimately, the film instructs us that both of these characters are missing the point somewhat, and that in a post-industrial America the available places of "nice, calm, quiet" are not waterfalls or empty fields, but are precisely the places that have effectively "fallen apart." Almost the entire film happens in these sorts of spaces, and Wright's eye for designing them is flawless:

These types of spaces are, almost always, sources of comfort (the final screenshot in that sequence is an exception); sites where play, exploration, and a kind of culture can occur.

In my own creative work and personal life I have often found that these spaces yield similar sorts of pleasures, but outside of Wright's production design I can't think of a time when I've felt that feeling reliably translated to the screen. Richard Wright, we salute you.

Labels: media commentary, pleasure, projects, spaces

Wednesday, May 21, 2008
10:34 AM
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the season of comics II / comics as knowledge-system

The season of comics continues unabated, with three or four more graphic novels lying in wait to be read, including the gigantic Daredevil Omnibus, kindly loaned to me by my Film Club compatriot Skunkcabbage.

Reconnecting with comics, with the Marvel Universe in particular, has been providing me with very real pleasure this winter, and I've been speculating as to why that is. There's probably a way in which the much-remarked-upon escapist or power-fantasy aspects of comics act as to temporarily stave off some of the depressing realities of adulthood (in the same way that they temporarily staved off some of the depressing realities of adolescence) but I don't really think that tells the whole story.

Late last night, K. and I discussed the idea that comics form a "knowledge-system," a body of deeply specialized / obscure (yet knowable) information that is rewardingly vast and crannied (yet navigable, and ultimately finite). Similar knowledge-systems might be things like jazz, or World War II history, or contemporary poetry. There is a certain pleasure, if you're a geek, in diving into a system of that sort, and learning the way that information functions in it. Who are the key figures? How are they related? What are the central narratives? What's the chronology of key events? These questions are a very satisfying sort of mind-candy.

With comics—particularly Marvel Universe comics—I have the advantage that the central roster of characters is pretty familiar to me, and has been since I first learned my way around the Marvel Universe knowledge-system in, oh, 1984 or whenever. Plunging back in mostly means learning where the stories are now—what's happened in the interval since I stopped reading. (Or filling in blind spots: hence my interest in the Daredevil Omnibus—Daredevil was never really a character I read when I was younger.) I've argued elsewhere that comics characters should age in more-or-less real time, but I'm learning that a stable roster of characters provides a certain orienting structure within the knoweldge-system, which is definitely making it easier for me to re-enter it.

Labels: comics, knowledge, pleasure

Monday, March 10, 2008
1:03 PM
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benign masochism vs. "fun that is bad"

More questions stemming out of yesterday's question. Are games that are hard more fun? My initial feeling is that there's maybe a "sweet spot" between a game that is so easy that it quickly becomes boring and one that is so hard that the player decides that progress is either impossible or not worth the time investment (I quit the otherwise adorable Un Jammer Lammy because the learning curve was too fucking steep for me to play the second level one more time).

Raph Koster's lecture / series of doodles Theory of Fun for Game Design (largish PDF) puts this in terms of pattern recognition: playing a game involves puzzling out its rule or behavior patterns, which is fun as long as steady, non-redundant progress is being made on the task.

Tom Coates' Plasticbag weblog has a post on "things that aren't fun, and fun that is bad," in which he asks a whole series of interesting related questions (specifically on World of Warcraft):

"I've started wondering whether a game could still be considered good if you want to play it a lot but at the same time resent the time that it takes from you. What if you find it boring but still somehow can't put it down[?] Can you love and hate a game at the same time and still call it 'fun'? Can a game be a narcotic, or a guilty secret or an addiction? Can it be a fruitless activity without value that still feels good?"

Long, interesting comments thread follows.

Labels: game_commentary, pleasure

Thursday, September 07, 2006
2:48 PM
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Today's e-mail asked: What is it with you all and games?

My answer, slightly expanded, read: I think most human beings need some sort of competition in their lives. It's demonstrably psychologically satisfying. That's part of why I enjoy games: they allow their players to playfully enjoy that satisfaction, safely. I would guess that people who don't play games are more likely to compete with others in ways that are more socially destructive (capitalism, acquisition, elitist oneupmanship, stealing one another's spouses, etc.).

(Possible theory: excellence in the more destructive forms of social competition is often taken as a badge of success. Perhaps the common perception of gamers as "losers" has to do with an avoidance of these forms of competition?)

A second reason is that games are systems, and I'm interested in the way systems work, and have been for a long time, probably about as long as I've been seriously interested in games. Playing a game is an exploration of the way a system works—within the constraints and rules of the game "world", what moves are the ones that will produce the desired outcome? What are effective ways of manipulating this system? Playing Icehouse with Trevor when I was in New Orleans this fall really reminded me of how delightful this exploration can be when shared with another person.

(Making up games deals with the fun of the flipside—conceiving rule-matrices that might be fun to play within.)

A third reason, this one the brainchild of my friend Jon, is that games expose us to situations that we might not experience otherwise, which enables us to test out particular sets of behaviors without serious consequences. (Play in general fulfills this role, games are merely a formal method of doing it.) This testing-out process in turn can influence the way we behave when we leave the gamespace and return to daily life. Traditionally, it is children who need to test out behaviors the most-- since they're learning how the world works --which may be why play and games are generally considered to be childish pursuits. But a person who thinks of learning, growing, and evolving as a lifelong process might find value in continuing to play.

(Role-playing games are particularly unique in this regard; they allow us to test out aspects of whole new identities.)

Labels: game_commentary, play, pleasure

Wednesday, October 30, 2002
8:59 PM
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