Depressingly Narrow Reference Bases: The Definitive Review
Yes, I know ten movies! They're really cool!
We live in a profoundly referential culture. It’s a product of repetition, of the free access to media, of the Dawkinsian meme’s digital ubiquity. Our culture revels in the reference as something intended for profligate use, to be rinsed over and over again until transparent. We just love dropping in the pithy quote, slipping in a perfectly timed snippet. We just love those cool points and knowing chuckles. I am no virtuous innocent here. During a recent re-watch of The Young Ones, I was shocked at how many lines I had absorbed into my everyday vernacular, from the authoritarian “what on earth do you think you’re doing?” to Vyvian’s exclamatory question “is this some kind of sick joke?”, I was chilled by the realisation that I’d been making these references for nearly four decades. I guess I should be thankful that I’m not instinctually referencing Frank Booth from Blue Velvet, but navel-gazing my way through dialogue references turned me to thinking of environmental ones, and the worrying propensity for the modern videogame to rest on the laurels of a desperately narrow base. What’s perhaps worse is that the modern videogame frequently references older videogames that drew on the same narrow bases, just as the modern movies - which might inspire modern aesthetics - reference an equally narrow base of even older movies. It’s narrow bases all the way down!
Aliens
Cameron’s 1986 appropriative and abusive assault on Scott’s beautiful original has been strip-mined by videogames to such an extent that it’s almost impossible to cover every instance. Naturally, Giger’s original alien gained so much more visibility in Aliens that its form became more replicable, and hence near-ubiquitous in late-80s monster designs. R-Type’s Dobkeratops being the most obvious, but there are references strewn across 16-bit gaming, not to mention the nature of a lurking, insectoid predator became a legitimate archetype thanks to the monster closets of Doom. We also heard the hissing Aliens sound effects to warn of those closets’ proximities and what is an Imp but a brown alien, really? Yet the larger influence and the deeper reference is in architecture. How many corridors have we traipsed along that match either the visual style or the smoke-and-shadows ambience of Hadley’s Hope? Or the hyper-industrial environs of the atmosphere processor at the film’s pretend climax? Cameron’s cobbled tech-noir aesthetics are arguably lifted from prior sources1 (yes, literally everything from Blade Runner2 and Alien), but his populist presentation is what injects the style into the general consciousness. Despite precursors winding back via Alien, Star Wars, Dark Star, THX 1138 and 2001 to the foundational 1950s design of futuristic architecture in Forbidden Planet or This Island Earth, it’s specifically Aliens that secures the summation. It’s the fount from which a million fucking identikit scifi interiors sprang from. Interestingly, Alien: Isolation was happy to dive back to 1979’s more rugged style in its superb, yet perhaps over-long, tread through a Ron Cobb space station, yet it narratively felt far too referential in hindsight. Too eager to recast filmic content as gaming challenges, as highlighted by a docking clamp release being identical to the Nostromo’s self-destruct mechanism. It's a grand stretch for the same complex tech to serve two very different tasks from a surface viewpoint, but utterly in keeping when you realise how much of the original film is recapitulated in Isolation, sometimes repeatedly, even demanding that another fucking Ripley must endure another fucking one-woman battle against against another fucking alien. Once you have the fifteenth jumpscare of something unexpectedly appearing, you just wonder when a ginger cat is going to pop up, and how much of a tragedy it is that Harry Dean Stanton never did any gaming voice work.
Die Hard
Where Aliens partially introduced the duct as a viable conveyance from peril, Die Hard beatified it. Confined, forbidden, artificial spaces crop up in many a 70s disaster epic, but it's the utility of them in 1980s action cinema that allows their subsumption into the videogame environment. Die Hard is as much about the transgression of forbidden spaces as it is a fucking Christmas movie3. Die Hard’s geographical journey through Nakatomi Plaza’s tower bears more relation to The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure than you’d initially think, capitalising on the exotica of backroom, urb-ex delights with maintenance rooms, access shafts and human-accommodating ducting. The lift shaft as a mid-boss, unfinished offices as territory to be conquered, the roof as a climactic fighting ring. Half Life is the confluence of the disaster movie and Die Hard, both environmentally and in the sense of the lone, out-of-place hero defying the authorities and the odds, all to bring about a just resolution amidst an unfolding disaster. Gordon Freeman may not have the quips and heart of John McClaine, but he carries the same utility, the same gutsy urge for raw survival. The same assault from and confrontation of primal fears. This carries through into the Far Cry player-protagonists, or just about any game that casts you as the sole individual to take on some conspiratorial might. They share that cinematic root back to Bruce Willis and an MP5, striking up a Zippo in an air duct. McClaine’s need to see via flame strikes such a contrast with its Aliens ductile predecessors, notably Bishop’s dutiful crawl to a transmitter. The set-piece escape via curiously-lit ducting may have seen the redemption of Gorman and a wasteful sacrifice of Vasquez, but the claustrophobia and thrill of forbidden territory is missing. Die Hard celebrates McClaine’s traversal and exploitation of these exclusionary spaces, just as Freeman does in Black Mesa and City 17. Thus, the metal-lined iconography of Fallout 3’s vaults and subterranean complexes fall into view as perhaps more than a sci-fi recladding of fantasy’s stone tunnels, but more the specific grafting of the inhumanely human onto rock and soil, the artifice as undiscovered country. The artificial landscape as an erotic partner, the colonisation and exploitation an erotic act.4
The Matrix
Far less romantic and far more literally aspirant, the narcissistic supply that videogaming gives The Matrix is perhaps ‘referentialism’ at its most fawning and creatively bankrupt. Spinning the same populist trick that Cameron pulled with Aliens, the Wachowskis managed to create ‘Narrow Reference Base: The Movie’ by outright appropriation of not only a Twilight Zone episode5 but also two decades of Hong Kong action cinema. The saving grace being not Reeves bent over in a trenchcoat to iconically over-egg the ‘bullet time’ gimmick, but Yuen Woo-Ping getting a decade of well-paying fight choreography in Hollywood and, perhaps, a sliver of recognition from western audiences ignorant of the really quite fucking amazing kung-fu films that he made in Hong Kong. The Matrix’s astonishingly shallow use of kung-fu and heroic bloodshed tropes delighted ingénue audiences in 1999, and thus seeded all manner of influential ideas: cross-cultural combat, notions of a stylish aesthetic for nerds, the re-codification of the Goth, not to mention defining an entire field of temporal interactive systems for videogames. Most of all, the action tropes, the visual language and that uncontested millennial coding of the geek hero seeps deep into videogaming culture. Deus Ex leads the charge in startlingly blatant fashion, with any game that uses time-slowing mechanics or martial arts with gunplay as a combined discipline dutifully simpering in the movie’s wake. Max Payne? Matrix Payne more like. I’m not kidding, either. I think there were Neo skins for Max’s model within days of the game hitting the Warez sites6. But of course, my issue here isn’t the direct lifting, nor is it the incorporation of film action into interactive design. It’s more about the shallowness and homogeneity that such widely-influential artefacts necessarily connote when they are the exclamation point for inspiration, rather than the gateway for exploring far richer and more fertile subcultures. Take Max Payne as Matrix shooting and bullet-time in a kooky satire of hard-boiled crime comics. What you get is the straight corridors and shooty arenas of Max Payne, where the satisfaction is from doing what you saw in the movie. You don’t get the operatic dives of Tequila in Hard Boiled’s opening sequence, nor any of the non-verbal storytelling of the big warehouse shoot-out, or the wild momentum of those climactic hospital sequences7. Nor does Max Payne pay much heed to the root media. There’s no Peckinpah-esque dilation of violence, no temporal smearing of unfolding horror across the retina8. In the realm of The Matrix, it’s all just supposed to be really cool.9 This may explain a little as to why the bullet-time shooter died with Max Payne 3. To delve a bit deeper still, Neo’s character arc glamourises the idea of the normal being granted magical combat powers that exponentiate towards a seeming omnipotence, which funnily enough combines so sweetly with McClaine’s grit in Die Hard that it basically becomes the standard for player characters in just about any XP-enabled FPS of the 21st century.
Heat
Lady, why are you so interested in what I do? Because the street shootout is so iconic, we’re going to base entire games around it10. Like Payday, or the spirit animal of Kane and Lynch. I mean, the entire sonic landscape of firearms in modern videogaming is chasing the cadence and atmosphere of Heat’s assault rifle reports along an LA street. What the real cognoscenti stay for is Hanna’s spiralling cocaine use and McCauley’s books on metals, but Heat’s crimebro charisma places it high in the pantheon of 1990s American crime cinema that videogames just fucking adore - no mean feat considering it’s up against two Tarantino movies AND The Usual Suspects. Mann’s sleekly confident definition of the robber gang, of the true professional criminal, probably sings the loudest in the choir of sloppily-nabbed crime movies that make up Grand Theft Auto’s tiresome melange of criminality and slapstick. Of course, Grand Theft Auto has no qualms about mixing the mature aspirations of Heat with the comic-book exploitation of Pulp Fiction and thinks it works just fine. It’s not as if it hasn’t tried mashing Scarface into Spinal Tap or Boyz In Da Hood with Friday, or The Godfather with Eastern Promises etc etc, while seemingly missing out the far cooler and more enriching stops along the way. A bit more Natural Born Killers recognition in GTA might bend it towards a more interesting path, and consider a mashup with The Big Lebowski. Just imagine if GTA 4 had paid attention to Larry Clark11. But then they had every chance to learn from The King of New York12 and fucked it. You want a really cool crime movie to make a game from? Try Miller’s Crossing you fucking assholes. Instead we get the wannabe try-hard cringe of Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead13.
Dawn Of The Dead
When you tropify zombies and set a movie in a consumerist paradise, it’s no surprise that it becomes a defining foundation for entire genres. The most blatant is the most curious. Dead Rising’s original proposition seems so much more exciting conceptually than any of the Resident Evils. And no, I’m not saying that to be a contrarian asshole. I just think Resident Evil is tainted by being just ever so slightly boring. It’s a shame videogames never swung toward Day Of The Dead’s bleaker vision, or the sheer bonkers shlock of Land Of The Dead14. We’re all still asking videogames to send more ambulances for comedic takes on the genre but man, since when has a videogame actually been funny enough to pull something like that off?
Repo Man
Actually not an influence, which is a colossal tragedy. Imagine Grand Theft Auto in an Edge City universe. Holy fucking shit.
Nil By Mouth
Again, not an influence. Not sure the market could handle the onslaught to be honest, but man oh man what an aspiration to live up to. I’d love to see a AAA take on Billy’s life as a heroin addict in 90s London, but you know they’d fuck it up and go all Trainspotting on it.
Phase IV
No, seriously, it’s a roguelike where you play as the ants.
84 Charlie MoPic15
This is the Vietnam game we never got. Play as the war photographer, not some super-soldier. We have the hints from Dead Rising, after all.
Network
YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU... WILL... ATONE!
[21]
There's a brilliant hierarchy I love to force. Cameron wants to be Scott, Scott wants to be Kubrick. After all, Scott's The Duellists is his attempt to be Barry Lyndon, GI Jane/Black Hawk Down are Full Metal Jacket and Prometheus is his attempt at something approaching 2001. And wasn't Napoleon something Kubrick always longed to film?
I’m not sure I can relate the extent of referencing Blade Runner suffers, yet no-one really captures the deep charisma it exudes from every frame. Even Denis Villeneuve.
There's a particularly chilling correlation between filmbros who assert Die Hard's Christmas status and those who declare Empire Strikes Back to be the best Star Wars film. Hint: ESB is really fucking boring if you don’t like Jedis.
Yeah, I really spiralled into Ballard-aping claptrap with this one.
Dreams For Sale, 1985. Features Meg Foster in a pre-They Live role.
If Remedy was actually cool, they’d re-run the flower pots scene from A Better Tomorrow.
I will forever be haunted by the accidental slaughter at the beginning of The Wild Bunch. There's such a macabre ballet that plays out in the staccato montages between slow motion and realtime. The viewer is forced to linger on the deaths of innocents as they fall, absent of any gore, yet it’s far more affecting than any gloopy squib or crimson spray. And I fucking love a gloopy Peckinpah squib!
“Don’t worry about it, it looks really cool!” is the Cameronian credo. In my most unreasonable and rabid ranting about James Cameron’s concepting, I blame him wholeheartedly for the creative dereliction of the modern blockbuster. Emmerich, Bruckheimer, Bay, Abrahams, all of those fuckers and the pap they spew onto the screen, the IPs they’ve merrily mishandled for popularist delights, the ruination of sequels, the insidiousness of vapid action cinema, of violence without grit, violence without soul. But really don’t worry about it, it looks really cool!
A friend of mine claimed that they were staying in an LA hotel room after a particularly heavy night of indulgence, only to be violently woken by insanely loud gunshots at 7am in the morning. He thought the world was ending, but really his hotel was a street away from Heat’s shootout location.
For films about New York, we all know the classics, but Kids had something else. Pre-millennium fatalism masked as idle hedonism, where youths prove just how much youth is wasted on them, is as stinging as it gets for the relationship between the human and the city. Sledgehammer brutality in the undercurrents, and that’s without ignoring the sledgehammer brutality in the overt content.
People think Goodfellas or Reservoir Dogs are the most quotable films, but King of New York is just supreme. EG: “FOR THE BULLET HOLES, PUTAH!” - and that’s just the opening scene.
I used to love this movie, but a recent re-watch was excruciating. It’s so desperate to be as cool as Pulp Fiction et al, that it has the aroma of GTA V when it’s trying its hardest to be satirical. Inordinately cringeworthy, but like a car crash, you can’t stop watching it.
Peak guilty pleasure. Read it as zombie-camp, being a deflation of all the hyper-serious zombie-bro fiction of Walking Dead, Last of Us etc and it’s fucking glorioussssssssssss.
I had to reference this extremely obscure Vietnam movie because I saw it on Moviedrome. Moviedrome was fucking invaluable for broadening your reference base.