Bishop of Battle (1983)
I have been thinking about paradigmatic movies that kind of represent a moment in time, regardless of whether they are good or bad. And while movies are, for the most part, dependent on narrative, they also have the ability to capture the built space, clothes styles, hairdos, music, and the general built environment of a cultural moment. To riff on Frederic Jameson’s notion that the “the visual is essentially pornographic,” the act of re-watching “bad” films from the late 70s and early 80s is an act of desire-laden voyeurism for me. The narrative is often secondary to the visual pleasure of the film medium that captures the excesses of the visual that lay bare the nostalgia fueled yearnings of watching
While thinking of paradigmatic films of the 80s (and more on this in some other post), I recalled a film from 1983 called Nighhtmares that is a re-telling of four urban myths, and while I will only focus on the second story titled “Bishop of Battle”–the other three are well worth your time, featuring the likes of Lee Ving, Lance Henricksen, and one of my all time favorites Veronica Cartwright. The “Bishop of Battle” stands out in my mind because I deeply identified with video game crazed kid J.J. Cooney in the episode, played by Emilio Estevez. The short starts off with J.J. hustling vatos in a downtown Los Angeles arcade in order to win enough money to return to the Valley and get to the mythical 13th level of the game Bishop of Battle. The opening scene is rich with arcade imagery, capturing the stand-up consoles that ruled the era, and the game J.J. and the his unassuming victim play is Pleiades (1981). What’s more, when J.J. really wants to get in the gaming groove, he puts on his old school Walkman headphones for a dose of some punk rock, featuring the likes of Fear and Black Flag (an interesting association between punk and video games, and perhaps one of the reasons why Estevez’s next role would be playing a punk in Repo Man ).
“Battle of Bishop” Part 1
After being outed as a hustler, J.J. and his friend barely escape to the Valley which is almost entirely represented by the shopping mall (a symbol in film that truly fascinates me from Dawn of the Dead (1978) to Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) to Valley Girl (1983) and beyond, the filming of the Mall during the late 70s and early 80s deserves an entire space for thinking film all to itself). While J.J. heads into the arcade to try and reach to the elusive 13th level of Bishop of Battle, his friend Zock is concerned that video games are making him a fiend, and that he has changed. In fact, the rest of the short highlights this change through scenes with a potential love interest he repudiates and his antagonistic relationship with his parents, all to highlight that he’s sick, he is a video game addict—a vidiot! I love this early narrative tracing the idea that video games are like a drug, and their addicting quality can be likened to all the terrible effects of alcohol or heroine. It hits home for me because my older brother used to call me a vidiot back in 1981 when Pac-Man hit the scene (my drug of choice), and I found myself on numerous occasions raiding my father’s coffee cans filled with quarters to feed the monkey at the local arcade.
“Battle of Bishop” Part 2
Finally, in the last part of this short J.J. breaks into the arcade in the middle of the night in order to beat the Bishop, and he does make it to te 13th level, only to have the game come to life within the arcade. J.J. plays for his life quite fiercely and seems to narrowly escape the deadly game. But, alas, the dreaded Bishop of Battle swallows him up in the mall’s parking garage, and with a kind of nihilisitc twist on Tron (1982), at the very end of the episode J.J. is seen by his Zock and his parents being ingested into the actual narrative of the video game, which the understanding that he is never to be escape. See where that addiction can lead you kids!!! I just love it that as early as 1983 video games had entered the moral and mythical status of Hollywood urban legends. This short is represents a deep-seated anxiety about this new and addicting digitized medium, and its projection here as an imaginative tale of being literally consumed by the actual game, which is my its very nature violent and premised upon battle and consumption, has stuck with me. A logic which immediately brings Bryan Alexander’s awesome blog Infocult to mind and the regular discussion on the gothic representations of videogames in the media he regularly traces, especially when they deal with my hometown of Strong Island.
“Battle of Bishop” Part 3
Yet, with all that said, for me the moral tales of such films are fascinating, but it’s films ability as a medium to capture the actual spaces of an aracde during the 80s, which are for the most part gone, as well as the clothes, hairstyles, and the music of a moment is the true pleasure of a return to an example like this. And with this new fangled technology called the internet, fans and hobbyists like those at Rogue Synapse can work on designing an actual version of the Bishop of Battle game for real, you can read the details and download a demo here. I love the internet, it makes my poronographic nostalgia that much more interactive 