dawn of the dead
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 
Finally, the last and mashed installation of my Dawn of the Dead (1978) series which took far more technical and creative energy than I originally imagined. The idea behind this experiment was simple: create three different videos that present a critical examination of the social/political commentary about consumer culture embedded within Dawn of the Dead using three different video-based approaches. Oh yeah, one more thing, all of this was to be completed in three days.
The first take was a simple, edited argument in which I juxtaposed clips from Romero’s classic horror film. The second take simply added my own running audio commentary on these selected clips from the movie. Two days, two clips, no problem.
This take, the third take, the mashup, threw a bit of a wrench in my work flow (that’s for you, Andy 
). I labored over this version far longer than I anticipated, which in the end says something to me about some of the formal elements and challenges of video more generally, but the demands of imagining and executing a mashup more specifically. For the other two takes I had the argument in my head from having seen the film so many times, and analyzed it in my usual way, i.e., informally, idiosyncratically and questionably.
Yet, the mashup was far more demanding. I wanted to take the mall footage from Dawn of the Dead and mash it up with some of the public domain resources available on the Internet Archive. I found two good marketing films for shopping centers (Shopping Can be Fun (1957) and In the Suburbs (1957)) and was planning on using both, but here is where the difficulties began. After watching all three movies a number of times to find moments that might work, deciding on clips, and then editing them down, I found that the most important element for framing my own commentary in this mashup was going to be a consistent narrator and background music. This ultimately led to me to limit the “straight” narrator and documentary footage to just Shopping Can be Fun. A choice which meant I had to abandon some amazing commentary and narration from In the Suburbs.
I think this is illustrative of the mashup process, it is all about framing a narrative, making editorial choices, and, in my case, working creatively within the very specific limitations of new media. I’m not sure if limitations necessarily lead to interesting creative side effects (my mashup’s a case in point ), yet the technical, time, and found material limitations meant that I wouldn’t be able to do whatever I want (the death of Hollywood in my mind). I was forced to recognize the restraints, compromise, and produce.
For example, my limited understand of effectively editing and manipulating audio led my to simplify the sources, and helped me recognize immediately what I need to do to create a better mashup next time (and there will be a next time!). I am fully aware that the version as it stands now is mediocre at best—this is a “b” blog after all—but I really enjoyed the creative stimulation, despite the fact that I need to work a lot harder to hone my technical and formal approaches to what should be understood as a new way of framing an argument using the archives of our culture as the creative canvas.
More than that, however, the idea that I might be able to galvanize an idea or reaction by re-working these cultural artifacts is pretty cool. Mashups might be understood as the imaginative re-orchestration of culture through sounds, images, and that depend upon, as much as they diverge from, the history of narrative. A perfect medium for the future given the multi-modal internets we inhabit on an ever increasing regular basis.
Being good for my word, below is the second version of the Dawn of the Dead clip I published yesterday here, but this time with a running commentary of the edited scenes. It is far from perfect, and Jerry gave me a ton of good recommendations for making it better, so I will return to it. Nonetheless, think of it as my ode to director’s commentary when they meant something during the heyday of Laser Discs. In fact, I think my favorite quote from a film commentary was by John Singleton on the Boyz n the Hood laser disc where he refers the use of slow motion during a particular scene of drive-by violence as “Peckinpah shit.”
Over the next three days I am going to be publishing three different videos dealing with George Romero’s genius horror film Dawn of the Dead (1978). The first of the three (this post) is a six-minute, edited “argument” of scenes that I think frame the power and importance of this film as both horror and social/political commentary. The next post (take 2) will be my recorded commentary upon the edited argument presented here. And the final take will be a mashed up version of these clips. This is really just an experiment to trace how we might take various approaches to media for analysis, critique, and the creation of something new. Two recommendations for your viewing pleasure: be sure you have a pretty fast internet connection and use the full-screen option! Enjoy.
