The Holy Mountain

While I can't cite any specific studies, I do know it's widely acknowledged that the human mind always attempts to organize and structure our experiences, even when they seem completely obtuse and non-sensical. People are inherently wired to want to tell stories, or hear stories. When relating the series of events which led to a failed relationship, for instance, we generally do so in a linear, chronological way, each sub-story or event along the way leading to the next. This is why, I would argue, most of the highest grossing films of all time have such prototypical, strictly linear and traditionally structured narratives. Understand that narrative and story are not interchangeable terms, so while the Lord Of The Rings trilogy has an epic and relatively complex narrative, the actual story it's relating can be as happily reduced to archetypes as the Star Wars trilogy, itself famously influenced by George Lucas's study of Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces.

However, entertainment, or art if you will, that seems to willfully buck any notions of accessible narrative, story, or meaning captures the imagination of everyone. Even if their reaction is to look at the surrealist and absurdist branch of movies, music, literature, and art and say “this is weird and pointless”, I think it still interests them on a subconscious level. By which I mean, they have a negative reaction to it, but it provokes such a strong reaction because their mind is attempting to piece things together or decode some meaning even while they consciously reject it. The common reaction to watching just the trailer for Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, judging by the YouTube comments seems to be “what the hell is this?” and/or “I bet they were on drugs” and/or “I want to watch this while on drugs.”

Yet there is more to this reaction, and more to the film itself, than just weird-for-the-sake-of-weird or, to paraphrase the Spacemen 3 album title, taking drugs to make movies to take drugs to. To the average viewer, most of David Lynch's films are impenetrable messes that tease some kind of logical, knowable story but obscure it via surreal narrative conceits. Even though I've watched Inland Empire a half dozen times and still can't quite say for sure I know what the plot is, I—and this is crucial—do believe there is some kind of simple story to uncover. It may sound like bragging, but if, as I try to, you spend enough time with willfully perverse or “difficult” entertainment (or, again, art, if you will), then you can more and more easily tell the difference between weird-for-the-sake-of-weird versus weird-but-with-something-to-say-that-couldn't-be-as-effectively-said-in-a-more-traditional-framework.

So, The Holy Mountain. This is an infamous cult film, and easily the most psychedelic movie I've ever seen. It is not psychedelic in the cliched 60s flower power sense, but in the sense of dreamlike, symbolic, spiritual, and philosophical motifs and story fragments. To put it another way, it's the difference between hallucinogenic drug use of the Sgt Pepper's/Summer Of Love sub-culture and the hallucinogenic drug use of Huxley's The Doors Of Perceptionand the avant-garde music/film/art scene of the late 50s/early 60s. So while you might go in expecting a seemingly random and arbitrary collection of hippies freaking out, doing drugs, and having sex, what you actually get is something like a scene wherein frogs and toads re-enact the Conquistadors coming to the New World and the systematic genocide that resulted. Or a scene where a group of people push piles of money into a fire in the middle of a table in some sort of weird, Buddhist-like acceptance ritual of leaving behind property and material goods. Or a scene where an old man with only the left half of a beard/mustache is breastfeeding a dude, but then the breasts turn into growling jaguars for some reason and...I don't know; I think it's supposed to be a dream sequence or some kind of projected distraction meant to keep the dude from ascending the titular mountain and...you know what, forget it.

This is definitely a movie that is impossible to explain or summarize in all but the most vague and lucid of terminology. It exemplifies all that is possible in the film medium, because it would not remotely be the same thing if translated to a novel or album or videogame. It defies categorization or traditional scored reviews because it simply is. Even if you don't do any drugs before, during, or after watching The Holy Mountain, there will be sequences that have you saying “is this really happening?” at least every 10 minutes. You may consciously reject it and say it's pretentious, inscrutable bullshit, but somewhere in the deepest recesses of your mind, Alejandro Jodorowsky is speaking to a part of you that not only wants to listen, but wants to understand. And I don't know about you, but I am much more excited by things I want to understand than by things I can too easily understand, are in fact, mundane. With an open mind and/or ready access to some of nature's finest psychedelic smoke-ables and eat-ables, The Holy Mountain may already be waiting for you, beckoning for your first steps up its strange facade. Just don't get distracted by angry jaguar tits.

David Lynch's Inland Empire

Inland Empire (2006)

When you watch a David Lynch movie for the first time, there's always that scene or moment when the film takes the plunge down the rabbit hole, so to speak. You tell yourself that you're going to keep a mental catalog of all the characters, events, locations, and story elements that have taken place so far, and you're not going to let the plot lose you this time. But then, before you know it, characters are suddenly entirely different people, or seem to be. Or you're in scenes with characters you've never seen before who talk about cryptic subjects. You lose track of whether this is a dream or a fantasy or a nightmare. And then you give up any chance of puzzling it all out, content to let the images, emotions, and scenes wash over you. Moreover, I'm not sure there's any overriding plot to Inland Empire that one is supposed to decode. I'm not even sure David Lynch knows precisely what is always taking place. But then again, that's never been the point of his movies.

Film is primarily a visual medium. How the shots are composed and lit, how the camera moves, what the camera focuses on, where the actors and the sets are and how they move and interact...all these concepts are ways of conveying not only story to the viewer, but also meaning. Some directors are well known for being incredible with their style and unique vision. Others are content to let film be another way of telling a story which could just as easily be a book. I love Kevin Smith, but even he will admit that he's not an ambitious director. Yet his 'style' fits his films well. What I'm getting at here is, David Lynch is one of those auteur directors who make masterful use of film as a visual medium. To watch his work is to see his vision and his vision alone. He almost always writes the screenplay and either writes himself or handpicks the music that is used. As someone who writes fiction, I know how hard it can be to get down exactly what you see/feel in your head. Even if you dislike what David Lynch films are, you can at least admire that he's able to get things from his head unto film as well as he does.

Inland Empire is a three hour epic and feels equally like a summation of Lynch's career up until that point as it raises new possibilities for his future. It starts out as the story of the filming of a cursed movie before becoming a strange series of somehow interconnected scenes centered around the various personas of lead actress Laura Dern. It seems to weave a spiderweb of realities in which, after a point, we're never sure if what we're watching is the actors in real life, the actors in the movie, a movie about the making of a movie, or the fantasies/dreams of the different characters. Inland Empire is a dense, difficult work but I find myself returning to it, as I do all of Lynch's films, because it's like nothing I've ever experienced.
The most interesting visual aspect of Inland Empire is the use of digital film. This gives it a glossy, hyper-realistic look which helps underscore the movie's themes of reality vs. fiction and how films affect the actors. It's as if you're watching the behind-the-scenes footage of a movie while also watching the movie at the same time. The 'movie' being made in Inland Empire--something about adultery in the south--bleeds over into the actors' lives. One scene has Dern laughing and saying "this sounds like a line from the movie" and then we see that she thought they were in reality but were filming a scene. There's a another scene early in the film where a mysterious old Polish woman comes calling on Laura Dern's actress persona. I always get the feeling that they were never in the same room together. Dern's responses and reactions don't quite match the woman's, as if Lynch were interviewing her and then cut in the old woman later. Again, it's like behind-the-scenes footage mixing with the film itself. Meanwhile, Inland Empire occasionally cuts to seemingly unrelated scenes with three people in rabbit heads who have stilted, vague dialogue. And there's a crying girl who watches those rabbits and the ongoing film and who ends up murdering one of Dern's personas with a screwdriver...but then that turns out to be a scene from the movie being made and...yeah, it's all very confusing.
While watching the movie for the third time the other night, a phrase kept repeating in my head: "watching someone else's dreams." The film's tagline is "a woman in trouble", which is barely adequate to describe the "plot." More helpful and relevant to my phrase is a quote that Lynch offered, taken from one of the Upanishads, a sacred Hindu text: "We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe." Going along with my dreamlike interpretation, David Lynch is a well known practitioner of Transcendental Meditation. Less informed viewers might watch his films and think their bizarre, absurdist plots were the work of a drug addled mind. Rather, I feel like Lynch brings back images, ideas, and feelings from his dream-life and what he experiences in meditative trips. How else to explain the hypnotic, beautiful, and terrifying look of this film and the events that take place??
Is Inland Empire a good movie?? I'm not sure. It sounds presumptuous to say this, but I don't know that you can apply typical critical metrics to it. Three hours sounds like a lot of time yet it passes so quickly and you still won't really "know" what happened. While I may like some of Lynch's films better than others, I think the success or failure of his work rests less on the usual meters of a movie's success or failure and more on how much they stick with you. I'm drawn into Lynch's world (or whichever world he's made this time) for two hours or more and, when I'm through, how much of that world sticks with me, and has me thinking about it, is my measure of success. For the majority of the population, Inland Empire will be a baffling, pretentious, overlong art film that makes no sense and never goes anywhere. But I'm still thinking about the movie, and the characters, and the arresting, hypnotic images it presents. Inland Empire might just be Lynch's magnum opus. Highly recommended.

Killer7

Killer7 is definitely a game that I would not consider 'fun', but one that demonstrates the potential of videogames as a storytelling medium. You could tell this story as a movie, manga, novel, etc. but it wouldn't be quite the same narrative as it was in this game. The various tools the game uses--the cell shaded graphics, the inspired/unique sound design (the acoustic guitar strum when items appear; the mechanical voice saying "bullet"), the intentionally awkward controls (at first I hated them, but after awhile they seem very deliberate), the mix of anime and CG cutscenes, the interactions in the 'save rooms' (the TV channel idea is charmingly bizarre)--could never be done in any other medium.
I know people are starting to apply the auteur theory to videogame designers, but this is a case where I feel it truly applies. You couldn't get a game like this out of any designer other than Suda51. As the game is a surreal, complex mess that I'm still trying to unravel after the ending, it reminds me a lot of a David Lynch film, open ended meanings and "leave it up to each viewer/player to decide for themselves" and all. In a similar fashion to how you always get the impression Lynch had a hand in everything in his films from the sound scoring to the camera angles to the production design to the dialogue, you get the sense that Killer7 was entirely Suda's vision brought to life.

This isn't to say that Killer7 is a flawless masterpiece. There's a big difference between an 'art' game and a great 'art' game. Just as I've never seen a movie quite like Lost Highway but don't consider it a great movie, I've never played a game like Killer7 but don't consider it a great game. This raises a whole 'nother side debate of why I play certain games, and what I hope to get out of them. Killer7 is a unique, inspired, and utterly memorable experience (experience being the key word here) but playing it is often a frustrating chore. Even though you effectively can't lose because of the Garcian character, who can instantly revive dead characters by recovering their bodies, Killer7 is still a difficult-for-the-wrong reasons gameplay experience. Enemies that can instantly kill you, or that can get off cheap hits on you because you just came through a door, are something the entire medium needs to leave behind if we want more people to stick with 'art' games like this. I don't mean that such games need to be stupidly easy, but they should at least make getting through the narrative as easy as possible.
As it's a mix of a rail shooter, survival horror, and an adventure game, Killer7 doesn't do any of these pieces particularly well, but as a combined package, it's frequently brilliant. This especially comes to a head with the boss battles, which range from unique spins on the tried and true "expose/shoot the weakpoint" to a High Noon-esque duel with a dove as the timer to a predetermined, fighting game-style tournament that you play but have no direct effect on to a "final" boss fight in which you win by letting all your characters die. Kind of.

All the while, the game is playing with the conventions of the above genres, and videogames as a whole. Just as Earthbound could be taken as a parody of RPGs, Killer7 constantly undermines your idea of what a game can be and what's supposed to happen during a plot. Much as Lost Highway starts off as a mystery about the disappearance of a musician's wife before things quickly take a turn for the surreal, Killer7 starts off about a team of assassins assigned to stop a terrorist group before quickly going off the deep end. It is absolutely post-modern, and skirts dangerously close to being a meta-game at certain points. Though it may not make a whole lot of sense to you, but you'll never forget it. The levels you go through--particularly the school and the Japanese-style mansion/house--have a surreal, dream-like atmosphere that matches the ghostly characters who talk to you with their distorted, robotic voices, creepy monologues out of which you can occasionally catch a intelligible word or two.
If you approach Killer7 like you would any other game, trying to overcome the enemies and power your way through to the end, you're missing the point. Even if it is ostensibly a shooter, it's one of those games--like Silent Hill 2, Earthbound, and Shadow of the Colossus--which you're tempted, indeed encouraged, to think about when you're done playing, and to go back to over the years to catch new details. To take your time with the game, linger in its environments, and puzzle at the complicated story (and backstory) as well as the series of endings, is to fully understand what the game was trying to do. To put it succinctly, Killer7 is a game you don't play, it's a game you experience. It has its flaws (after all, it's one of those titles that the same reasons I give for loving it, other people give for hating it) but as an experience it remains one of the best the medium has to offer.

The Darkness That Lurks In Our Mind

Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams (Xbox)

Playing Silent Hill 2 does something to me that I've never been able to fully explain. It's the sort of experience that defies me to put it into words without being reductionist or overlooking something. To put it as best I can, Silent Hill 2 terrifies, fascinates, confuses, and engages me in a way that even the rest of the games in the same series don't.

If I were to compile a list of games that proved videogames were art, Silent Hill 2 would be on my list. The atmosphere of the game--the environments, the sound design, the music--is probably the single most memorable and affecting in recent memory, and is every bit as good as the material that influenced it. That is to say, David Lynch movies (particularly Blue Velvet), David Cronenberg movies, J-Horror, Jacob's Ladder, and many psychological philosophies and texts. Wandering through the first 20 minutes of the game, you are making your way into the town itself--fog and snow obstruct your vision, but you keep thinking you see things in the distance or in the very fog itself. You hear odd noises that never repeat or make another appearance. You meet a woman in a cemetery who seems far more afraid of you than the bizarre world around her. And from there, the game just gets more frightening, mind bending, and surreal as it goes.

Jaywalking is punished with...unique methods in Silent Hill

It would ruin the plot to discuss almost anything, but suffice it to say that Silent Hill 2 has one of the most complex, multi-layered, and ultimately ambiguous stories in any game I've played and yet still feels satisfying even if all your questions about James, his wife Mary, the character Maria, and the town/monsters themselves are not fully explained. This is the sort of videogame you will be thinking about as you play it, between sessions of playing it, and after you're done playing it. The sights and sounds--oh, the sounds!!--will stay with you, from the first appearance of Pyramid Head that mirrors a scene from Blue Velvet to the subtle and terrifying ambient noise to the brilliant and always appropriate music by Akira Yamaoka to the various endings you can get which each offer a unique ending to the story.

Employees shouldn't bother to wash their hands

The problem I have with the game is this: it's not that much fun to play. This may sound odd coming from someone who absolutely adores it, but hear me out. The experience, in sum total, of Silent Hill 2 is one of the greatest videogames have to offer. But that said, it's not that much fun to play. The combat isn't the focus of the game, but it does make it "not fun." It's clunky and awkward, and just doesn't feel right. Also, depending on the difficulty you play on, it can feel baby easy or pointlessly hard--the only difference between the two extremes seems to be an increase in the number of enemies, how much damage they take before they die, and how much ammo/health restoring items you get. All of this is, ultimately, poor game design because there are ways to make a game more or less challenging beyond "you can die more easily because enemies take more hits and you have less firepower." However--and this is a big however--it doesn't ruin the game. That's because you don't, and shouldn't, play Silent Hill games to have fun. It's the equivalent of an art film or a horror film versus a summer action flick. Criticizing Silent Hill games for bad combat kind of misses the point, really, since it's like criticizing, I don't know, Taxi Driver for having poor taxi driving scenes.

No, this little girl isn't supposed to be scary, and yet...

There are other minor quibbles one could make about Silent Hill 2 with more than half a decade behind it, such as the uncanny-valley-creepy looking cutscene character models, but for the period it came out, the game looked amazing. Anyway, this also misses the point, because it has looks where it counts--art design and aesthetics. Silent Hill games have a very unique look and feel all their own that transcends the console generation each is from. By today's standards, the "graphics" aren't impressive, but the way the town and monsters look and behave is still genius. You really do become engrossed in the game to the point where you don't sit there thinking critically about everything. I have always hated the idea that a videogame is just the sum of its parts, and if certain things are off or bad--it's too short, too difficult, has technical problems, and so on--then it is automatically a lesser game for it. Silent Hill 2 has its flaws, but they're easy to overlook and forget about when one sits down to play.

"There was a hole here. It's gone now."

Some videogames you play for fun or as entertaining escapism--the Marios and Halos and World of Warcrafts of the world. But some games really do try something new and succeed, and show you things, make you feel things, make you think things, just like any other piece of art can, like an album, a book, a movie, or a painting. Judging such games by the "is it fun or not, and why" standard of criticism misses the whole point entirely. Silent Hill 2 is a game you'll return to over time, discussing it with friends, seeing new angles on it each playthrough.

Nurses: not always hot