I can make you hate (48 page)

Despite being almost completely incoherent, it’s enjoyable bibble, and as good as superhero films are ever likely to get, which is excellent news because it means they can stop making them now. Seriously, they needn’t bother releasing
Batman Bum Attack
or whatever the next one’s called, because it won’t be as good as
Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D
. Finally we can move on, as a species.

Still, entertained though I was, I did find myself occasionally checking emails: a first for me in a cinema, and surprising when you consider the amount of spectacle on display. It’s like watching buildings and cars and girders and fighter jets endlessly smashing around inside a gigantic washing machine for two hours, interspersed with wisecracks. That’s what mesmerises humans, just as surely as cats are fascinated by bits of string being pulled across the carpet. Up to a point, anyway. Once you’ve seen 10,000 cars exploding, you’ve seen them all. I rapidly succumbed to spectacle fatigue.

Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D
cost $220m to make and is 143 minutes long, so whenever I glanced at my phone for one second, I missed $25,641 worth of entertainment.

(As an aside, I bet you could find someone prepared to shoot a stranger dead on camera for $25,641. What if you paid that person $220m to shoot 8,580 strangers dead on camera – that’s one per second – and then while you were watching the footage afterwards, in your lair, your phone beeped and you glanced at it for five seconds and didn’t notice all five members of One Direction taking a bullet? You’d miss out on a real cultural talking point.)

Finally – and this is an odd accusation to level at a superhero film – it didn’t feel very real. I reckon only about 8 per cent of
what was on screen was actually there. The rest was imagined by computers.

And please, leery tragi-men, don’t dribble on about ‘Scarlett Johansson’s arse in 3D’ being ‘worth the price of admission’. The film was shot in 2D and converted to 3D using software, which means you’re actually drooling over a 2D image of Scarlett Johansson’s arse wrapped around a wireframe model of an arse that isn’t there. You’re sitting in front of HAL 9000, jerking off like a monkey. Somewhere, the machines are laughing at you.

My confession that I checked my emails during the film earned me a staggering amount of opprobrium, although in my defence I should point out that a) the cinema was virtually empty and I was sitting about three rows behind the only other occupants and b) for fuck’s sake, it’s only
Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D.

Eleven weeks ago I wrote a column about my experience of becoming a dad. I also promised to never write another ‘
parenthood
’ piece again, on the basis that prior to becoming a parent, the mere mention of babies in newsprint was guaranteed to make me vomit all over the page in protest, paying special attention to the author’s byline photo.

I held true to that promise. Really I did. And then a few weeks later I wrote an article on becoming jaded with popular culture, in which I had the temerity to mention parenthood again. Briefly, and only in passing – but boy did some readers go for me in the comments section.

‘Oh Brooker, you smug, simpering, self-satisfied, mimsy, middle-class, latte-sipping, fleece-wearing, washed-up,
shark-jumping
, progeny-spawning embarrassment. I remember way back when you used to be relevant. When you wrote those columns slagging off reality show contestants. Remember those rebellious glory days? You said Anton du Beke looks like a man who jizzes sherbet or something and it was hilarious. Now look at you. You’ve become everything you used to criticise – literally everything.
AND
you’ve grown your hair a bit: the ultimate betrayal.
*
You’ve let yourself down, but worse than that, you’ve let me down – me, your cherished reader: the single most important person in your life.’

I hereby resign from whatever contest of cultural significance these keyboard-bothering nincompoops think they’re conducting.

The key point these wailing children fail to appreciate is that becoming less relevant is my inevitable destiny. It’s their destiny too, but they’re way too full of snot and pep to notice. The real tragedy is not that I’m doomed to fade, but that I’m doomed to fade just to make room for these pricks.

Well prick away, cocksure Sharpington Sharp, because one day, you’ll be so irrelevant yourself you’ll actually stop breathing. Your body will decompose to a grey, pulpy mulch that will fertilise the soil the next generation will nonchalantly trample over on its way to the hologram shop. And that’s how I picture you when I read your comments – as a shovelful-of-putrefied-matter-to-be making the very least of its brief window of consciousness. Under those circumstances, your level of snark merely strikes me as tragicomic.

All of which is a longwinded and possibly over-defensive way of saying I’m going to mention babies again. And again and again and again. Look, I’m mentioning them now:
BABIES
. I’ll mention them as often as I like. In fact I might ask them to print this entire column in a special Winnie-the-Pooh font, with a photograph of a mobile, just to make it more off-putting to the cool kids.

A common theme in the comments expressing dismay at my shameful acceptance of fatherhood is that people go all sappy when they have a baby; ergo, every word I wrote from this point on would be shot through with gooey, complacent sentiment.
I don’t understand that. I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t gain an additional nine layers of rage the nanosecond they become a parent. There’s the sleep deprivation and the stress, of course, but that’s largely offset by the underlying sense of delight that babies radioactively plant in their parents’ heads in a cunning bid to stop them murdering them.

It’s the rest of the world that’s the problem. When you’re suddenly tasked with steering a defenceless, vulnerable creature through life, the state of the planet instantly feels like less of a wearying joke and more of an outrageous affront to human decency. The world has slightly sharper edges than before.

Still, it’s probably best not to succumb to this over-protective mindset, in case you turn into Sting and accidentally write the anti-nuclear-holocaust song ‘Russians’. ‘How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?’ he sang, doubtless in the grip of new dadhood. ‘Believe me when I say to you, I hope the Russians love their children too.’ Nothing wrong with the sentiment, but no one ever danced to it at their wedding.

But I guess Sting wrote that because his son was precious to him. And I can relate to that now, just as I now understand why parents think their kids are unique and wonderful geniuses. It’s simple: for the first six weeks or so, a baby is effectively little more than a screaming pet rock. It can’t even hold its own head up, so any expectation you had regarding your child’s abilities is instantly reset to zero. You get so accustomed to it doing nothing but yelling and defecating, the moment it does anything new – smiling or batting vaguely at an object – it’s a miracle, like a chair has learned to tap-dance.

How clever, you think, forgetting that ‘batting vaguely at an object’ is hardly worth mentioning on a CV. All your baby has actually done – in geek terms – is receive the latest OS update, which fixes a few bugs (it goes cross-eyed less often), clears up some performance issues (it feeds more efficiently), and enables new features (object-batting now included).

Of course, everyone on the planet gets the same OS updates, at regular intervals, for their entire lives. Before long, he’ll get the crawling update. The talking update. The walking update. And so on.

Personally, I downloaded all of those years ago. I’m way ahead of the little idiot. Way ahead. I’ve already got the hair-greying update, and am hoping to collect the complete set of related physical ‘improvements’, such as weaker eyesight and sagging flesh. Eventually, in a glorious climax, I guess I’ll install and run the ‘afterlife’ routine, encountering the inevitable fatal system error halfway through.

Unless by then they’ve ironed out that final, unfortunate, inescapable glitch.

In the early eighties, the arcade game
Pac-Man
was twice as popular as oxygen. People couldn’t get enough of the haunted yellow disc with the runaway pill addiction and soon clamoured for a sequel. Namco, the Japanese creator, was working on a followup called
Super Pac-Man,
but this was taking too long for US distributor Midway’s liking. So it bought an unofficial modification of the original game, changed the graphics a bit and released it as
Ms. Pac-Man
: possibly the first female lead character in a video game.

I say ‘possibly’ because no one knows what gender the
shooty-bang
thing you controlled in
Space Invaders
was because it didn’t have stubble or knockers to define itself by. But then nor did Ms Pac-Man, whose name was confusing: at the time the prefix ‘Ms’ was a clear nod to feminist independence, whereas the surname
‘Pac-Man’ – not ‘Pac-Woman’ – screamed of subjugation to the patriarchy.

This intense paradox often caused gender studies students who encountered the
Ms. Pac-Man
cabinet to suffer such cognitive dissonance they fell to the ground, fitting and flapping like panicking fish. Arcade owners had to shove sticks with rags tied round them into their mouths to stop them chewing their own tongues off and distracting people from their game of
Q-Bert.

‘Pac-Man
was the first commercial video game to involve large numbers of women as players – it expanded our customer base and made
Pac-Man
a hit,’ claimed a Midway spokesman at the time. ‘Now we’re producing this new game
Ms. Pac-Man
as our way of thanking all those lady arcaders who have played and enjoyed
Pac-Man.
’

Thanks, men! But was the game itself a compliment?
Pac-Man
himself had no visible gender-specific features, presumably because his penis and testicles had been chafed away by years of sliding around on the floor of the maze – which explains why he was constantly necking painkillers. Yet Ms. Pac-Man had to wear lipstick, a beauty mark, and a great big girly bow on her head. Despite being a limbless yellow disc, we were expected to find her ‘sexy’. Some men will screw anything.

As well as being superior to the original game, this ‘
female-friendly
’ incarnation actually had a story. Between levels, a series of simple animations turned
Ms Pac-Man
into a rom-com. In ‘Act 1’, her and Pac-Man meet. In ‘Act 2’, they take turns chasing each other. Finally, in ‘Act 3’, a stork flies across the screen and drops a baby Pac-Person in front of them. You can find this patronising or charming or both, but the startling thing is this: thirty years on, the depiction of Ms. Pac-Man in those basic cut scenes is actually more progressive than the depiction of the vast majority of female game characters today.

Last month the creators of the game
Hitman
drew widespread criticism for a grisly promotional trailer that showed the main
(male) character slaughtering a group of S&M killer nuns. Since this was merely the logical conclusion of a deeply boring trend for rubberised female assassins that’s been going on since the 1990s, some gamers were surprised by the outcry, and became indignant and defensive, as though someone had just walked in and caught them masturbating to the same goat porn they’d been innocently enjoying for decades, and judging them and making them feel bad.

When they’re not seven-feet-tall high-heeled dominatrix killers, women in games tend to be saucy background-dressing or yelping damsels in distress. A rare exception is Lara Croft, the female star of
Tomb Raider,
who – in Pac-Man terms – is Ms. Indiana Jones.

But whoops. Last week the forthcoming big-budget
Tomb Raider
reboot made headlines after its executive producer
apparently
told the gaming site Kotaku that players would feel an urge to ‘protect’ Lara after she faces a series of ghastly trials including an encounter in which she kills a would-be rapist. The subsequent outcry necessitated a speedy clarification from the developers about precisely what kind of game they’re making.

The irony about the
Tomb Raider
fiasco is that when you actually look at what’s been revealed of the new game thus far, the creators’ intention is clearly to transform Lara Croft from a heavily armed big-titted wank-fantasy into a grittier and more plausible heroine. It’s an ‘origin’ story in which an inexperienced 21-year-old Lara crashlands on a remote island and has to fight the elements as well as the baddies in order to survive. Whether it’s essentially
I Spit on Your Grave
in pixels remains to be seen, but the ‘new’ Lara looks less stereotypical than 99 per cent of female game characters.

But then, some people cling to those stereotypes as if their goolies depend on it. Last week, a female culture critic trying to raise funds on the Kickstarter website for a series of short films exploring the stereotypical treatment of women in games was
subjected to a bewildering level of harassment from a peculiarly angry slice of the gaming community. As well as trying to have her Kickstarter account frozen or banned, they subjected her to a barrage of abuse that must have felt like running face-first into a muckspreader.

‘Fucking hypocrite slut,’ quipped one gallant observer. ‘I hope you get cancer,’ chortled another. To be fair, it’s probably not the notion that games misrepresent the sexes that enrages them. They probably shout this sort of abuse at anything female.

I say ‘shout’. I mean ‘type’. And not in person. Whenever there’s an actual woman in the room, they stare intensely at their shoes, internally composing their next devastating online riposte to uppity vaginakind. ‘
WHY MUST THEY TORMENT AND BEWITCH ME SO
?’, they think, in tearstained capitals.