Rumor has it that Oliver Stone gets angry when fans thank him for Gordon Gekko’s “Greed Is Good” speech in Wall Street, because Gekko is the villain, and that speech is the opposite of the movie’s moral. And yet, like the gangster movie, the primary allure of the 80s materialist movie is the glamorization of the superficial lifestyle from which the protagonist supposedly needs to be redeemed.
Brett Easton Ellis directing a movie based on a book by Brett Easton Ellis, set in the 80s, is hugely exciting. But it’s exciting purely because it represents another chance to vicariously live through the 80s. It’s like watching Less Than Zero on DVD in 2009 while getting drunk by yourself and wondering why you never got that glamorous cocaine-covered life you deserved. Only you watch it in a theater, with other people, and you get drunk after instead of during, and the movie came out in 2009, not when you were in high school, so the fact that you get caught up in the glamour of it makes you feel a little bit less pathetic.
When I was in fifth grade, circa 1982, I had one of the hand-held football games pictured above. It was about the size of two iPhones. The game was played by using your thumb to maneuver a player from one end of the field to the other. The opponent’s players were LEDs that were lit up. The user’s player was an LED that was lit up a little bit brighter.
Moving the avatar down meant that the current LED would go out, and the LED just below it would come on. Avoiding the opponents meant maneuvering around them before they had the chance to tackle you. Whether or not they tackled you while you were adjacent to them was purely a function of how long you lingered on any particular spot. The whole screen represented only ten yards; you had move through it ten times in order to run the length of the field.
I loved it. Never was I bothered that the players were represented by LEDs. In fact, the disparity between real football and the little plastic device with the panel of red lights was the whole appeal of the activity. Being good at the game didn’t indicate dexterity or a knowledge of football. It indicated the ability to think abstractly, to imagine a whole world where there wasn’t one. How long could you stare at that little screen before two adjacent lights started to look like nothing more than two adjacent lights? When that happened, you’d hesitate. And that’s when you’d get tackled. Read the rest of this entry »
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