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As I write this, the ongoing saga surrounding raising America’s debt limit continues with little certainty as to whether our political leaders will be able to hammer out a deal to avoid a government default. Like a Greek tragedy, it drags on while ordinary Americans remain perplexed, annoyed, and in same cases utterly aghast. My mother and my girlfriend both asked me recently, probably rhetorically, “How did we ever end up here?”

I didn’t have a very good answer for them, largely because I am not an expert in economics nor a political operative. I don’t even have a political science degree. Yet I did have one opinion, one unshakeable belief, that has come to motivate my entire political outlook. If you want to know a little piece of how we ever got to this point¹, I think you have to start by looking at one thing: Income inequality.

Or, as I like to call it, the wealth gap.

EconomyWatch.com has this definition of the phenomenon: “The existence of disproportionate distribution of total national income among households whereby the share going to rich persons in a country is far greater than that going to poorer persons.”

Translation: Income inequality is when the richest few have dramatically more of the wealth than the vast majority. Exactly how much more? Well, take a look at this chart:

I snagged this graphic from a larger piece in Mother Jones that paints a stark and compelling portrait of the issue of income inequality. I’m going to use a few of their charts, but they deserve the credit for aggregating the research and I encourage you to go look at their full article.

On the left is average household income, adjusted for inflation, over the past three decades. Notice the red line on the top? That’s the wealthiest 1% of Americans, and you’ll see their average income has skyrocketed, multiplying by a factor of four since 1979. Now, do you see all the other lines? Try to pick them apart. They’re a little squished together down at the bottom. Yes, your eyes do no deceive. Their average incomes have remained stagnant.

That’s a before tax chart. Now look at the graph on the right. That shows the share of income after taxes over the same period. This time, the picture is bleaker still. Not only has the share of income for the wealthiest Americans grown at a pretty stunning clip (120% increase for the top 1% and almost 30% increase for the top 20% since 1979), but the share of income amongst the remaining 80% of Americans has actually declined.

Put another way, income inequality has gotten dramatically worse in the past three decades.

What does that mean in real dollars? According to an analysis done by professors at Yale University and UC-Berkeley², 90% of Americans have made less per year, up to $10,000 less on average, than they would have if their incomes had risen in the past 30 years as it had in previous decades. In other words, since 1979, 90% of Americans have given up income while the top 10% have taken home more than ever.

That is a massive redistribution of wealth upwards. It’s like Marxism in reverse, with 10% of Americans controlling two-thirds of the wealth, and the rest of us making do with less. If you’re wondering what happened to the American middle-class and their disposable income, the disposable income that has powered economic growth for a generation, that’s where it went. To millionaires who collected close to $700,000 more per household per year, all of it at the expense of middle-income families, thanks to economic policies that have widened the gap between the richest few and the average American. It’s not even about rich versus poor. It’s about the rich versus everybody else, even those of us who would never in a million years consider ourselves impoverished.

Why does this matter? Is this just sour grapes from the people who look with jealousy at those who’ve worked hard to reach the top of our economic system? Life isn’t fair, right? Never has been, never will be.

Let’s be clear: This has absolutely nothing to do with fairness. Income inequality makes it virtually impossible for a society to sustain itself over the long term. The wealth gap, as it turns out, is a cancer at the heart of our economy and political system. Income inequality is functionally problematic. Fairness is like an amusing side show to the real argument.

Noted economist Joseph Stiglitz pointed this out in an article for Slate a month ago:³

With so much of U.S. national income going to so few, growth could continue only through consumption financed by a mounting pile of debt. [full article]

His point is simple enough. With so many people (almost everybody, just so we’re being clear) making less and less as a part of the overall economic pie, there has simply been less and less actual capital for them to spend. As they’ve had less to spend, the only way the society could grow was to finance that growth with debt. Like a starved body feeding on itself, the combination of decreased incomes and increasing debt eventually reduces the larger society to an emaciated husk.

That is exactly what we’ve seen in the past few years. Economics are complicated. The sociopolitical influences are what make it so damned complicated. Put another way, humans and their irrational behaviors, are what makes economics such a fascinating roller-coaster. Yet however complicated you want to make it, there does remain the simple truths.

For an economy to grow and continue to sustain a society, everyone has to see their income grow. That’s fundamentally impossible if the gap between the wealthiest few and everyone else keeps getting larger. Economic growth in real dollars isn’t a zero sum game, but the percentage of the pie is. If one group gets a larger share of the overall income, another group has to get less.

What does that have to do with the debt-ceiling and the game of political and economic chicken going on in Washington? As has been alluded to in this article, by Stiglitz and Hacker in particular (check your footnotes), the biggest driver of income inequality has been tax policy.

One upon a time, conservatives latched onto the idea that the one thing dragging this country down was taxes. If the government could just give back all of that money it took from you, then you could spend that money and invest that money, and start companies with that money, and the engine of the economy would hum along. You may have heard of “Trickle-Down Economics,” a pejorative political description for the school of thought called “supply-side economics.” Supply-siders believe that the best way to encourage economic growth is to make it easier for people to produce goods and services, and they believe the best way to do that is to reduce regulation and taxes on corporations and businesses and the wealthiest individuals who finance such ventures.

For the past thirty years, across Republican and Democratic administrations, America has followed this school of thought right off a cliff. We’ve made it so much an assumed part of our political discourse, that there are those on the right who are fundamentally opposed to any tax increases or regulation. It’s like religion. It’s an ideological maxim for them. Regardless of the economic facts of the past few decades, they fundamentally believe this is the one true way to a sustainable society.

And they are wrong. They are so wrong it hurts to hear them, because their policies are driving the debate in Washington. They’re the ones standing underneath the Capitol dome and holding the country’s financial health hostage unless we slash government spending, slash government regulation, slash the safety net, and never, ever, consider raising taxes to increase revenue. You’ve got millionaires who’ve gamed the system and you’ve got ordinary people who’ve bought the snake oil and turned into an ideological litmus test, and then you’ve got ordinary Americans.

You’ve got people like my father and my mother who’ve worked themselves to the bone to give me the best life possible, and worry their lifetime of struggle won’t mean anything when the government slashes the safety net out from under them. You’ve got people like my girlfriend, who works with children as a speech pathologist and watches too many of them slip away because Medicare keeps getting nibbled away by conservative budget-cutters.

How did we ever get to this day? Take a look past Main Street, past the shuttered shops and empty parking lots. Look a little further, towards Wall Street. Look to Pennsylvania Avenue. Look to every part of America where an elite few bought and paid for policies that served their interests, but forgot that they live in the same country as the rest of us. In the long term, the interests of a few cannot be served at the expense of the interests of everyone else.

Joseph Stiglitz said it best in Vanity Fair, so I’ll let him say it again here:

“The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.”

The Hollywood Reporter is out with an analysis of this summer’s box office, leading with a rather startling statistic: R-rated comedies have grossed more than superhero flicks.

Barely, it should be stated. But when you’re talking over 1.01 billion (with a B) dollars, barely isn’t nothing. The figure is even more compelling for Tinseltown number crunchers when you consider that an R-rated comedy, even one featuring the more expensive stars, costs dramatically less to make than a tent-pole action blockbuster. In other words, R-rated comedies’ box office may only be ever so slightly higher than the spandex-clad movies, but their profitability is higher still.

There have been endless lamentations of the quality of blockbuster superhero flicks, comic book adaptations, and the general suck-itude of what Hollywood has fed us. Last year, Matt Zoller Seitz at Salon.com wrote a mini-thesis on why superhero movies often aren’t very good, and he hadn’t even seen Green Lantern. Of course, his piece was hardly original. A few months later, UnrealityMag.com argued the whole genre had peaked. Between then and now, countless more blog posts, magazine articles, and comments online basically made the same point.

Then, this week, Jacob Silverman wrote a surprisingly solid piece in Tablet magazine on how to save the genre by reconnecting it to the complex tension many early Jewish comic book writers infused in their stories.¹

There are some exceptions, of course, but most of the last decade—an era when Hollywood has supposedly rededicated itself to producing quality superhero movies featuring iconic characters—has been a wash.

I’ve read all of these arguments, and I’ve even agreed with them, in overall sentiment if not in every specific complaint. Then, I’ve shrugged and ignored them.

Why? Because it’s a ridiculous argument that has no bearing on whether or not these films will continue to get made, or whether they will continue to suck. Hollywood makes money by making movies. For every Green Lantern or Iron Man 2, there’s The Dark Knight or X2: X-Men United. The good mixes with the bad, and every last one of them, regardless of where they fall on that spectrum, has made money.²

I’m generalizing. Not every film has been a success. There are notable financial flops (see, Superman Returns), but the superhero flick has remained a fairly profitable enterprise on the whole. The merchandising alone is worth the trouble of producing these films.

But show me an article about the flagging fortunes of the genre’s box office relative to some other genre, and then I’ll pay attention. Dollars and cents make the world spin round, so this is something studio execs might pay close attention to. Of course, if anyone sees this and thinks, “Ooh, finally! Hollywood might stop making superhero movies — or make fewer of them — and start pouring its production budgets into some other genre,” that person fundamentally misunderstands the economics of the film industry.

That R-rated comedies made more at the box office one summer than a crop of admittedly middling superhero flicks will not sound the death knell of the over-marketed spandex set. What it does mean is you can expect to see more R-rated comedies coming down the pike, and guess what boys and girls, a larger percentage of them will probably suck. The same Hollywood model that has turned so many superhero flicks into pale imitations of Christopher Nolan will greenlight a bunch of pale imitations of Zach Galifianakis. Yes, there will be some really funny movies in that mix, but more than not will be, at best, eh.

Also, don’t expect R-rated comedies to become the next summer tent-pole. By definition, they can’t be. Merchandising is limited to non-existent on a film like Bridesmaids and you can’t make bank off the kids during their summer vacations with cursing, nudity, and poop jokes.³

So, take a deep breath. Repeat after me. Wither the superhero summer blockbuster? Not on your lightsaber, chuckles.

Roberto Orci is not exactly a household name. His collaborative partner, J.J. Abrams, is dramatically more well-known, but if you’re a fan of science-fiction, you’re likely a fan of Orci’s work: Fringe, Cowboys & Aliens, and of course, Star Trek. Specifically he wrote (with Alex Kurtzman) the 2009 Trek reboot.

I was in the minority that found the film severely lacking, but I did at least appreciate its attempt to link the brand new Star Trek universe with the extremely deep, existing canon of the previous films and television series. The premise, more or less, involved Spock and a gaggle of evil Romulans¹ being thrown back in time and thus changing history. This new timeline exists in parallel with the existing Star Trek universe, giving Abrams and company the chance to revamp the classic characters while still nodding their head reverentially to Trek as it had been developed.

For some, this was the one glaring problem in Star Trek.² They didn’t object so much to the premise, but the way in which it was handled. While it is explained in the film, more or less, it’s actually fleshed out more completely in a series of prequel comics, collected and sold as a trade paperback under the title, Star Trek: Countdown.

If you’d never read that comic, you’d be forgiven for thinking the villainous Nero character a little thinly-drawn. Virtually all of his character development and back story was either on the cutting room floor, or in the comic.

Why, these people ask, would they make a movie with serious gaps in the story that can only be filled in by going and reading a comic book? A story in a single medium, even if it exists in a larger universe of stories that cross multiple media, should stand on its own. Nobody should be required to cross-reference some other creative work to be able to fully understand that single story. Thus the failing of Star Trek to fully develop and explain its central villain and initial premise within the film itself is unforgivable. However entertaining the comic is,³ it should be supplemental, not essential, to the film.

All of which brings us back to Mr. Orci, who spoke a few days ago on the upcoming video game being developed around the Star Trek reboot. The game’s not due out until next year, but Orci and his partners in the Star Trek film are apparently involved in developing its story, with an eye to making it part of the new canon:

So one of the reasons we were excited to participate in this game is that we wanted it to be very much something that can fit in between the two movies… we would like to think that the game and everything that we do in between to be as close to canon as you can get because it’s actually being taken into consideration with where the movies are.

Anyone who had a problem with the way the prequel comic book was handled is probably a little worried about that quote from Orci. Are you going to have to play this video game to fully understand and appreciate the next film?

Their argument, so far as it goes, is hard to quibble with. You shouldn’t be lost inside of a film, or a novel, or a video game, or a comic book, or a TV show. Even if there’s a larger universe at play, the single-medium/single-story you’re currently consuming should provide adequate guide posts and narrative development to stand on its own.

Take Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Was it an especially delicious experience for those fans who’d watched the original series and seen the character of Khan debut in a single episode two decades earlier? Absolutely. If you’d never seen that episode, did the film make perfect sense to you? Yes, it did. That’s a textbook film, and if you’re looking for a better example of how to handle a story from a larger franchise, you’re unlikely to find one.

Yet, I can’t help but be excited by developments like the Star Trek video game. I absolutely love “worlds.” By worlds, I mean highly developed, rich, complicated narrative universes in which myriad stories can be told. Star Trek began with a fairly basic, some might say pedestrian, science-fiction premise. I liked it, but I never really loved it until the third TV series, Deep Space Nine. It was there that a host of alien species, complete with histories, political interplay, and twisting plots collided with plenty of gray shades to keep the characters interesting.

The original Star Trek centered around three men (Kirk, Spock, and Bones) with a half-dozen supporting bit players. The Next Generation expanded the diversity and roles somewhat, but it remained a small group of mostly humans warping from one planet to the next, wrapping up their stories in an hour (occasionally two). Deep Space Nine had its one-off episodes, but it quickly developed an evolving drama with stories that didn’t ultimately wrap up until the very end of the show.⁴

By that point, the Star Trek franchise had already spawned hours of television, hundreds of novels, comic books, and an above average volume of film sequels. There was plenty of narrative sprawl to work with, to the franchise’s credit. If you wanted to, you could get lost in the intrigues of Federation starships and Klingon birds of prey for days or weeks. Yet Star Trek didn’t start out aspiring to that kind of narrative complexity; it just sort of ended up that way.

Other science-fiction franchises have been a bit more ambitious. Whatever Star Wars looked like when it first rolled around George Lucas’ head,⁵ he did see, pretty quickly, an expanding mythology, one that ultimately would play out in two more films, a prequel trilogy, books, comics, video games, an animated TV series, and plenty more still to come.⁶

Then there are the soap opera series, that start out with a very clear expectation on the part of their audience. You will commit. You will miss nothing, for if you skip an hour or two, you will be utterly lost. The reboot of Battlestar Galactica fell into this category, and it was engrossing. Nobody was going to drop in on the show in season three without picking up the DVD box sets of seasons one and two. Lost was practically byzantine, even to those who’d stuck with it from day one.⁷

These are great worlds to get lost in, and for fans, it’s always a case of the more the merrier, but they don’t exactly count as cross-media storytelling. For the most part, they’ve never really aspired to anything more than a single medium, single format for the core story. Everything else, whether it’s a novel or a video game, has been ancillary to that. Take it or leave it, because it doesn’t really matter to the TV show or the film trilogy.

I can see why many fans would prefer it that way. Not every TV-viewer is going to be enthralled at spending $60 for a video game, and there’s still, sadly, a whole class of people who look down their nose at comic books. That these same people still shell out every time a superhero flies onto the silver screen is rich indeed, but they don’t seem interested in reconciling the dissonance in their cultural taste.

Yet I’ve always been more interested in those narrative enterprises that sought to incorporate various mediums and demanded a level of investment on the part of their audience. I actually don’t think this has anything to do with complex stories. A film franchise can construct a pretty successful and complex narrative without crossing mediums (see Christopher Nolan’s Batman films or Peter Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations). Rather, I appreciate that each medium does something different, and it can serve a story to play to those strengths, rather than limit yourself to the parameters of a single platform.

Video games are unique in their level of interactivity. Reading isn’t entirely passive, at least not in the way that film or television viewing is, but no medium requires user-involvement to the degree that video games do. That doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the conventions of classical storytelling, but it does lend itself to a level of immersion that can help carry a larger narrative experience. As Kevin Shortt, a story designer at game developer Ubisoft said on this subject:

The unique challenge is that games are an interactive medium. Interactivity is what makes it possible for games to contain an exciting world with all kinds of unexplored territory. But it also can be destructive to the rhythms of a story. And a strong story demands good rhythm and pacing. [full story]

In much the same way, a novel can help expose the internal monologues of the characters much more efficiently than a film or TV series can. Big budget films can bring a level of production value and grand visual spectacle that is hard to match in other mediums. If a storyteller sets out, from the beginning, to weave a story into all of these formats, because they feel there’s a compelling creative reason to do so, what’s the harm in that?

After the success of The Matrix, a sequel was an obvious choice. Yet they went one better. Not only did they conceive a two-film single story line, but they layered in a video game that took place within the folds of those two films and a series of animated shorts that further expanded the narrative.⁸ The films were designed to stand on their own (though not one without the other). You didn’t need to play the video game or watch the animated shorts, but if you really wanted to experience the story the Wachowskis were trying to tell, then you definitely needed to go whole hog.

A more recent example is the adaptation of The Dark Tower, a series of novels written by Stephen King. A team lead by Ron Howard are seeking to turn the books not into a single movie, or even a series of movies a la Harry Potter. Nope, they’re plan involves three feature films and two TV series, all linked to each other.⁹ The X-Files made a feature film once that was supposed to be situated between two seasons of the show, so it’s not unprecedented, but it’s more than a little rare to see such an ambitious, cross-media project conceived from the very beginning.

It’s rarer still to see storytellers bring totally divergent mediums together. The Wachowskis went with short-form animation and video games to pair with their films, but you didn’t see novels or comic books as part of that menu. The Dark Tower already is a series of novels, and this would be an adaptation, so those don’t count. As ambitious as Ron Howard & Co.’s plan is, it’s still just movies and TV shows. After Buffy the Vampire Slayer wrapped up it’s TV run, it released an entire season in comic book form, but that was a response to the cancellation, not a pre-planned attempt to tell part of the story in a more appropriate medium.

And that’s a bit of a shame. How often have you seen a film adaptation of a great novel or video game franchise and thought, “That needed a little more room to work in.” Usually we shrug our shoulders and think, “Well they should’ve made it a TV show instead.” But that’s not the only option. As Ron Howard has said of The Dark Tower, “We can use the intimacy of television when that’s appropriate, and the scope and scale of the big screen with the bigger fantasy ideas.” In other words, a story can exist across mediums, and utilize the strengths of them all to the advantage of the story.

Which brings me to my latest hobbyhorse, Mass Effect. This series achieves, for me, the perfect ideal of cross-media storytelling. It’s a trilogy of video games, an iPhone mini-game, a series of novels, comic books and graphic novels, and a collection of codexes.¹⁰ There’s a film in production, but I’ll leave that out for now, since it’s unclear it if will be a straight adaptation of the video games (I hope not), or a unique story set in the larger Mass Effect universe (I hope so), or a story that exists to deepen or build upon some aspect of the video game trilogy (I really hope so).

All of that is great, but it’s not what makes Mass Effect’s approach to storytelling interesting to me. What Mass Effect achieves is an ability to enter its story from a variety of points. That’s different from say, the Lord of the Rings films or even The Matrix franchise. You simply cannot watch the Return of the King if you haven’t seen the first two films from Peter Jackson or read the book. To do so would leave you utterly lost. Who are all of these characters?

In the case of The Matrix, good luck watching the second film without seeing the first, and forget about watching the third film all by its lonesome. It’s hard to imagine anyone playing the Enter the Matrix video game without previous exposure to the Wachowski’s world. The Animatrix shorts can sort of stand on their own, but they don’t mean much without connecting them back into the films.

Mass Effect will ultimately guide you back to the video game trilogy. Yes, that is the spine of the franchise, though I could imagine, several years from now when they’re releasing Mass Effect 5 or 6, when this is no longer the case. But I’m not being hyperbolic when I say you could pick up the first novel from Drew Karpyshyn, having never played the games, and immediately become engrossed. You could fall in love with the world of Mass Effect right then and there, and even if you never played the games, you could still be a fan.

I personally found myself playing Mass Effect 2, having never played the original game.¹¹ I was greeted by an interactive comic to explain the necessary back story, but I could’ve played the game and not been entirely lost if I’d skipped this primer. While still playing the game, I picked up the Mass Effect: Redemption graphic novel, which serves as a prequel to one of the missions in the game. It also helps explain a small part of how your character ends up where he does in the beginning of Mass Effect 2. I have friends who didn’t read the graphic novel until after they’d played the whole game. We experienced the narrative in a very different way from each other, totally out of order, but none of us really lost anything in the translation.

After almost completely finishing the game, another person directed me to an iPhone game, Mass Effect Galaxy. I wouldn’t recommend this for purchase, but I looked up the storyline and found myself reading the adventures of two of the main characters in Mass Effect 2. I was suddenly reminded of a bit of dialogue early on that alluded to a history, possibly romantic, between the two characters. I hadn’t thought much of it, but here it was, unfolding in a video game I could play on my phone.

It’s one thing to build a largely linear narrative, simply expecting the audience to hop from one medium to another in some pre-selected order. It’s another thing entirely to craft an interlocked narrative around a variety of distinctive mediums while still allowing the audience to come into the world in whatever order they choose, without losing anything. Mass Effect has achieved that, and it makes me more than a little sad that more franchises don’t even try, much less achieve the goal.

You could argue the pieces aren’t really essential to the whole, and I suppose they’re not if you’re just looking at the video games, but that strikes me as a fairly narrow way of looking at things. The creators of Mass Effect have made an effort to tell an engrossing story, and they’ve done it using the conventions of a handful of mediums. If you played the games, liked the world, and found the story interesting, why wouldn’t you want to experience all the details? That’s the whole point of narrative worlds, as opposed to single stories. There’s lots of narrative, almost all of it interlocking to form a rich tapestry. At some point, what’s essential largely depends on how broad or limited your perspective is.

I know there are those who will cock their eyebrow at this kind of endeavor. I have been guilty of shaking my head and turning away from a story, simply because I didn’t feel like putting in the time and investment to get through it all. When I missed Battlestar Galactica early on, I shrugged my shoulders and didn’t bother trying. I knew you had to be there from the beginning. I didn’t know if I wanted to invest the time when I could see how many hours were involved. I didn’t even approach it until the series had ended, and that was just one TV show.

It’s understandable why some people would see a series of films, TV shows, comics, and novels and think, “That’s going to be hard to pull off. Am I going to have to consume every part to understand the whole, or worse, be let down in the end?”

Yet as with all things, execution is the key. If a story is rich and engrossing, full of detail and narrative tension, drawing you along and entertaining you every step of the way, is it really going to feel like too much effort? And if the story is dull, poorly constructed, lacking in rich details, then even one film is going to seem like you’ve been cheated out of your very valuable time.

Don’t write off a narrative simply because it’s chosen to aim for an ambitious, complex, cross-media method of storytelling. So long as the storytellers are upfront about what they’re doing, why not take as much of a good thing as you possibly can?

I’ve read more than my usual volume of film reviews lately, and the reason is one film specifically: Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

I’ve yet to read a positive write-up of Michael Bay’s latest entry into the franchise. Rather, I should say I’ve yet to read a review that actually made the film seem good. That hasn’t stopped a number of critics from giving the film positive scores.

Check the “fresh” reviews on RottenTomatoes. I did. This is what I learned:

You should see it even though it’s hateful and empty and preaches the worst kind of reactionary violence without even really meaning it. — Andrew O’Hehir, of Salon.com [Full Review]

He actually writes, at one point in the review, “It’s not worth doing, it’ll definitely make you sick and a lot of it will taste bad.” He’s making a metaphor for this movie. He’s recommending this experience to you.

I have to admit that during the times that I wasn’t feeling whatever intelligence the movie was pummeling out of me being actively insulted, I did kind of enjoy the spectacle. — Glenn Kenny, of MSN Movies [Full Review]

Any film that pummels anything out of you should probably achieve something utterly brilliant in the pummeling or be avoided at all costs.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is among Mr. Bay’s best movies and by far the best 3-D sequel ever made about gigantic toys from outer space. — A.O. Scott, of the New York Times [Full Review]

See how clever Mr. Scott was being there. See how he limited it to only 3-D sequels made about gigantic toys from outer space, because there’s oh so many of those. He at least admits to his faint praise, then tries to say it’s not faint praise at all. The last line of his review: “I’m not judging, just describing.”¹ Oh bite me.

And then there’s Matt Goldberg at Collider.com, a friend of mine and one of the more under-appreciated film critics out there. I’m going to pick on Matt, mostly because I actually know him, and mostly because I think he can take it in stride.² Here are a few choice excerpts from his write-up about Dark of the Moon:

For the most part, Bay doesn’t care about character development, smart humor, or about making sure the plot holes aren’t so big that a Transformer could walk through them… there’s nothing in this movie to indicate that he cares about plot beyond its ability to lead him to a new action scene or cheap joke. You have to grind through 90 minutes of tedium to get to the chewy, chocolate-y center of Transformers: Dark of the Moon [which is] its final hour of destruction, [an] orgy of special effects and pyrotechnics. Swerving wildly between the insultingly stupid the ironically idiotic, Dark of the Moon is Bay at his worst and at his best. [Full review]

Now, I’ve cherry-picked from the review. Let me cop to that right now, but let me also invite you to read the entire thing. Seriously, read it and then come back and finish this post. I beg you to explain to me how Matt wrote all of that and then plucked a big fat B- onto the film. B-minus!

I’m absolutely open to hearing from any of the critics I’ve called out,³ explaining how they could write such harsh things about the movie and then give it a good rating. Remember, I’ve only quoted from reviews that are fresh according to RottenTomatoes. That means these critics are actually recommending you pay to go sit in a theater and be bombarded for two-and-a-half hours by the spectacle Michael Bay has conjured up. I just don’t understand it.

Maybe it’s because this is Michael Bay. This is the guy who won us over with mindless, but thrilling adventures in years past. He gave us Armageddon and Bad Boys (and a sequel that was even bigger, longer, and somehow better than the original). He gave us The Rock with Sean Connery in full-on bad ass mode.

I’ve been a Bay-defender in years past. People who lampooned him and wondered aloud why Criterion⁴ was wasting its time releasing special editions of his films always got an earful from me. I loved that he was making visual distinctive films, even if the distinction was an assault on our senses and a devil-may-care approach to the narrative. I implore you to seek out and read the essay included with the Criterion release of Armageddon, that explains the visual economy of a Michael Bay film.⁵

But even I had to take a moment to catch my breath when I read Matt Goldberg’s opening line: “A Michael Bay movie cannot be measured by the same standards as a normal movie.”⁶

Yes it can. It so absolutely can, and more than that, it so absolutely should. If you judge Michael Bay by the standards of normal movies, that’s how you know he’s an actual filmmaker with real talent doing interesting work. Set him apart, and he becomes a joke, a thing to be pawed at but never really engaged with.

Let’s say a person kills somebody. You call him a murderer and an animal, because we want to think a murderer is special. We want to believe a human being couldn’t be so cruel, so callous, so heartless. But it’s humanity that allows us to judge. It’s humanity that tells us what is right and wrong. An animal doesn’t know any better. A monster is just being itself. If you refuse to call the murderer a human, you take away your foundation to judge them.

So it is with Michael Bay.⁷ If you try to set him on some other level of filmmaker, that’s just taking every criticism you then apply and devaluing it from the start. Michael Bay has made some amazing films. He’s also made three Transformers films, two of which I can personally vouch are the worst things served up on a silver screen in a decade. At least.

Why can’t we just say that?

I once interviewed Ellen Kushner.¹ This was years ago, when I was in my early twenties, and she was at a conference on myth and storytelling in the modern world. The event was put on in celebration of Joseph Campbell, and I was just covering what looked like an interesting conclave of storytellers. I’ve misplaced my notes from the interview, and I can’t find a copy of the article I ended up producing, but one thing she told me has never left my mind.

A story doesn’t have to be wholly original, but it does need to be conscious of the elements its playing with, and be skilled at weaving them into something different.

I’m paraphrasing, from memory, but I think I’ve captured the spirit of her point. She used the metaphor of a pebble pushed down the river by the currents. In the beginning, it’s a jagged hunk of rock, dislodged from a mountain side. As it rolls along the river floor, constantly rushing across other stones, its hard edges fade. Slowly it becomes more curved than jagged. By the time it comes to rest downstream, it has the telltale polish and smooth, round edges of a pebble.

Story is like that, so sayeth Kushner. So sayeth Joseph Campbell and others, but I’ll attribute it to Kushner, because she was one of the most delightful people I’ve ever interviewed. She was making a larger point, that some of the greatest storytellers of our generation are often playing with very old material. What makes them good is an awareness of that fact, and a willingness to be part of that process of pushing the pebble downstream. I had cited Neil Gaiman in particular as an example of just such a storyteller, but there are plenty of others.

Another way of saying this: It’s all in the execution.

I’ve never really bought into the meme that to be truly great, one must be truly original. In film school, the primary focus of my studies was the art of film adaptation. I was very much a fan, and liked to point out to people how many films were adapted from something else. In truth, most films aren’t entirely original creations. They started out as a book, a play, a video game, or something else.

Every year, we are subjected again and again with this meme.² Those who criticize the raft of sequels, remakes, and adaptations and bemoan the death of originality in Hollywood can’t seem to help themselves. I will leave that particular argument for another day, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the lack of originality to this criticism. Also film is hardly the only medium guilty of the practice. There, I’m done.

But there is a rather exquisite example of what can go so deliciously right when somebody comes along and mashes up a bunch of other things into a new story. Mass Effect is a video game that has spawned two sequels (the third in the series will come out next spring), a few novels, some comic books, and excellent soundtracks. It blatantly weaves bits and pieces from Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, and a few other science-fiction universes into a single mythology.

It is good. It is really good. Mass Effect is so good, in fact, that it puts the lie to the notion that only original content can be great.

The sheer volume of material that has been developed is pretty surprising, given the size of the franchise. There’s no movie (yet) or TV series (please, pretty please) and the number of novelizations can be counted on a single hand. The comics are relatively light in length, as comics tend to be, and there aren’t yet enough of them to account for a sizable oeuvre. Nevertheless, Mass Effect has its own wiki with over 1,900 individual entries.

Most of this material is contained entirely within the two Mass Effect games, sprawling interactive narratives with stunning graphics and plenty of ways for the player to control the storyline. The actual gameplay is stunning enough³, but the story is what interests me most.

The premise of the story is as follows:

[Mass Effect] is set in the year 2183 CE, 35 years after humans discovered the ruins of an ancient spacefaring race called the Protheans on Mars. With the technology from these ruins, humanity learned the secrets of mass effect physics and element zero, unlocking faster-than-light travel. Humans also discovered the mass relay network that threaded the galaxy, permitting instantaneous passage across thousands of light-years. Humanity began its journey among the stars, encountering various alien races and establishing itself on the galactic stage. — Mass Effect Wiki

It’s as simple a science-fiction premise as you can get. A couple hundred years from now (give or take), humanity has learned how to travel between the stars. Alien races are found, looking remarkably humanoid. Sounds like Star Trek, though in its defense the premise for Star Trek wasn’t exactly high on the originality scale. There’s a sort of galactic capital and a loose federation of species that keeps the intergalactic peace. If that sounds like the Federation in Gene Roddenberry’s creation, well it isn’t terribly far off.⁴

In this universe, there’s also people called biotics. They have the ability to manipulate dark matter⁵, an innate skill that’s amplified by bio-mechanical implants. The result is an ability to do cool, superhero tricks. Think picking people up and forcing the to float across a room, right up until you decide to slam them into a wall. Think firing off massive electrical bolts that take out everyone in your path.

Yes, think Jedi force powers, a la Star Wars.

Then there’s the whole Protheans bit. Yes, we learned how to travel through the stars thanks to technology left behind in our solar system millenia ago by a now-extinct (we think) species of super-advanced aliens. They’ve developed these gates all over the galaxy that allow a ship to be flung at faster-than-light speeds from one star system to another.

Does that sound a little bit like Stargate to you?

Look, I could go on. Those are the big three influences I noticed right off the bat, but I’m willing to bet there’s more. There are also caveats, and I’ll own up to them. Yes, science-fiction is a genre riddled with copy-cats and overt influences, arguably more so than most other genres. And yes, I know the concepts in all three of the aforementioned franchises were not entirely original to them (see Lucas’ discussion of origins and influences on Star Wars in this Wired article), so it’s hard to say Mass Effect is aping them when they are aping something else.

Yet all those caveats don’t change the fundamental point. Mass Effect is a franchise built entirely out of the spare parts of science-fiction tropes that came before it. They’re tweaked, to be sure. In Stargate the Ancients (as clever a name as you can come up with for an ancient species that’s no longer around) built a network of gates on planets, connecting worlds to each other. In Mass Effect, the gates are in space and they’re designed to hurl starships from one solar system to another.

Even the characters are, as often as not, deeply inspired by existing work. Could you have the artificial intelligence on the ship in Mass Effect 2 without 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or without Kit in Knight Rider for that matter? Joker, the pilot of Mass Effect, has to have a little in common with other sci-fi pilots, no? His personality struck me as at least a little bit like Wash from Firefly.

Yet just as it could all have felt like a hack job, a ship built from scrap that barely stays afloat (or flat out sinks), Mass Effect isn’t like that at all. It’s a solid universe, rich with character and potential. Humanity at its most vulnerable, and simultaneously at its most ascendant, is not a bad place to set a story. Or dozens. And that’s just the human side of the ledger. The alien species are so rich, that whole novels could be written about them. Who doesn’t want to see a good story about the development of humans with biotic abilities that make them like superheroes? Who doesn’t want to read a novel about humanity’s first interstellar war with an alien species? This is the key to a good world: you want to go back and spend more time there.

This is in no way surprising to me, but then I was already a fan of the idea that good storytelling often involves recycling others’ material. Those who argue that originality is the key are the ones who need a good healthy dose of Bioware’s latest video game franchise.

They succeed, obviously, because their execution is sound. Take a look at the reams of background material they’ve included in the game, easily accessible via a menu of data files, and you’ll see just how much thought went into the development of the Mass Effect universe.

As for me, I’m just thankful the franchise has some ancillary media. Once Mass Effect 2 is fully in my rear-view mirror, I’ll at least have some novels and comic books to hold me over until Mass Effect 3 comes out. Cue my girlfriend rolling her eyes.

There. I said it. The critical darling of the moment, the commercial success, the video game that looks more like a film than any other video game before it, L.A. Noire — it kind of sucks.

I’m not entirely alone in my assessment. Michael Thomsen at IGN posted a pretty thorough take-down of the game in his Contrarian Corner column.¹ I don’t agree with his disparagement of the film noir genre. If it’s littered with one too many (or one thousand too many) ineffective executions, that hardly undercuts the entire genre, and besides, all genres have their predictable tropes and standard conventions.

Yet Thomsen lays out a solid argument when he dissects the game’s mechanics.

Like an unsuspecting private dick, L.A. Noire is doomed before it even begins by virtue of Team Bondi and Rockstar’s most basic choice to set the game in an open world. The worst compromise comes with the investigation scenes where Cole Phelps walks around crime scenes looking for clues. These scenes require players to absorb a lot of visual information and filter out the irrelevant details. Yet there is no mechanic for looking. Players have camera control during these scenes, but it is an amended version of the car racing camera necessary for the driving scenes, the real mechanical heart of the game. Instead of seeing the world through Phelps’ eyes, these scenes have you watching from a distance as Phelps looks at things.

You can read the rest of the article if you want to get more details on how the mechanical schizophrenia of the game is its ultimate undoing. What Thomsen does not say, at least explicitly, is this.

A video game is only as good as its gaming mechanics. Each and every medium for artistic expression has its own unique quirks and functional requirements. Literature, even of the trashiest variety, has the capacity to include an enormous amount of internal monologue. Film, on the other hand, is more limited in this particular area. This is a simple fact of the different mediums; one is overtly visual while the other is more descriptive. You can tell the same story in both mediums, but you can’t exactly tell it the same way.

Video games have matured at a rapid clip over the past few decades, but the nature of the medium remains essentially the same as it did when we all played Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System. It’s about the gameplay mechanics. Get that wrong, and it won’t matter how jaw-dropping your graphics are, because in contrast to the medium of cinema, video games enthrall their audience through the interactivity of the experience. The best games meld the underlying gameplay with appropriate graphics, sound cues, textual elements, and other conventions we’re familiar with from movies, comic books, novels, and the like.

In the case of L.A. Noire, the basic mechanics of the game, the interactive heart of the experience, is flawed. The graphics are admittedly impressive. The motion-captured performances are sight to behold, and the technology will almost certainly be used in the future to enhance video games as an art form. But because the gameplay is flawed, the game fails.

Yes, I’m lamenting that video games spend too much time trying to create stellar graphics, mimicking the spectacle of film, and not enough time perfecting the interactive experience at the heart of the medium. It’s an argument as old as time, or at least as old as video games.² It’s been hashed and rehashed, including a rather poetic and introspective discussion by a relative non-gamer, Nicholas Baker in The New Yorker. Perhaps his piece is so good, because he doesn’t seem aware of the argument he’s tripping into.

I should also credit Slate for their year-end gaming club discussion, which pointed me in the direction of Baker’s piece.³ Perhaps nowhere has the argument been better argued, from all sides, but I find myself siding with the professional critic who wrote:

[Games] are generally the only media that require the consumer to physically participate in creating the experience. If the game isn’t fun or entertaining to actually play, the audience will simply put it down. And then nothing else matters.

In L.A. Noire, that is exactly what happened to me. I played, and I played, and at some point I realized the game felt more like a chore. I didn’t want to finish it. That’s when, despite being most of the way through the damned thing, I popped it out of my Playstation 3, drove to the nearest Gamestop, and exchanged it for Mass Effect 2.⁴

What made L.A. Noire so maddening was how poorly developed the basic mechanics were. The game has a simple setup: each case opens with a crime scene full of evidence, which point you in the direction of other places of interest, wherein you will find individuals that must be interrogated. At each scene, you’ll look around for clues that you will then use during your interrogations. For each question, you’ll be confronted with moments when you can accept a person’s statement as the truth or a lie. If you think they might be lying, but you’ve got no evidence to confront them, you can go with doubt. There is right and wrong answers, and depending on which choices you make, the way the case unfolds will change.

Except, no it won’t. The cases always end. You always get moved along until you’ve interviewed everyone and collected your evidence and make an arrest. You could literally get every single truth/doubt/lie choice wrong, miss buckets full of evidence, and you’re still going to get through the narrative.

While it’s unlikely you could get it so wrong, you’d be forgiven for frequently coming close. The motion-capture technology and subtle facial emotions are supposed to help clue you in, but they’re clumsily effected. At one point, I pulled up a walk-through of the game and replayed a case I’d done poorly on. It didn’t take me long to realize that half of this is pure lucky guessing, with no sound logic to speak of. Or as Thomsen wrote:

In other sequences, I found myself facing the truth/doubt/lie prompt after a statement that contained multiple parts and I felt at a loss as to which I was supposed to be evaluating. Inevitably, I’d make a choice thinking I was responding to one point and Phelps would suddenly start talking about another that I hadn’t wanted to address. Characters have a delightfully mysterious capacity to emote and show cues of nervousness, anger, doubt, shock, and fear, and yet the only way to interface with that nuance is the conversational sledgehammer of yes/no/maybe.

Thomsen also cites the way the camera is setup for an open world environment akin to Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption, something that is entirely inappropriate for a game where you have nothing to do in that open world, but must instead look around crime scenes for tiny little clues amidst a cacophony of potential details. About a third of the way through, I turned to a friend and condensed the game to this:

“You walk around every square inch of a scene, waiting for your controller to rumble to let you know you’ve found a clue. Then you press X. Once you hear a music cue, you’re done. Then you go interview the person at the scene. You kind of guess if they’re telling the truth or lying or whatever, and then you press X (or square or triangle). Once you’ve asked all of the pre-selected questions, you move on to the next scene. Repeat. Eventually, you’re given the chance to make an arrest. You press X. Then it’s the next case. Repeat.”

I’ll admit. South Park did it better.

Never has a game gotten the video-game-as-movie model so wrong. In the words of Stan, “Who plays video games to listen to a bunch of characters talk and press the X button?” I sure as hell don’t.

I do, however, play video games to interact with the world. I do play video games to have some real control over the outcome of the game. I do play video games to feel some sense of accomplishment and reward at the end of a challenging series of tasks.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with an essentially linear narrative that mimics the structure of a film. Uncharted, a series that’s about to release its third title later this year, has mastered the formula. There’s also nothing wrong with a storyline that branches based on the choices of the player, forcing you to accept the consequences of your actions and ultimately govern the way the story unfolds. Good examples of this include the aforementioned Mass Effect franchise, as well as the old Knights of the Old Republic games.⁵

L.A. Noire tries to be both, melding motion-capture cinema-level graphics with a branching storyline that shifts with the player’s choices. It deserves credit for the graphics, but it also deserves a massive heaping of criticism for its utter failure as a game with logical mechanics that engrosses the player.⁶