Final Fantasy, First Citizen
LiveJournal Entry July 11, 2001 alone again…
well, i’ve been fighting wiht my dad asgain. god, why dose he hav to be SUCH a basterd to me? its like he dosent even CARE about me. i woud run away from home, but i dont think i could carry my stereo and all my cds with me. coudnt live without linkin park, KoRN, soad, ALIEN ANT FARM, stabbing westword, KITTIE, billy jole, NIN, pere ubu ect. ect. if olny the internet was faster i coud download evrythng from napster and i really coud run.
saw a movie y-day; final fantasy. realy mad. cloud wasnt in it. plus the solider guy looked like ben affleck but not t like him to. creepyyy…just made me SADDER
Current Mood SAD 
Current Music the Cure – “Lovesong” (ohmigod save me Robert SMith)
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Uncanny can't be canny can he?
Sorry about that glitch. Blogging about Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within must’ve accidentally reset my systems to a savepoint somewhere in 2001; oh LiveJournal, how I miss the halcyon days when you ruled the internet. But enough of this witty banter, onward to impenetrable academe!
Jason Sperb on Temporality and Post-Modernism
Sperb’s article is about David Cronenberg’s creepy/cool 1983 horror flick Videodrome, but the key point to take away from is his suggestion that we consider particularly timely films as projecting a sort of field of stasis around themselves and their immediate surroundings. Films themselves can become dated, but they also preserve some part of the context in which they came to be. As my flip little LJ flashback demonstrates, for those who saw it at the time Final Fantasy is a film that sheds little bits of 2001 all over your freshly vacuumed 2009 carpet. Like the games from which it is loosely derived, its portentous story and heavy-handed metaphors are but pretext for the experience; one plays the games, but the film’s purpose is merely for one to look at the accomplishment of man and his fabulous machines.
It’s all in the film’s opening sequence. The “camera” cranes up over a desolate alien landscape. There is an abrupt cut to an extreme close-up of a blinking eye. We are expected to note the incredible “realism” of the reflection of the sun on her iris, the detail of said iris, the way the eye moves, the pores of her skin. Gradually the film reveals more of both landscape and protagonist, demonstrating the circumference and volume of its reality. Suddenly, in the film’s most oft-reproduced shot, the camera whirls and we are presented with a view from directly below Ross, who now appears to be standing on top of a sheet of water. This is real enough to fool you, it says, but unbound from reality’s petty rules. Somewhere it’s 1991 and Bono’s singing “Even Better Than the Real Thing.” Somewhere it’s 1895 and Maxim Gorky is up late writing a thoroughly unnerved account of a still photograph of a train that is jumping suddenly into a silvered chaos of motion.
I am reminded of critic Robert Spadoni’s account of audience reception to the advent of sound pictures. According to Spadoni, at certain points of momentous technological change (i.e. motion, sound, colour, 3D) audiences briefly become hyper-aware of the cinematic apparatus. This type of audience member, termed the “Medium Sensitive Viewer,” is so struck by the newness of the innovation that the actual content of the film becomes secondary. Audience-members in 1927 spent as much time celebrating the novelty of synchronized sound as they did grousing about its drawbacks and inconsistencies relative to natural sound. An uncanny valley had opened up, wherein its unprecedented proximity to the real thing invariably drew attention to its minute differences. Familiar and unfamiliar, and thus uncanny. For a little while. But they got used to it, and now we never notice that the sound we interpret as issuing from an actor’s lips is in fact bursting from a loudspeaker elsewhere in the room.
Same thing goes for the visual effects of Final Fantasy. What was once revolutionary now seems commonplace, next even to the videogames of recent years. At the time, some were willing to overlook its formulaic plot and stock characters for the wonder of its very existence; Roger Ebert gushing review hurriedly disposes of the plot to wax lyrical about its strangeness and newness. Square Pictures planned to turn digital “actress” Aki Ross into a star who could work on the same variety of projects as fleshly counterparts like Angelina Jolie. Hyperbolic predictions ensued. The stun value has worn away now; its graphics would be impressive in a videogame, but hardly revolutionary. We are left with a pedestrian sci-fi actioner, an archaic digital film whose characters lack the charm and lasting appeal of simpler creations like Buzz Lightyear.
Yet still it holds the distinction accorded it by Ebert, “the first citizen of the new world of cyberfilm.” And still it bears the impression of the time when it was the only denizen of that realm, that time when blogs were a place for teen angst and not university assignments.
Current Mood WISTFUL 
Current Music The Cure – “Untitled”
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Oh I'm gonna get all up Within that Spirit.
