W.B. Preston
I first saw Brainscan (Edward Furlong, Frank Langella) in late summer 95’. I remember it vividly, as I knew I only had a few short weeks of vacation left before school started. I was ten-years-old. The movie was premiering on HBO and I was well on my way to becoming a film fanatic. I was especially interested in this because it was the first film I had seen Mr. Furlong in since Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the movie that I consider to have begun my love of the cinema experience, and more generally, the summer Hollywood blockbuster. Needless to say, I was anticipating viewing this film because of Mr. Furlong’s name on the marquee.
I had been inducted into the horror genre years prior, my mother was a huge horror fan, and as a small child I had already consumed the entire Elm Street series up to that point, as well as the majority of Friday the 13th and the Halloween series respectively. However my childhood horror diet did not consist solely of these legendary, if fading, horror sagas, I also consumed one offs and lesser known horror series such as Candyman, Cape Fear, Troll, Poltergeist, Leprechaun, Child’s Play, Rumplestiltskin, Kujo, The Gate, Pet Cemetery, Puppet Master, Critters, Gremlins, Hellraiser, Killer Clowns From Outer Space, Night of the Living Dead, The Lost Boys, The Monster Squad, Predator, The Fly, Little Shop of Horrors, The Lawnmower Man, Dr. Giggles, Serial Mom and It.
If you were a kid in the early 90’s or late 80’s and were a horror junky like me, you probably had a similar early film curriculum. As you can see, my education consisted of every kind of genre at every level of quality, from classic to, uh, not so classic, and from hard R adult fair, to light kids horror stuff, so when Brainscan was advertised on HBO that summer, I knew it wouldn’t be a classic, but I was interested nonetheless, and well prepared. I was also a video game nerd, so if you’ve seen the film or played the game The Last of Us, you know where I’m going with this, and if not then stay with me, this has a point.
In the movie, a kid, Furlong, gets a videogame on CD-ROM, that is a kind of virtual reality experience, in which you become a killer, and must commit murder under a certain time limit. Well eventually the kid realizes that his murders are really happening, and he must figure out a way to stop it. It’s kind of silly, and thinking back on it, it was kind of like an episode from the Nickelodeon show Are You Afraid of the Dark. This all sounds quaint to a modern audience, but at the time there really were not video games whose specific task was murder. Sure there was shooting games, like Doom, and fighting games of all sorts, there was a game on Sega CD that I recall titled Night Trap, in which you were in a house with a group of teenagers and as vampires descend upon the kids, you must use traps to kill the vamps. Again, the aim of the game was not simply to murder.
So I remember distinctly thinking that a game about murder could never happen, and would never happen, and the world would be safe from any such nonsense, and I ate dinner and went to bed and dreamed of candy canes and lollipops. Fast-Forward fifteen years and quite a few ‘killing’ games have been released, Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, just to name two, but in the case of Grand Theft Auto, the murder aspect feels more like a video game fantasy then a real life snuff film. And Call of Duty is a war game, so obviously you are shooting people in the head, but again it doesn’t feel like a snuff film, it feels like you are fighting for some cause, and the action is kind of on the cartoon side. It wasn’t until The Last of Us that I felt the promise of Brainscan had finally began to be fulfilled.
Most notably the multiplayer mode in The Last of Us in which groups of players from around the globe are pitted in four-on-four teams in different locales, a university, a small town, etc. and must stalk members of the other team and eliminate them one by one. Sounds similar to Call of Duty, but this is not a war. There is not a bunch of shooting and groups of people armed to the teeth with the latest technology in weaponry and armor. Call of Duty is a fantasy, this is a snuff video game. These are regular people, in jeans and jackets and beanies, some are unarmed, as the premise of the game takes place in an America after the fall of society. So ammunition, weapons and food is scarce, and you have to survive with what ever you can scrounge. Some people are armed with shanks, some just have their fists. The ones lucky enough to have a gun are able to defend themselves, but are also given the ability to inflict murderous carnage on the unarmed. What’s worse is you don’t just shoot someone or hit them and then they fall to the ground dead. Oh no, that would be like games of the past. In this game you tip toe around a building and quietly sneak up on an unsuspecting victim and attack them. They then fall to the ground on their knees, and you kick them to the floor pressing the barrel of the gun to their temple and execute them, in a fashion so realistic that the first time I witnessed it I actually flinched at the shock of it.
From the description of my childhood, it should be clear that I was not some sheltered from violence bubble boy religious fanatic, out here trumpeting against violence in videogames. No far from it. I’m a gamer through in through, and a horror fan. I’m the gamer that wishes Manhunt was still around on these new systems, or that Hitman was more realistic. But this game takes it to a new level, especially in a society that has had quite a run of armed madman killing innocent people, do we really need all of these pill popping, gun toting, madmen playing this game which depicts such realistic acts of inhumane violence, and getting a hankering for the real thing?
What is even more disturbing than all this is the game is called The Last of Us. If society does in fact fall, if there is no government to at least seem like it is interested in stopping bad guys, then this game is how it all ends. Packs of murderers roaming the country executing the unarmed and taking their goods. As I sat in horror watching my brothers play feverishly and enthralled, it seemed like a training simulation for the end. An end in which the right wing nuts with their huge gun collections and stash of millions of bullets and ammunition, and thousands of hours logged at the shooting range are in charge. Maybe the armed militias are not forming to defend themselves from the government, maybe they are forming to defend themselves when the time comes and there is no government.
Or perhaps I’m being dramatic. The point is The Last of Us is the first step towards a real Brainscan, which is kind of cool and kind of scary.
No comments:
Post a Comment