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Tag Archive for cold war

Atomic Blonde and My Childhood Nihilism

August 23, 2017 Writing Comments Off on Atomic Blonde and My Childhood Nihilism

Good goddamn, Atomic Blonde was something else.  With Charlize Theron as an unreliable narrator and James McAvoy as good-guy douchebag-gone-native this may be in my top-ten favorite cold-war spy films ever.  It’s a “genre” film, make no mistake about that, but if you have ever been a fan of ’70’s/80’s spy fiction, this is going to be right in your wheelhouse.

I grew up during the cold war.  I was probably in 4th grade when it finally hit home that if the PTB’s pissing matches ever went past the point of no return, I was going to be one of the lucky ones who was vaporized on impact.  It was… unsettling at the time.  When your formative years involve regular reminders that all it would take was a bad transistor, or a flock of pigeons, or a bright red balloon in the wrong airspace at the wrong time, to end the world as you know it, you’re looking at a certain embrace of your inevitable radiation-fueled disintegration.

On older family member once remarked that my generation had no fear.  That the comfort and security of a regular paycheck and well-defined working hours didn’t seem to hold as much attraction for us.  But when you grow up with the complete destruction of humanity as a very possible outcome before you even make it out of puberty, what the hell else can they do to you?  This sense that, we’re all just shuttling around behind the scenes while the facades of our major players keep shouting rhetoric at each other onscreen is one of the key drivers in this film.  While posturing is going on, there is “real work” being done behind the scenes and that idea is one of the most attractive things about the cold war genre. There are people out there taking actual actions.  Not superheroes, not billionaire playboys, just someone who has a job to do.  Anyone can save the world.  They just have to be in the right place at the right time.

For me, there were a lot of things to love about Atomic Blonde.  Charlize Theron absolutely makes you believe that she is physically capable of pulling off every one of those moves.  They do the Actor the service (and, yes, this is a service) of allowing her character to get bruised, spit blood, stomp around town in a stylish coat and a black eye.  They (and likely Ms. Theron bought into this) are not interested in keeping her “pretty”.  None of this is “pretty”, none of it is glorified.  It is death, betrayal and mayhem on an intimate, fingernail-peeling, scale.  The fight scenes are gorgeous and brutal in a way that has only recently become fashionable.  They make every single hit hard work for both Lorraine (Theron) and her opponents.  These fights are first and foremost about endurance.  Who can get up again the quickest.

The story itself, the narrative that strings all of these fight sequences together is incomplete, but not for the reasons you might thing.  This film was written and filmed for us “Cold War kids”.  This means there is a lot of “generational canon” here that, unless your own memories of the cold war get brought to the fore by the sound and imagery, you’re going to miss.  If anything, the filmmakers are guilty of going too far into “show, don’t tell” land. The current crop of 20-something moviegoers simply aren’t going to have all the references to hand.  (I’m reminded of when The Two Jakes, the 1990 sequel to the 1974 Chinatown was released.  After 16 years, the experience base of the moviegoers had changed and the new generation just didn’t respond quite as strongly as their parents).

Atomic Blonde reads very much like the plot of so many post WW2 and early cold war spy films, gems like Enigma where the feeling of an operative working in informational darkness is only enhanced by the viewer being kept in the darkness alongside them.  This was standard fare in many stories of the time. If you are a fan of the genre, Atomic Blonde will fit right in there alongside the original Bourne Identity or Flight of the Condor.

Fallout was the Future

November 14, 2015 future, Videogames, Writing Comments Off on Fallout was the Future

The thing about Fallout 4, for my generation this was the future that was dangled in front of us. We had movies like Mad Max that codified this post-apocalyptic world in such a way as to make it easier to deal with. It became less of a boogie man as our TV, movies, our books dug into the idea and familiarized us with the potential outcomes.

This game is riddled with touches, with background moments and still life’s that are like getting an ice pick in the ribs, emotionally. There are lots of things to shoot, there are lots of unreasonable enemies who never seem to fall their morale checks, but they’re all set against a visual backdrop of unspeakable tragedy.  By and large Fallout 4  is a slow game, it’s an exploration RPG at its heart and it gives you plenty of time to mull over the state of that game world in comparison to the state of the real world.

The artist in me goes so far as to note this is reflected even in the brightening of the color palette. We are given an option to play in the pre-apocalypse world, just for a time. This 1960s that might have been, were all the colors are bright and the sky is clear. That hopeful imagery, that feeling of immortality, those bright colors underlie all of the texture development, all of the environment development in the game. There are very few places so blasted and destroyed that you can’t help but be reminded of that Utopia that the game began in. Bright blue shelter in place pods are scattered throughout urban environments, few of them contain corpses, but all of them contain reminders of the people who sheltered there, protected and preserved until you open them to take a look.

And as a parent, because by now many of us Cold War Kids are, you can’t help but place your family in the scene. You can’t help but look at the well preserved, scattered toys inside of a shelter and think, that could have been my kid in there.

If you couple the emotional devastation of the world with the agency of being a player, it can double down.  The attraction of being a player in a world like this is that you can do something.  You can save the town, you can eliminate the Raiders, you can actively engage to make the world a little bit better. But at the same time you are constantly reminded of the tragedies you could not affect. It’s an implicit failure, one that underlies every action you take in the game. And when the adrenaline rush from mowing down super mutants is over, you are still left with the world that may never recover.