s01e03 (Kurt Walker, 2020)
Added 2020-12-30 01:56:09 +0000 UTC
Occasionally, a film manages to go right to the heart of one of the defining cultural crises of the era. Films like this pull into focus a great many suspicions and inklings that have perhaps been experienced in an affective manner but not yet fully articulated. Works like this are rare. And sometimes they display the marks of that struggle to simply identify what we are working with. This means that they can be descriptive rather than complex or critical. That is, a film such as Kurt Walker's s01e03 performs the task of simply bringing a cultural moment into sharper relief, without necessarily proposing value judgments or tackling broader ethical problems.
More than any film I've seen since Phil Solomon's Grand Theft Auto series, s01e03 provides a clear image of how identity and sociality have radically changed since the advent of online gaming and social media. By adopting the "world" of Final Fantasy XI as its fundamental landscape, s01e03 explores the relationship between online and IRL relations, their adjacent spatial logics, and the fact that, from a particular point of view, it no longer makes sense to consider one "world" anterior or more legitimate than the other.
In this regard, s01e03 is an implicit rebuke to cultural theorists like Adam Curtis, whose anarcho-libertarian worldview (most clearly expounded in HyperNormalisation) maintains that online relationships are fraudulent, a tool of mass distraction designed to keep late capitalist subjects off the streets and out of the real political sphere. In fact, taken as a whole, Curtis's entire corpus suggests that subjectivity itself, or human interiority, is a capitalist production, and that humans are only reaching their full liberatory potential when they subsume themselves to the swirling mass.
By contrast, Walker's film examines the relative freedom of online "landscapes," particularly at a time when actual space -- the city, housing, the public sphere -- is being destroyed by privatization and gentrification. In s01e03, Walker's players are seen trying to exist in the "reality" of Vancouver, only to be thwarted by various spatial impediments. By contrast, the two prospective lovers share an existence in Final Fantasy that, while hardly unfettered -- the game code has its limits, of course -- provides a field of action that they control and define.
Formally, Walker expresses this co-reality with a visual approach that emphasizes the realism of various vistas and locales within the game, and uses shadows and filters to "derealize" the spaces of the real world. In watching s01e03, one is often unsure whether one is seeing a real, photographed location or a part of the Final Fantasy game-scape. And of course, this maneuver emphasizes that, Bazin's contentions notwithstanding, all of these spaces are equally representational once they enter Walker's film. Neither is definitively more real than the other.
In the course of s01e03, we experience a kind of vicarious loss, a variation on the end of the world. The one-hour film is structured by a 24-hour countdown, leading up to the moment when the server that hosts the main characters' game space will go offline for good. They try to make plans for continuing their relationship IRL, but this shift is tinged with apprehension, since the game world has allowed these two people to adopt their chosen gender, race, and body type. Reality is far less forgiving. And there is the problem of how to traverse distance, and what spaces actually remain for young people to explore their existence?
If there is a flaw in s01e03, it's that in articulating this social dilemma, Walker provides very little friction or pushback. A more complicated work might have entertained and refuted the notion that the shared life of these two subjects is somehow inauthentic, a surrogate for actual human connection. Instead, s01e03 coalesces and displays the cultural problem itself, the coextensive relations between the cyber and material worlds. He shows us exactly what that looks like, and how it affects so many of us. So in a sense, s01e03 is an opening salvo in a broader human discussion, one we will all be struggling through for a long time to come.
