Monday, March 30, 2009
Home Alone: end-games
I am still being pursued by researchers from TV programmes who want to explore how computer gaming undermines society as we know it! Years ago, in the mid-90s The British Library awarded me a grant to direct a research project on video games in the home. Unlike the highly suspect statistical research of the time, we went into 100 homes and observed and interviewed children with their families over a period of time. The results were sufficiently entertaining and challenging to put me on Newsnight and other media outlets. I suppose the limelight lasted about six months after which I refused further show time on the basis that the research results were past their half-life.
At the time I argued that computer games were actually beneficial and that addiction in this sphere was no greater than in any other. The incidence of ‘loners’ resulting from games playing was a favourite topic of debate. As it still is. I also argued that video games, despite being extremely violent in some cases, were unlikely to ‘trigger’ psychopathic behaviour. I received quite a lot of mail, most of it uncomplimentary. Computer games were the work of the devil and rotted the brain, or at least the moral centre of it.
In the intervening period, because of my work as a panellist for The British Board of Film Classification, I have read much more research which seeks to prove that gamers become anti-social, autistic, criminal, morally corrupt and so on. Most of this research comes from America and most of it is self-fulfilling, being sponsored by politically or religiously motivated groups. Their work cannot differentiate between individuals with deep-seated social problems who gravitate to games playing for kicks and the millions who play every day and are not affected.
I also proposed that gaming has many valuable qualities in the development of social and intellectual skills, having seen how children teach each other, work in competitive and cooperative peer groups and seem to undergo intensive learning spurts. It was not just hand-eye co-ordination but something deeper, as though levels of cognitive awareness were being developed under the surface.
Whatever, the research proved contentious because all research ends up in a political bunfight as unscrupulous or blinkered individuals and pressure groups seek to use it for their own ends. When I suggested that schools were outmoded museums and beacons to failure and should be re-drawn as workshop spaces with teachers conducting research in their own specialist areas alongside their (secondary) students and that there should be separate centres for developing social understanding of sex, parenting, cultural difference etc, I was vilified by oponents. The bastions of the traditional territories and structures of the educational profession are difficult to breach.
So, with pleasure and a bit of a smug “I told you so” I see that the BBC website reports research in Amsterdam which confirms my hypotheses in those early days of domestic gaming. Very few of the hundreds of young people they have treated are addicted. They suffer, instead, from social alienation brought about by poor upbringing. Their condition is reversible, following a bit of love and affection and social development.
If you play with your kids on their machines a little and demonstrate you love them, no problem!
Friday, March 20, 2009
The Sins of the Father: Fritzl
Josef Fritzl is an extreme deviant. How does a society deal with such individuals? There are always a handful of aberrant people who commit such appalling acts that they shock and bewilder even the most experienced psychologist of human nature. I spent an evening once with the then UK Government’s top psychiatrist, someone whose life is spent shuttling between serial killers; psychopaths who are unique in their symptoms and behaviours. There are no real patterns across cases, just a continuous malfunctioning in each of them concerning whatever it is that keeps us abiding by social conventions, moral or religious codes; no critical self-awareness. These (mostly men) have little sense of social pressure to conform to anything. The worlds that exist inside their heads bear little relation to the one outside, which the rest of us inhabit. Inside their tiny universes, they reign supreme and whatever the desire that arises, it must be satisfied. Whether their adult condition comes from abuse, lack of love, trauma or some genetic aberration, the result is often so excessive in its barbarity that it raises in us the desire to have them eliminated from life. They are not non-contributors like people in comas because we can await their re-awakening in some slight hope. No, they will never be released and we have no hope for them. Their only value to society is as guinea pigs in the slow growth of understanding of what causes these conditions. The man I met was remarkably easy going and unaffected by his forensic questioning of diseased minds. When I pointed this out, wondering about the horrors of possible transference, he said that the creatures he visits are so far removed from normalcy that he sees them as Gordian knots through which no sword will slice. He only has words and drugs.
Fritzl has blamed his mother for his acts, having spent time with a psychiatrist who may or may not have fed him this rationale for what took place over more than two decades. Our parents can do terrible things to us, wittingly or unwittingly. Whether his mother’s crime tripped his lack of critical self-awareness to the extent that his incest-fantasy would consume him totally, will never be resolved. What does seem to have happened is that he viewed a videotape of his daughter’s 9 hour testimony while she sat in court. Reality forced its way in, enough for him to apologise. But not enough for the world to accept his contrition. He will stay in prison hospital for ever, probably. But at least his daughter Elisabeth, after her long, abused and nihilistic incarceration, saw him with her own eyes as a sick old man, shuffling to and from court and collapsed in on himself, never again the powerful Dad who had taken so much of her life’s potential in his hands and torn it apart in his cramped cellar.
Meanwhile, Fritzl and his lawyer have received thousands of death threats from Austrian citizens. And Elisabeth’s tenuous, anonymous new life with all her children has been revealed in the press. She is hunted as though she must remain a State victim. One wonders about those in humanity who may be short of becoming psychopaths but who can do a fine job in stamping brutally on the defenceless victims of the deranged, never mind the so-called ‘monsters’ themselves and those that are legally bound to defend them on the public’s behalf.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Eating people is wrong…
…except if you are in the Andes and have survived a plane crash and there is nothing to chew on except your newly dead fellow passengers. Whatever it is that makes us develop taboos, it cannot be the Divine. If that were so then there would be some semblance of conformity among the world’s religions and faiths, always assuming that behind them all is One True God. However, not even cannibalism is a universal crime. The early colonists thought, in their passionate desire to impose religion and pillage the riches from tribal lands everywhere, that native peoples were godless and soul-less. Particularly those who ate their enemies after battle. They were little better than animals. Having such low esteem for their fellow men made it much easier to use and abuse them as slaves.
Somewhere in all this murk is a hierarchy. Taboos always have hidden levels of acceptability. More often than not these depend on the notion of context. So for UK thinking, if a man and his sister are the last surviving couple on a desert island, who would deny them the solace of each other’s bodies? For sex or for food? Or their desire to produce surviving offspring, despite the risks. Elsewhere, however, the same act may be acceptable within local law. But that is a familial taboo and we are talking here of eating issues! I saw a film in 1962 called Mondo Cane. It was a documentary horror film containing the bizarre stuff people stick down their throats around the world, a precursor to today’s TV jungle celebrity eating challenges. I vividly remember bluebottles on toast. On the news there has been widespread condemnation of cat farms in China, which provide delicious feline flesh for the meat market. The film showed a multitude of cats of all types and markings, inside a large wire cage. Yes, pretty pussies. Meanwhile, most of the ‘developed’ world other than Norway and Japan, is distressed by the thought of eating whale.
One argument in this conflicting set of attitudes to what should be prohibited from a menu, is that the hierarchy of acceptability is based on the degree to which animals are like humans, in their intelligence and their looks. The brighter they are and the more anthropomorphic, the greater the revulsion we have. But this ignores pig in some cultures and it ignores horse in others. It ignores monkey where that is eaten. In fact, when it comes down to a stricter examination, there is nothing that is not poisonous that is not eaten somewhere, no matter how bright. Octopus is more intelligent than a dog. Pigs are even brighter and have a sort of army colonel character to their faces. Even the ugly looking blowfish, that most venomous of finned creatures, is prized in Japanese restaurants. Young chefs have to eat their own cooked blowfish before being allowed to practise on their customers. Custom develops over centuries and, if I am to be believed, human beings then embroider these into their religions or socail mores and have their gods or their cultures decree that such and such is lipsmacking and that other stuff is not.
I have probably eaten dog under the loose disclaimer of ‘meat stew’ in an Uzbek corrugated-roofed café by the road, on the way from Tashkent to Samarkand. Muslims and Jews have eaten pork in error, often enough. They live to tell the tale with no apparent harm to their ethical cores. Whether entry is prohibited to heaven or some other paradise owing to such contamination remains to be seen..
It is hard for us to comprehend that what we refuse to eat is the result of mere sentimentality or expediency and that there are no universal laws out there. Here’s a quick TT (Taboo Test). Order the following food, according to your degree of revulsion, should circumstances require you to survive. Put the most mouth watering first and the least appetising, last:
Dolphin, Flies, Snake, Snail, Worm, Rat, Penguin, Bat, Crow, Tarantula
Bon appetit!
Labels: Eating cats. Taboos. Religion.
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire – Piss and Tell
I like Danny Boyle as a director, from Trainspotting on. He handles colour and crowd movement brilliantly. He also has a gift for managing the sordid so that it hurts and yet there is no overly glossy dramatising that you get in most American gangster films, for example. And he shocks in ways that audiences pay for. A bit visceral. Always pushing the plot on. He also seems a nice bloke, judging by the interview at the wonderfully conceived (by Mark Kermode) world premier of his ‘lost’ film, Alien Love Triangle in a twenty odd seat cinema behind a suburban house in Wales, which made my tears well.
Therefore, with the hype of all those awards woodpeckering about my ears and a personal interest in India – I was born there and have been back – I settled down for the film, Slumdog Millionaire. When it finished I expect I had a screwed up look of bemusement on my face. It wasn’t that I didn’t like it. It was engaging enough: the picaresque journey of two uneducated brothers to early adulthood, one through crime and the other through petty crime and, finally, winning Who Wants to be a Millionaire. It also contained the oldest narrative line of girl lost, girl found, girl lost again, girl found for good, twining around the tales of maturation.
It wasn’t great in its humour – the scene of the uneducated boy scamming a foreign couple about the history behind the Taj Mahal was too corny to be funny – and the recurring TV clips of him in the Who Wants to Be A Millionaire show somehow lacked laughs and dramatic tension. As well as this, it missed out on the drive and fury of the ensemble playing of, say, City of God, which managed the coup of depicting the desperate plight of those in favellas while respecting without endorsing their complex, sometimes utterly despicable behaviour.
Then there is the Indian thing in me. Or is it the general business of portraying poverty? For example I dislike nearly all films whose plots have white stars against the backdrop of black faces. I didn’t really enter Slumdog empathetically. What always strikes me as a western non-tourist walking through slums, is the mixed feelings of guilt at being, relatively, so well off and that strange desire to observe and store up experiences for recounting. Piss and tell. Something in me both wants to do something to help change matters and something else remains detached and objective, as though, when I come to depict events, I’ll be able to describe them for maximum effect. I refuse to be overcome by emotion, regardless of the knives of empathy in my insides.
By the end of the film, I felt that it was hardly a specifically Indian experience, despite the Hindi and despite the child blindings. Dickens did this kind of plot much better. Even the Bollywood ensemble sequence in the railway station at the end borrowed heavily from Zatoichi, where the samurai plot finishes, bizarrely, with the flourish of a tap dance.
I am sorry it’s not a more analytical review. Why am I so concerned about authenticity when I don’t apply this criterion to every film I see? Everything has its context and the film I saw prior to Slumdog was The Class (Entre les Murs), a year in the life of a multi-ethnic mixed ability class and its teacher in a slum of Paris. It was riveting and set up so many complex debates about poverty, race, culture and what can be acceptable in context, that maybe my mind was still trying to unscramble it, days later – when I sat down to Danny Boyle, where everything appeared a mite too cinematically glib.
Monday, March 02, 2009
Vice and Virtue in the Virtual
There are times when you must extol the virtues of the Internet. It can be a Pandora’s Box upon which politicians and the unseen mulitnational forces that conspiracy theorists believe run the world’s affairs, would like to sit. At other times it can be a Medusa’s Head of writhing snakes, whose tongues flicker at the innocent user, invariably making him or her an unwilling prey.
The dramatic tension is increased because monitors and key boards have become prostheses, biotechnically grafted on to our persons. We suffer viruses, freezing, unhealthy intakes of spam, Altzheimic lacunae, senior moments and the like. If everything slows down to the pace of a zimmer frame, we invoke the second law of thermodynamics because we are reminded of our own mortality.
I was sent, the other day, one of those execrable pyramid diatribes about how white people in America were suffering because the US legislature had passed laws over the years which gave minorities rights, thus demeaning the supremacists’ sense of the order of things. It is bad enough when such communication comes unannounced and anonymous past the filters but this was personal. Someone from my past, from school days in fact, had included me in their roll of honour. Maybe it was an assumption of ties forged by going to Blaydon Grammar School, as though all who had survived that piecemeal, lethargic, educational process, like the children of Jesuits, must have been conditioned to see the world through the eyeholes of a peaked white hood. The person who had forwarded this email of racist rancour had seemingly succumbed to its post-script stating that only 5% of those receiving it would be brave enough to send it on. I dealt with it as well as I was able, feeling that my role in the affair was to attack the virulence and let everyone on the aforesaid roll know how despicable I felt it all to be.
But, of course it is a lesson.
Something significant that the Internet is beginning to do which seems, so far, to have escaped the theorists and the pundits, is make us all players in the way we manage human affairs. We may no longer be able to repeat those dishonourable crimes of the past and claim to have no knowledge of holocausts or genocides. Today, there can be no excuse. You are in the thick of events and you can contribute to them, one way or another. No newspaper editor can block your letter of protest. No TV producer can discount your wish to repudiate a character assassination or perceived slight to your ideals. Everything that is known to be happening in the world is there at the end of a Google click. There is no excuse now just to allow things to escalate, to wash over you like a tide of sewage.
In the old days, the Christians among us would talk of bumping into Peter at the Pearly Gates and having our sins weighed against our virtuous acts but, even for Christians, there must be a realisation that God has gone techno. The meeting with Peter will have him a PDA button away from a spreadsheet which will give the statistics of how much you contributed to the fight for good over evil in your Internet behaviour. No doubt the same scenario holds for the followers of every one of Earth’s religions. And for agnostics like myself.
So, if you’ve never done it, try it. Take part. Save your soul or validate your sense of justice. Send an email supporting something you truly believe in, or attacking something you find unpalatable. Otherwise, those with extremist agendas will increasingly corrode and corrupt our social life.