Film Review: American Sniper

Watching American Sniper as a British viewer, someone whose idea of patriotism is watching England fail to win the World Cup every four years, can be an uncomfortable experience. Every awkwardly patriotic diatribe uttered by Bradley Cooper's Chris Kyle (and I counted at least three) is made extremely po-faced and with not a hint of humour. Is director Clint Eastwood condoning or condemning such unthinking nationalistic pride? Is Chris Kyle here portrayed as a naive but well-meaning patriot or is he a foolish gung-ho nationalist?

This lack of clarity as to the central theme of the movie is infused into its very structure. The film is centred around Kyle's four tours of duty, each one involving exciting action sequences and tense encounters. At the end of each tour Kyle returns home and is plainly suffering from PTSD, struggling to communicate this to his wife as he has been raised in an environment which does not allow displays of masculine emotion. He is emotionally repressed, and oppressed by patriarchal strictures about how men should behave. These are the most fascinating and most successful elements of the film, and Cooper does an admirable job in the role, communicating in a quiet, grunty Texan drawl. However, each time the movie begins to explore Kyle’s troubled psyche, it drags us back to the tedious Iraq-set action sequences and makes us watch Kyle and his fellow US soldiers revel in killing “savages”, as they are referred to frequently throughout the movie. This formulaic structure not only confuses the message of the film, but it also slows pacing down to a crawl as the predictability of the narrative becomes clear to the viewer.

Rather than focus on Kyle’s psychological torment and troubling relationship with war, the film creates a couple of frankly preposterous and largely fictional villains for him to fight -  the sniper Mustafa (a Syrian Olympian inexplicably fighting in the Iraqi insurgency) and the dreaded "Butcher", a silly horror movie reject who rips off limbs with an electric drill. This could have been an interesting way to create a dark reflection of Kyle’s life and therefore create a clearer picture of his psyche and motivations. But Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall don’t bring any such nuance to the story. The reason for these creations is far simpler; without them, Kyle's adventures in the Middle East would seem pointless and futile. By creating Kyle’s nemeses Eastwood is able to show Kyle as a true hero and give him a reason to keep fighting. Take them out of the picture, and he is just like any other soldier, futilely fighting and dying on the sands of Fallujah.
 

American Sniper is plainly trying to be more than just a war movie - it wants to give us some insight into a man who dedicated his life to fighting overseas for his country. But by propagating an overly simplistic portrayal of war as both necessary and exciting, as well as feeding into existing narratives of “good vs evil” or “us vs them”, it tells us very little. Nothing is resolved or learned by the end of the film, and Kyle’s tragic murder at the hands of a PTSD-suffering veteran he was trying to help is glossed over with a simple on-screen intertitle. Frankly, he deserved better.   

Film Review - Sound Of My Voice

Sound of My Voice is a slightly malfunctioning jack-in-the-box. Instead of having the tension crank up over time and then release in a satisfying conclusion, it ratchets up the tension but then fizzles away, leaving a little too much of its plot dangling on a thread. Nevertheless, this is a taut and well-crafted 85 minute drama/thriller with some excellent performances and a fascinating premise, and it is well worth your time.

This the second feature from the creative team of ‘Brit Marling and her friends’, this time with Zal Batmanglij in the director’s chair. The first was ‘Another Earth’, which made a bit more of a storm at Sundance in 2011 than this effort, although I do not think it is necessarily the superior film. Both have big ideas and both end ambiguously, but ‘Sound of my Voice’ is a tenser, more tightly constructed film which benefits from its slightly lower ambitions.

Lorna and Peter are investigative journalists who join a cult in order to create a documentary film and expose the cult’s leader, Maggie, as a fraud. However, as the film progresses they become more and more spellbound by Maggie, who claims to be from the future. She has little evidence to support her claims, but her soft, husky voice, prom queen looks and an air of mystery all combine to make her a compelling siren capable of snaring even the sceptical journalists and, by the end, perhaps the audience as well. 

Maggie, played by Brit Marling, is a wonderfully fascinating jigsaw of a character, who we learn enough about to begin piecing together her journey in our minds, but not enough about to be able to definitely say who she is or where she came from. While both Rhoda (in ‘Another Earth’, also played by Marling) and Maggie are similar in that they are lost souls, Maggie is the far more interesting character. Like any great leader, she has a powerful presence and the uncanny ability to override our intelligence and logical thinking with pure emotion. Crucially, Peter and Lorna’s constant battle between their sceptical, logical thinking and the magnetic and alluring Maggie is totally believable and is a battle being played out as much in our minds as theirs.

The vagueness and ambiguity of Maggie’s character unfortunately also extends into the plot, with several plot points left dangling. The audience discovers, at one point, that Lorna is an excellent shot, but she never gets to utilise her ability, in clear (and literal) breach of Chekhov’s famous principle that every element in a narrative serve a purpose. These abandoned plot threads may have been left open for a sequel, which is almost unforgiveable even for a major blockbuster, let alone for an indie movie with absolutely no guarantee of being successful. The other explanation may be the film’s low budget, which also benefits the film and helps to create its claustrophobic and documentary-style atmosphere.

Summary: Sound of My Voice is a clever little thriller which, with a little more fine tuning, could have been great. It leaves a little too much dangling to be entirely satisfying, but its ideas linger in the mind.

Bechdel Test: Passed

Project Zomboid, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Zombies

When you first boot up Project Zomboid, the developers make you read a little warning, explaining that this is not the full game. In fact, it’s not even a demo. In fact, it’s not even a beta test, or an alpha test. This is a pre-alpha tech demo, whatever that means. In most cases, such hedging would sound alarm bells, but there’s a woeful tale behind this early release which I won’t relate here but which inevitably led to myself and what I imagine to be hundreds of others hurling money at the poor dev team, The IndieStone (www.rockpapershotgun.com has some excellent explanations of the issues).

Project Zomboid is about zombies. Alright guys, there’s no need to yawn so rudely in my face. I know zombies have been done to death (I would apologise for the pun, but you yawned at me. If you think I’m boring, you get cheap puns. That’s how I roll). But they’ve never been done quite like this.

The IndieStone team have managed to distill MineCraft's best narrative elements- that feeling of trying everything to desperately survive, of sitting in a hole in the dark while zombies scratch at the walls, and have transplanted it into a bleak and emotionally traumatic world. This isn’t a cutesy Lego box of goodies, but a Lego box where all the Lego has been taken out and replaced with blood, guts, and a stark reminder of the inevitability of death.

In the game world, that reminder is the moaning and banging at the door of your supposed safe house by the zombie horde outside. "I was sure they hadn't followed me!", you cry as you frantically count your shotgun shells. You take a gulp of some soda for a slight energy boost and wait for the horde to smash through your barricade. Then you open the door and let rip. Brain matter flies everywhere, and in the confusion you rush out the door. You don't emerge unscathed, however, for a lone zombie scratched you on your way out.

In search of medical supplies, you happen upon a supermarket. Inside, you are met by a fellow survivor. He seems less than friendly, however:stay where you are or ill shoot! I don't give him a chance to. This game has turned me into a murderer, though I try to justify it to myself by suggesting he would have shot me first. My barbarity is rewarded, as he has loads of shotgun shells, allowing me to survive just that little bit longer.

Of course, you don’t start the game off with a shotgun. I only got the shotgun after a fantastic and heartwrenching tutorial, probably one of the best tutorials of recent gaming times. In it, you are caring for your wife, who has broken her leg while escaping from assailants. The game teaches you the basic mechanics by making you craft bandages, find some painkillers, and then board up the house to make it safe. You go out in search of food and find your first zombie, an experience which made me jump out of my own skin. After quickly reattaching my skin, I managed to thwack the zombie in the head with my trusty hammer, sending brain matter flying everywhere. Satisfying, but also an indication of the difficulty level of this game-it took me two very slow swings of the hammer to fell a lone undead, so I immediately began to worry about how I would take down a horde of them. I put these fears aside and returned home, informing my wife that I had made soup. In my first playthrough, I rather stupidly left the soup on for too long and burnt the house down. The fact that such an act is even possible in this game highlights the emphasis here on survival. You are not an action hero, but a simple guy who makes mistakes, like everyone. Leave an oven on for too long, forget to board up a window, leave your painkillers at home, and you’ll soon be rat food. In my second more successful playthrough, I boiled up the soup, turned around, and was met with a shotgun in my face.

‘Howdy, neighbour’, he said to me jovially, though I think the shotgun in my face possibly counteracted his apparently friendly tone. He forced me upstairs after I stupidly revealed that I was not alone, and he stood by the side of my wife’s bed, point his gun at the both of us. At this point my palms became sweaty, and my mouse cursor edged towards equipping my hammer. I knew that if I equipped it, he would shoot me the first chance he got, and then he’d have his way with my wife, which I simply could not allow to happen. But I kept the mouse cursor there, because something in me knew that this man was not going to leave us in peace. The tension began to mount as I waited for a sign that he was about to shoot.

It came. I equipped the hammer and smashed his head to bits; although he let off a few shots, they seemed to miss me. Rarely have I felt such tension and then subsequent elation at the goings-on of a video game. The key to the success of this game on an emotional level is that it places you in literally the worst place imaginable, but unlike many games you don’t merely have to fend for yourself. You have to be almost entirely selfless; after all, there was no necessity for me to stay at home with my wife. In fact, I could have simply skipped the tutorial by smothering her with a pillow to save her from having to die painfully. That act filled me with regret, made all the more palpable by the fact that I foolishly left the house after doing so (carrying with me a framed photo of my recently deceased spouse), and died a stupid death surrounded by a horde of the flesheaters. This is a game about death, its inevitability and our futile attempts to stave it off. No matter how much I board up my house, they eventually get in. No matter how many shotgun shells I accumulate, I eventually run out. Perhaps it was better for my wife to die by my hands, with love, rather than have her gobbled up by a bunch of brainless zombies. These are the kinds of issues touched upon in this pre-alpha tech demo, and I can’t wait to see these ideas fully realised.

I have played through this pre-alpha tech demo many times now, and each time I have felt a variety of emotions that are often reserved for the best of literature and cinema. Few games can do that. But this isn't a game, its a PRE-ALPHA TECH DEMO, and its one of the most exciting things I've ever played.


(Project Zomboid can be purchased, via some Google Checkout tomfoolery, on http://projectzomboid.com/blog/ for £5, £10, or £15!) 

Storytelling in Video Games: Why LA Noire probably won't change the world

Last night, a couple of inebriated fellow students stormed into my room whilst I was shamefully attempting to replicate the economic policies of the Hanseatic League on Patrician III, and made me watch an episode of The Twilight Zone, because “they don’t make shit like that these days”. As you can probably tell, we’re all a bunch of nerds/geeks, and so the conversation (after watching 25 minutes of excellent early science fiction television) inevitably turned to video games, and particularly LA Noire. 

LA Noire is an upcoming vidya game for the PlayBox and X-Station that is absolutely nothing like La Confidential. It’s main draw is its revolutionary new means of capturing the performances of actors and translating them to the screen. Rather than conventional motion capture, which requires actors to dress up like characters from Tron, this new method simply uses lots and lots of cameras, translating the actor’s every facial twitch into a 3D model in real-time. As a result, this creates much more realistic facial animations, enabling players to see every movement of the nose, eyes, mouth, and so on, with frightening accuracy.

My drunken friend argued that this level of accuracy is a revolution in video games; that it will not only change gameplay (by allowing for players to act as human lie detectors, for example), but more importantly will dramatically increase the emotional connection between the player and the characters on-screen.

I am more sceptical, and I believe that my scepticism is well-grounded, for several reasons. Firstly, the technology required to achieve the level of realism of LA Noire is brand new and incredibly expensive. LA Noire, I’m guesstimating, has the budget of a huge Hollywood blockbuster; such production costs are simply out of reach for most games developers. While in the film industry, a couple of guys can go out with a camera and make a guerrilla film on a small budget that has great emotional depth, albeit without the special effects or production values of big budget titles, video games do not work that way. Indie games developers do not have the resources or technology to create photo-realistic games like LA Noire with top-notch actors and scripts, and thus their emphasis has always been, and will always be, on creating unique forms of gameplay, often with simplistic but stylised graphics. This highlights a fundamental difference between films and games, and is one of the reasons that games can never be like films; in films, the actors do not have to be painstakingly modelled by animators, and this simply makes it much easier to create films with both a human element and an accompanying emotional depth. 

My second reason to be sceptical of this new technology is that, alone, it will not revolutionise the video games industry unless it comes packaged with a free copy of ‘Writing for Dummies’ for every games developer. Let’s face it: the majority of games are not well-written. Graham Linehan made an excellent point in 2009’s ‘Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe’ that too many games writers take their cues from films instead of books. They see the fact that images are on a television screen and immediately assume that games should be written like films. This is a fundamental misapprehension of what video games are, or should be. Games are much closer to books in several senses. Like books, games can be taken at the player’s own pace. Many of the best modern games, like Metroid Prime and Half-Life 2, allow the player to explore, examine and manipulate the environment, which allows for a great level of exposition (of the background of the game world, of characters, and so on) without resorting to ‘cinematic’ cutscenes, which substitute that depth for flashy visuals. A film can only last up to around four hours maximum before it starts becoming something quite boring (or ceases to be a film), and is generally watched in one-sitting. Both books and games are supposed to be enjoyed over a longer period of time in multiple sittings, and in books this allows for slow-paced but very detailed character development and world building, which is something that many video games can learn from. 

At the moment, video games are very much leaning towards the cinematic, and yet the critical reception of the recent Call of Duty games, which are the archetypal cinematic video game experiences and yet are often criticised for lacking depth, good writing or interesting characters, can lead us to several very different conclusions. The first is that everything about Call of Duty is fine, but if it were combined with the technology of LA Noire it would be vastly improved. This would be simply misguided; more realistic faces in Call of Duty would have just a marginal impact on the quality of the game. A second conclusion we can draw is that a combination of improved writing and characterisation with the technology of LA Noire would vastly improve the Call of Duty experience. This is a possibility, and yet something is odd about it. The writing of Call of Duty really is no worse than most equivalent films, but the game is spread over a much longer amount of time (even if the campaign is only 5 or 6 hours long, that is still a lot longer than your average film), which means that a ‘cinematic’ form of storytelling is going to inevitably become flat, unstructured, and overly long. 

This leads us to the third conclusion. This conclusion is that the attempts of Call of Duty are misguided, because it is taking a cinematic approach to storytelling when it should be taking a different approach. This is the conclusion that I personally favour, but I am open-minded to being convinced by the second. But I’m not entirely sure what this ‘third way’ is. I said earlier that games are more like books than films, and I stand by that, but at the same time games are also very different to books. They do have a visual element, which is vital, but they also have a gameplay element, which I would argue is the most important aspect of video games (they are games, after all). But gameplay and storytelling do not have to be divorced, and I believe that any ‘new approach’ to storytelling would be an effective combination of gameplay and storytelling that combines the methods of literature, cinema, and gameplay into a coherent whole, without emphasising one over the other as games invariably do currently. The result of this would be the depth of a well-written novel, the visual flair of a Hollywood blockbuster, and the entertainment value of...whatever it is that people do for fun that isn’t a video game.

I wonder if LA Noire is going to pull it off.

The Inherent Value of the Comic Book

“We all know that comics are the most dominant form of entertainment in the world. The only problem is that the world doesn’t know it yet.”

-Tom Katers

Alan Moore, prior to the release of Warner Bros’. and Zack Snyder’s adaptation of ‘Watchmen’, said time and time again that the book was unfilmable. He argued that Watchmen did things which could only be done in comic books, and that it would fail to translate effectively to the big-screen. Watchmen was released in 2009, the latest of several comic-to-film adaptations of Alan Moore’s works like ‘From Hell’ and ‘V for Vendetta, and it didn’t do particularly well at the Box Office or in the eyes of many critics. Whether Watchmen was a faithful or effective adaptation is entirely subjective, as is the case for all films or even all entertainment media. But that’s not what I want to talk about. With the comic-to-film adaptation becoming more and more prevalent, and with the ‘Marvel Cinematic Universe’ building up to an almighty crescendo in 2012 with ‘The Avengers’, I want to look at whether Alan Moore is right-can the comic book do things differently to other types of medium, like ordinary novels or films? In a sense, I am asking whether the comic book (or its irritatingly grown-up moniker, ‘graphic novel’) has inherent value when compared with the more traditional modes of entertaining us with stories.

First, let’s look at what a comic book is. Like a novel or a film, it usually tells us a story. But that story is conveyed with images, usually though not necessarily accompanied by dialogue and/or narration, which are located within separate panels on a page. And also like novels or films, they vary tremendously in style and quality. A comic book I’d recommend is ’99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style’ by Matt Madden, which takes a very simplistic one-page story and tells it in, you guessed it, 99 different ways. What Madden does is both very clever and very simple; I remember in an A-level English Language class we were tasked with rewriting a short extract in first-person, third-person, as narration, as a film script, and so on. That’s exactly what Madden does in his book, and by doing so he demonstrates the huge flexibility of comics. In many ways, it is a more flexible medium than literature, because it can use both words and images to completely alter the tone and style of the story being told.

There are several problems with comic books, however. Or rather, there are problems with comic books that prevent them from becoming completely accepted in mainstream culture in the same way as novels and films. Obviously, there is the perception that comic books are for kids; after all, we all grew up with the Dandy and the Beano. But this is simply to blur our perceptions and ignore the reality in front of our eyes. There are thousands of films and books aimed at audiences that aren’t adults; it’s a (and I’m just guesstimating here) multi-billion pound industry. There are books for kids, books for young adults, books for lonely housewives craving a bit of erotica (oo er). And the same thing goes for films. And yet, we do not associate the entirety of cinema or literature exclusively with those particular genres. So why do people do it with comic books?

It may have something to do with the origins and history of comic books. They developed as the ‘funny pages’ in newspapers in the United States; short comic strips that still exist today in our newspapers with things like Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes. This soon evolved into what became the most iconic and most widespread (and profitable) comic book genre: the superhero comic. Needless to say, the superhero comic genre created an entire geek culture made up almost exclusively of male teenagers that continues to this day, albeit being now somewhat more diverse for various reasons which I won’t go into today (arguably, the rise of Japanese manga in the West, and other such comics that weren’t aimed exclusively at girls in a patronising way but catered to the needs of both genders).

While superhero comics are fantastic in their own way, most of them have little of the artistic or narrative value of many fabled films and pieces of literature. There are gems within the traditional superhero genre, like Spider-Man’s ‘Kraven’s Last Hunt’, but mostly it’s harmless, escapist fun. More importantly, very few superhero comics make use of the unique qualities of comic books in order to differentiate themselves from films or literature. It’s difficult to say with a straight face, for instance, that Superman is an ‘unfilmable’ comic book series, because it’s not. The influence, in particular, of Will Eisner in injecting cinematic qualities into comic books means many comics are inherently filmable. After all, comics are very much like film storyboards in their look, and so most comic books are very easy to effectively transfer to the big-screen. That’s why no-one complains about them making Iron Man, Spider-Man, or The Avengers films.

But in the past 30 years or so, there has been something of a revolution in the comics medium. The rise of the ‘graphic novel’, a sort of comic book for grown-ups, has shaken common perceptions of comics. Probably the best example is the aforementioned Watchmen. Arguably the finest of all comic books, it has a level of complexity that is simply staggering. Not only is it something of a deconstruction of the superhero genre as a whole, featuring retired ex-superheroes caught up in a Cold War conspiracy, but it is also complex in its structure and style. It features several clever and subtle story-telling techniques that can only be achieved through the unique combination of the written word and striking visuals that form the basis of comic books. It frequently delves into a book within a book style, which acts to add character development, enrich the backstory of the setting, and also allude to the main plot. Such an approach could not work effectively in film because comics, like books, allow the reader to take things at their own pace. Watchmen slowly builds up a rich and fascinating world of Earth on the brink of armageddon. It places visual motifs, like the smiley face of the Comedian, throughout, that require repeat readings to fully appreciate. One chapter, named Fearful Symmetry, even utilises the panelled structure of comics in a unique way by having each half of the chapter a mirror image of the other. And these aspects are not even the best bits of the book-it is also impeccably written, completely changing the reader’s perceptions of masked crime fighters and even making a complete sociopath and murderer the most likeable character in the book.

Another graphic novel which is important in very different ways is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. An eleven part epic, The Sandman delves into the lives of the Endless, a family of impossibly powerful beings that are anthropomorphised representations of human emotions and events, like Death, Dream, and Desire. Again, it is a masterpiece of fiction that borrows from and then subverts mythology and literature and crafts a well thought-out universe that is at once both familiar and terrifyingly unfamiliar. But what The Sandman achieves that could not be achieved in another medium is its emphasis on visuals. The Dreaming, the ‘place’ where we all go to dream, is impossibly amorphous and constantly changing. The entire series has this dreamlike quality that makes for some of the most stunning artworks in the history of the medium, that certainly could not be effectively created by modern CGI, nor could they be effectively described in a novel without losing some of the beauty and terror along the way. While, obviously, films or books could be made of this series, they would be unable to truly capture the magic, just as one cannot describe the beauty of the Sistine Chapel over the telephone. A lot of the credit for the visual style of The Sandman must go to Dave McKean, who was essentially the artistic director of the entire series and created some stunning cover designs, typography, and interior designs of the books themselves. Open any Sandman volume and you will be met by some haunting images before you have even started reading.

My conclusion can only be this: comic books have an inherent value as a medium, with their own unique methods of conveying emotion, plot, character, and deeper themes that are entirely separate from those of other media. Those methods are no more or less artistically valuable or significant than those used by literature, film or any other artistic medium. They allow for the slow, at-your-own-pace digestion of traditional novels while also imbuing the writing with an important visual element that is not limited by technology or budget, like cinema. Not only that, but the particular format of comic books, with panels, speech bubbles, and so on, can be utilised by the creator to help reinforce what is occurring on the page, just as a film director can use camera angles or a writer can use syntax and paragraphing. It is my sincerest hope that the next generation of comic book writers, many of whom I believe are creating new ‘webcomics’ as I write this, will continue to embrace the comic book medium as its own unique entity separate from film and literature. It deserves love and attention and, most importantly, it deserves an audience as large and diverse as that of the more traditional artistic media.

Oxford Lost 2011

On 26^th February, Heather Stevens, Yasha Jannoo and I, along with a bunch of others were kidnapped and taken 100 miles away before being dumped in the middle of nowhere without food, water or oxygen. We were forced to make our own way back to Oxford, fighting against the harshest conditions on Earth: wind, rain, snow, lightning, lahar flows, etc.

This was Oxford Lost, a charity hitchhike organised by RAG to raise money for four amazing charities: Shelter, Helen & Douglas House, Pathway Workshop, and Emerge Global. Check ‘em out. The aim of the game was to get dropped off in an unknown location (which later turned out to be Poole, which was generally lovely but with some fairly racist graffiti and some very angry drivers) and then have to make our way back to Oxford without spending a penny. Which basically meant either ‘doing a Grand Theft Auto’, or hitchhiking. Not sure which is the safer option, to be honest.

My team and I went for a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy theme, with me and Yasha in dressing downs and Heather in a makeshift Marvin costume (it was GLORIOUS. Except it came apart when we got to Poole and had to be abandoned. But for the five minutes she was wearing it, the whole of Poole was in awe. AWE.). Our first lift was from a lovely man named Keith, who had lived in Poole all his life. He vomited corny joke after corny joke at us, although he had a certain charm and style which made them genuinely funny. After being in the car with him for five minutes, he turned to us and said “Would you mind if I took you on a detour? There’s something I want to show you”. To hear a stranger say that straight after realising that you had failed to send the Oxford Lost HQ the licence plate of the car we were in is a genuinely terrifying experience. And being in that position tends to put strange images in your head of you suddenly becoming Jason Bourne and ramming a pen into your attacker’s eye.

Of course, we weren’t actually in that situation. For it turns out that Keith was one of those ‘genuinely nice blokes’ I hear so much about, and actually took us to a hill to show us the view of Poole. In an earlier draft of this blogpost, I said that ‘I felt like an arse for not trusting him’, but I don’t think that’s true. I think it was healthy and natural for me to be slightly wary of the stranger who has just picked us up, particularly one as eccentric as Keith. I believe it is better to be a bit distrustful and be proved wrong than to blindly trust someone and then be proved wrong. Keith was our first lift of the day and the most memorable character we met on the trip. We were in his car for no more than 15 mins, yet I feel like I’ll remember him for ever. So, thanks, Keith. Theith.

Keith dropped us off on a dual carriageway by Ringwood, which I thought sounded a bit like ‘ringworm’ so I wasn’t particularly keen on it as a place. Obviously, my impression was completely right because, where we were, it was pretty dire. We stood at this stupid dual carriageway for about an hour, receiving nothing but racial abuse and jeers. There was hope, at one point, when a car filled with young, attractive girls drove past. One girl leaned out of the window and said “Are you going to Oxford?”, to which I replied ‘yes’ because I felt no need to lie, and she then made a sort of ‘come hither’ gesture. What she didn’t seem to realise, though, was that she was on the wrong side of the road and the person driving didn’t give a shit. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I had gotten in that car. But then I remember that, about 30 mins later, we got picked up by a bright pink limo bus and that anything less than that would have made my life totally shit.

In case you missed what I just said, it was BRIGHT PINK LIMO BUS. Its driver was a man named Graham, who was very nice and offered to take us about 20 mins up the road. In the meantime, he put on the disco lights and played some wonderful, wonderful music by a lovely lady called Alexandra Burke. We had a little bit of a rave in the back of this limo bus, clothed as we were in dressing gowns. It was a surreal experience.

After that, the lifts just kept on coming. After only having been dropped off by the limo bus 15 mins earlier, we got picked up by a young couple who were going to Reading. Which is actually not that far away from Oxford, in the grand scale of things, but is very far away from Ringwood, which is a very good thing. The ride to Reading was fairly quiet, because I think everyone was very tired by this point, and the couple kind of wanted to listen to the Rugby on the radio. Us nerds in the back had no idea what was going on.Interestingly though, the woman who gave us a lift was called Lintilla, named after a character in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio show, and she was a massive Douglas Adams fan. Small world.

When we got to Reading, it was pretty dark. We were wearing dark dressing gowns and our signs had zero colour on them. Getting a lift was going to be tricky, but we decided not to listen to Yasha’s whining of “Let’s blag a traaaain” and headed off to find a good spot to hitch. As we were standing there hitchhiking futilely, a woman came up to us and offered to give us money for a bus back to Oxford. After explaining that we weren’t allowed to spend any money because it was a charity hitchhike, she then gave us a £10 donation. My impressions of Reading at this stage were very good, and they only got better when a stupendously posh man in cream trousers and a blazer offered us a lift. He was in the army and was on his way back home, and was one of those very posh army officer sorts. Lovely man, although I later realised that he was actually our age and it depressed me a bit. How can people be so confident and be able to drive CARS and be in the army at my age, aren’t we still CHILDREN? Apparently not!

By this stage, we were so close to Oxford we could smell it. We got another lift from a very friendly, ditsy blonde woman called Izzy, whose front seat was not particularly stable and almost ended in Heather’s untimely demise.

We made it back to Oxford with the help of a Brookes student, who was very nice but whose car was filled with a suspicious number of empty drinks bottles. If you don’t think that sounds suspicious, then you fail to understand the number of bottles there were in this guy’s car.

In my friend Heather’s blogpost, she talked about that what struck her most about this whole adventure was the transient nature of the relationships we formed. We were in the cars for relatively short amounts of time, and we formed bonds with some of them, but we’ll never see them again. My view of things is slightly different; what stuck out most for me was the fact that we got lifts at all. I kept trying to imagine myself or my parents driving down the street and seeing these hitchhikers and then deciding to pick them up. What compels someone to do that, and to be so friendly and lovely about it? Could I do that just the same, or would I drive straight past? I feel like the hitchhike raised some important questions about human behaviour and personalities which I’m not quite smart enough to answer, but definitely make food for thought. It was a great trip doing something that I never thought could be enjoyable. It was a difficult trip at times; there was that one rough spot after our first lift when we all thought we were not going to make it back. Hitchhiking is strange; it feels like hours of standing around feeling slightly bored, but then when you do get a lift there’s a burst of adrenaline and excitement, and the feeling of euphoria you get after a lift makes all the waiting worth it.

If you’d like to see our adventures, we have a little video for you all to savour and enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PpfGl7uwXg

And check out Heather’s blogpost on it as well! http://threeblognight.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/i-even-put-a-video-in-this-one-like-a-frickin-wizard/

Some Heavy Stuff: Orwell, Literature, and technophobia

Up until this very evening, I had never before read George Orwell's 1984. Blasphemy, I know. I'm not entirely sure how I've gone 19 years of my life, maybe 6 or 7 years of my proper literature reading life, and not EVER read a book that seems, in hindsight, like it was written just for me. I think my reasoning in having never read it was simply because I felt like I already knew what happens. 1984 has had such a massive impact on not only popular culture (Big Brother, Room 101, etc.) but also on the way we think about society itself; everytime we describe a new law as Orwellian or bring up the ingenious concept of doublethink, we are referencing 1984.

So, I felt like I knew it all. Worse, I felt like I could pretend that I had read the bloody book. People would bring it up in conversation and I would, like a tool, go "Oh yeah, great book, great book, one of my faves", and then go home and cry into my copy of Dune (my favourite book, which I have read and re-read too many times.) for being such a literary liar.

But that's all in the past now. I have, in a single blogpost, both come out of the I-have-never-read-1984 closet and dived straight into the I-have-only-read-1984-once chest of drawers (a tighter and more uncomfortable squeeze, I have to say).

Oh, by the way, I bloody loved it.

When I got to the end, I thought not about the issues and themes that it raised, which were many and brilliant, but instead about why it was important for me to read it, even though I pretty much knew the gist of what happened.

The reason that I should have read 1984 sooner is that literature has an intrinsic value; or, more personally, the reading of literature by me has an intrinsic value to me. Its value isn't in being able to talk about what you just read to your friends, and its value doesn't even lie, as a lot of people think about 1984, in the issues that the book brought to the fore and the ideas it propounded and the effect that it has had. It lies simply in the act of reading. That very personal act where you follow a story from its beginning to its conclusion, experiencing the lives of characters and the narrative that has been carefully shaped by a genius in order create an emotional response (or, in a good book, lots of emotional responses!). By foregoing actually reading 1984 I have realised that I actually missed out not only on the incredible depth and detail of its ideas, which is impressive if often a bit longwinded and repetitive, but I also missed out on what I found to be a very interesting love story. Yeah, that was my favourite part of 1984. And I am a heterosexual male. I'm going against the current, people.

When Julia hands Winston that note bearing the simple phrase "I love you", my heart missed a beat. In this terrifying world where everything was regimented and devoid of emotion and Winston felt like the last human being in Oceania, here was another human being who felt the same way! The idea of two lovers in secret being persecuted by the rest of society is as old as storytelling itself, but it is still able to incite that part of our consciousness that does the imaginary fist pump and shouts "FUCK YEAH!".

Not only that, but I loved how imperfect Julia was. I hate love stories where the man finds some perfect woman who is amazing at everything and completely unrealistic. Julia didn't give a shit about overthrowing the Party; she just wanted to have lots of sex in a very animalistic 'fuck you' to the system. Brilliant.

Above all, 1984 scared the shit out of me. I didn't realise just how far Orwell took it. Well, I actually did, but again, the act of reading it and allowing that atmosphere to wash over me in a way that is impossible in no other medium (except, I would argue, video games, but that's another blog post entirely) was entirely different to simply knowing about it from wikipedia or by cultural osmosis.

I am so scared from reading 1984 that my enthusiasm for my new AmazonKindle (yeah, I caved) has been tempered somewhat by the fact that I have a gnawing fear that it's a telescreen. One day, I'll put it into sleep mode, and instead of the friendly face of Jules Verne (who I find oddly comforting) I shall be faced with Big Brother's giant visage and a terrifying voice will erupt out of those tinny speakers: "Newman 0394! Bend down and touch your toes! Further! FURTHER! That's better!"

See, we have to remember that the underlying key to the society depicted in 1984 is technology. Without the technology that Orwell depicted in his novel-the telescreens, the helicopters, the military technology, the advanced filing and messaging system that allowed the Ministry of Truth to work so effectively and, worst of all, the technology and the understanding of the human mind which allowed the Party to control people so effectively-without all that, Oceania as depicted in 1984 wouldn't work. It's a horrible thought, but as technology advances, so too does the likelihood of 1984 becoming real.

And, I suppose, to come sort of full circle in a roundabout way, that is why it is important for me to have read 1984. Not only to try and prevent 1984 from becoming a reality, but because literature has an intrinsic value that, in the world of 1984, no longer exists. If we let our appreciation of literature and the arts and other pursuits which seem, from a purely utilitarian view, to be 'pointless', then we may as well put those telescreens up ourselves. And in a very, very roundabout way, that is why I like my new Kindle, in spite of my irrational Orwellian nightmares. In theory, it will make me read more. And that can only be a good thing.

(By the time this blogpost is up, it will have been a year between this one and my last post. I'm fairly sure that won't happen again. But no guarantees. Also, apologies for the all-over-the-placeness of this...whatever it is, but it's an excellent way of procrastinating :) )