ATLANTIC CITY (Malle 80): [4]

Less a lion than shambling tomcat in winter, Burt Lancaster delivers to us in ATLANTIC CITY a truth no less ugly for its familiarity: aging makes fools of us all. It would be wrong to attribute this film's expansive knowingness solely to Lancaster's unsettling creation, but there's an especially sharp eye trained on the deteriorating human body in this late Malle film, and I'm not sure who we should thank for that. Certainly we can assume the ruptured grace of Lou, Lancaster’s character, drew on that slow horror of seeing one’s beauty siphoned off into celluloid yesteryears. After all, who other than an actor has so many opportunities to watch and measure the incremental creepings of mortality? Malle, who would go on to direct another seven films, nevertheless must also have been noticing the shadows of death creeping in. I suspect a wordless connection between these two ageing artists, who knew all too well that a nude lemon wash in a hotel window would draw the worst out of any crumpled would-be alpha male.

And it's significant that Malle begins his film this way, because there's only the barest erotic pull to this act of voyeurism. Sally (Susan Sarandon) looks the image of youthful beauty, but her softly lit body is refracted by the lusting, impotent stare of Lou. The male gaze is made pathetic, capable of seizing onto its favored sex objects but separated from them by age and distance. It's only memory of past patriarchal power that even allows Lou such a transgression anymore. Ownership of the female body is fantasy now, despite their neighborly proximity. There's nothing left to see here. And though Lou will go on to assert his virility in increasingly desperate ways, this is not the drama Malle intends us to follow. Early on, the sight of the collapsing Traymore Hotel clues us in to the fate of Lou's self-willed resurrection. Atlantic City — and ATLANTIC CITY — has no time for the past, not when there's money to be made in the future (a process I’ve witnessed myself, having serendipitously made a romantic trip there myself only a few days ago). Time and capital sweep our dreams briskly aside.

As the verdict solidifies on our annual state of the Woodman address, ATLANTIC CITY seems all the more unlikely for denying us the comforts of silver fox mythology. The film even pretends at first there may be redemption for Lou in contrasting him against the craven Dave Matthews (Robert Joy). Lou's tales of the old days, not yet revealed as falsehoods, have all the glamour of movie star gangsterism. We also metatextually expect a certain amount of mystique from the great Burt Lancaster, exuding charisma even before his plot strand comes to dominate the narrative. This all changes, however, when the loose partnership ends in Dave's murder. Lou can no longer revel in being the surrogate father to the new kid on the block, and so he picks up the reins of their dummy drug business and gains the confidence to begin seducing Sally. His eventual success should be titillating, but instead it ends up further embarrassing a deluded man too lonely to admit his own irrelevance. Brief flickers of attraction between Lou and Sally cannot undo the fundamental mismatch between them. Perhaps the most telling moment comes before Lou has fully conquered Sally, when another peeping Tom session leads him to act out his lust upon an equally aged and pathetic hotel occupant.

ATLANTIC CITY may understand well the power plays of masculinity, but it does not ignore its female characters to shed unflattering light on the male ones. Indeed, Malle locates his tragedy in what becomes of the women these men pick up and let go. Grace, Lou's benefactor and occasional partner, clings to the fantasy of her bygone glory days. She invests so much meaning in being the trophy wife of another slain gangster that the squalor of her current life seems barely to register. Similarly, Chrissie seems oblivious to the betrayal enacted upon her sister by Dave, so caught up is she in a New Age dream that Dave entertained only until something better came along. For all her high-minded spirituality, she cannot escape the single motherhood to which Dave's death condemns her. Sally seems the most well-equipped to move redefine her circumstances, escaping from Canada and Dave's jilting with the dream of becoming a Monte Carlo blackjack dealer. But just as Dave was once able to seduce her with promises of love and a better life, Lou comes along and reenacts the same destructive dynamic.

If the people in this film are crushed by the weight of their pasts, capitalism, in contrast, marches unreflectively onward around them. Blessedly freed of consciousness, it is free to move toward the glory of a promising future without doubt or nagging memory. Malle allows this subtext to surface organically by surveying the entropic environment his drama inhabits. Billboards, crumbling hotels, and roving machinery seem to be characters just as much as the people they exist alongside. The elevated garage where Dave is murdered by the gangsters he conned continues its cyclical motion, consigning him to irrelevance in the face of economics both criminal and legitimate. Even the city's grand old hotels are shown little mercy, they stand only as obstacles to future profit, irrespective of the histories they contain. Their onscreen demolition bluntly confronts us with our own impermanence.

Odd, then, that Malle's film feels so warm. With such an abundance of human misery, painted onto an equally unpleasant canvas, you’d think this a thoroughly dour film. But by the time Lou and Grace sell the last of their illegitimate fortune and exit their longtime home together, even that insistent wrecking ball at work on the hotel behind them doesn't cast quite the shadow you'd expect. Sally exits the film driving away from it all, in thrall to a radio program about French wine. Her life's sadness is the most unfair after all she's done to escape it, but Malle doesn't deny her the possibility of happiness  that she has been denied her until now. Even Chrissie comes off more endearingly beleaguered than a truly lost soul. If life ahead for her will be torturous, we have no indication of that in this film's diegesis. There's a tenderness to Malle's depiction of his characters which prevents his film's weighty themes from outright smothering them. Lou, our avatar of shameful old age, may be the least redeemable of this cast of lost dreamers, but the amount of time we spend with him at least lets us know he's afraid, not malevolent. His mistakes are the mistakes of someone who doesn't know how he’s supposed to start disappearing. Masculinity's bravado serves him no better than the women around him are by femininity’s enforced submissiveness. Age knows no gender binary. If our fate is to slip away from life as capitalism's machinery obstinately endures, better to do it by meeting our fellow humans on an equal plane without artificial divisions.

SPECIAL POST: Video Games, Part II

I do believe there's a vacuum for meaningful success in America, because most American success comes with unwanted drawbacks nobody warns you about (again, maybe we're better attuned to those drawbacks as a culture because of how frequently we hear stories of "the dark side of success"?) [+ whether the success might be worth the drawbacks is something comparatively under-analyzed, not to mention fairly unpredictable on an individual basis]. So what we find ourselves with is a growing number of young people smart enough to see through the uncritical cultural vision of the American Dream while simultaneously craving the sense of fulfillment it offers while also fearing the attendant difficulties that might take the place of the historically unprecedented comfort of modern living they enjoy. They want the safety of now, the success of someday, and the consequences of neither. So it's not difficult to see why many have forsaken the idea of socially approved success, but it's a little harder to understand how video games, of all things, have come to fill that hole. I'm not very interested in talking about video games as a medium. It's the cultural function they serve that I find myself thinking about a lot.

There's an article by Stephanie Coontz that I don't know if I can find that talks about (among other things) the standardization of teenage experience in America. Teenagers have slowly been corralled up and marketized as a demographic. Forever the outsiders in a world sharply delineated between Child and Adult/Man and Woman/Black and White/Gay and Straight, the emergence of the concept of adolescence has brought with it an anxiety over what exactly to do with teenagers. We want to shape their indeterminate identities, but we're weirdly incapable of offering ways to do so beyond giving them market power to do it themselves. From an entertainment and marketing point of view, this obviously includes the hugely profitable PG-13 superhero movies and YA fiction and other usual suspects. Less obviously it involves the erosion of public lives they once had access to, creating a nostalgia for youthful wanderlust you can glimpse in movies like ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (aptly titled!) and in books like Stuart Dybek's Coasts of Chicago. Where neighborhoods were once a vast playground to meet all kinds of new people, now shopping malls are the domain of the teenager and their pre-selected friends. Public parks no longer hold much intrinsic interest in the age of consumer media, particularly toward those less athletically inclined in the first place. The world has indeed shrunk, but more importantly, it seems to have also withered away. The escapism of video games, then, is a compelling force upon teenagers in need of excitement (I'd also wager that the emergence of party culture is more due to enticingly easy access to drugs + alcohol rather than any inherently criminal teenage nature).

There are a number of broader sociological factors that have furthered this process of atomization and social disintegration. Class boundaries have solidified (suburbs vs. inner city vs. housing projects), racial boundaries remain mostly untouched, and gender essentialism keeps kids everywhere constantly seeking to boost their masculine/feminine credentials. The shift from an industrial economy to a service-based economy, as Coontz detailed in her article somewhere, left young people without any real opportunity for upward mobility in entry level positions. Years of work at an automobile factory gave you skills and prestige, whereas the entry level positions specially created for teenagers now are cashier, retail service provider, and supermarket worker. I'll go ahead and throw in my own experience here: it's depressing as hell seeing the same few demographically similar faces all the time and knowing that there are only minimum wage time-killing jobs available to you. And it occurs to me now that this is probably an unacknowledged motivator behind increasing college enrollment, the desire to just get away from the dead-end world of adolescence. Unfortunately, the proliferation of college attendees doesn't seem to have led to a population of happy, satisfied adults. For now I'll chalk that up to still living inside a patriarchal white supremacist society under the dictates of late capitalism and Big Finance, and maybe I'll take a closer look at that situation later when I understand it better myself.

As for video games qua video games, what is there left to say? Surely this culture war is mostly over by now. For all my disdain for television, video games are indisputably the more repulsive medium. Sporadic cases of innovation suffocate under the hegemony of interchangeable first-person shooters and role-playing games. The hero's journey seems to be the only journey, unless puzzle games are more your style. Even as someone who enjoys postmodern culture slumming, for me there's something too flatly repellent about video games. That you're meant to spend days working through them to extract marginal enjoyment out of them doesn't help. People sometimes ask me how I can watch so many movies, and I do find myself having to acknowledge that you need a special tolerance for medium-specific mediocrity to obsessively explore a medium. Pick your own poison and all. I can watch disposable blockbusters all day in the hopes of catching something subversive or aesthetically interesting, but I can almost feel my soul crumbling as I play a video game. From ages 8-16, give or take, I was immune to the depressive monotony of gaming. Until one day I suddenly wasn't. At the time it was quite a disappointment, but now I feel glad that it gave me the chance to really explore high art and human relationships. I haven't hardly looked back.

Except I suppose I have. I've been shaped by the unspeakable aloneness of the Metroid series' alien planets, so comforting for an introverted child whose peopled world never truly registered as real. I wistfully remember playing Super Smash Brothers Melee with my little sister years ago, us giggling at the absurd character model contortions, the childish meta-rules for gameplay we created together. Today I played Mario Party 5 with my two little stepsisters, and the gleeful attentiveness to our game's competitive dynamics was a welcome reminder that it is possible to enjoy a video game. What allows me to participate in that game with them, despite totally shunning the lone gamer experience, is the unresolvable tension between the playfulness of young minds and the linearity of many video games. Without our chaotic switching of paper-thin allegiances, the dismay and the relief of shifting in-game ranks, the little humiliations and big commiserations, the game would not held our attention. Here we have the fine tradition of repurposing mass media garbage for personal and social purposes. My own nostalgia for the comforts of a lonely electronic childhood provides enough of a bridge for me to connect with this next generation, who get their fix of numbing busyness through their smartphones instead of consoles. Hyper-capitalism is our unreality, so we do our best to be receptive to what goes on inside us with the dubious help of its detritus. We are united in our uncertain engagement with the weird world around us.

And I asked myself months ago, as I lounged to TOKiMONSTA's track "Sweet Williams" while my littlest stepsister sat next to me playing Puzzles & Dragons on some device or other: is there even more to life than this? Isn't it enough that we peaceably inhabit the same room and pursue our own interests freely? Why should I be expecting every moment to be a stepping stone on the way to existential purpose, hers or mine? My experience of our time together was untainted by the presence of a trashy video game, just as my distant memories of video game love have little to do with the actual games I was playing. I look back on my childhood and wish I'd had the confidence to explore the world around me, but I'm not even so different these days, I still tuck away into corners with my obsessions of choice. Art films and novels have replaced video games and sci-fi programmers, but I don't feel any more at ease with life as it's lived. The world's still mostly baffling to me, and I can't imagine it makes much more sense to anyone else, least of all children. Increasingly since gaining stepsiblings, I wish video games weren't preying on children with clipped wings. And at the same time I mourn my own bygone youth, too hemmed in by invisible-but-deeply-felt pressures to freely enjoy much of anything beyond endless Pokemon expeditions. Those constraints still exist. They still affect me, even as I myself have changed. If children today seem ensnared by games that have evolved to be ever more immersive, addictive, and narcotizing, remember that video games are the symptom, not the cause. The cause is whatever robbed us of our public lives as children and people. The cause is a world that doesn't want anything from us except our various forms of capital. The cause is the privatization of free space, social engagement, personal happiness. So forget video games. They're just one of too many distractions. Look for what caused them, what created them. And I don't mean Shigeru Miyamoto. I mean whatever took an inquisitive child like him and funneled his youthful enthusiasm into content creation. Any guesses what that might be?