Ender's Game, Spirited Away, and Sarah Ruhl, OR: The Urgency of the Necessary

Disclaimer: This post will contain broad sweeping generalizations. It contains very minor spoilers, if any. On the other hand, if you aren't familiar with Spirited Away, this will make less sense.

Less than 6 hours ago, I was watching Ender's Game at my local movie theater. It was a fine movie, but there was something off about it I couldn't quite put my finger on.

Less than 15 minutes ago, I was watching Spirited Away on my Xbox 360. While watching possibly my favorite film of the 21st century, I realized what was missing from Ender's Game. But before we get into that, we need to talk about things being necessary.

Sarah Ruhl is one of my favorite playwrights, and almost certainly my favorite living playwright. She has a collection of 75 incomplete essays on her website, which cycle randomly each time you refresh the page. It's brilliant. In one of them, number 71, she says the following:

"Be suspicious of an expert who tells you to cut out a seemingly unnecessary moment in your play that is complete unto itself as a moment. The soul of your play might reside there, quietly, inconspicuously, glorying in its very unnecessaryness, shining forth in its lack of necessity to be."

Though Ms. Ruhl is here speaking of plays, the same principle applies to any work of art. Spirited Away is filled with long shots of riding in elevators, painfully slow descents down a staircase (for a short while), and other segments which seem, when faced with a critical eye, to be rather slow-paced.

But maybe that's where the soul of Spirited Away is. I got to know the Radish Spirit on that elevator ride better than I got to know Bean throughout the entirety of Ender's Game. Having read the book, I know what an important character Bean is. He's still present at all the right moments, but he's just that kid named "Bean" that sort of acts like Bean instead of being Bean. His Bean-ness has been all but extracted from him, leaving a hollow shell that fulfills the same role, but doesn't have the same authority. Kinda like a diet soda.

The Radish Spirit, on the other hand, is about as close to being a throwaway character as you can get. He plays a very, very minor role, but he's also a standout character for his distinct mannerisms and appearance. Would Spirited Away be the same movie without the Radish Spirit?

Yes and no. Yes, the plot would be the same, and all the characters' relationships would stay almost identical, and so on - not much would be different. And yet everything would change. Instead of allowing for the awkward, cramped elevator ride with the strange, yet helpful, oversized beast... What would happen instead? Something else? A direct cut to the next scene?

Animation is expensive, so one does not put in useless scenes for an animated film. The Radish Spirit by himself is not the soul of Spirited Away, but he is a piece of it to be sure. You could surely cut the running time down to 90 minutes instead of 120 and still have a good story, but it wouldn't be the same. By comparison, it would surely ring hollow, because there would be nothing inside it to sustain it once it finishes.

So, to wrap up... Ender's Game is a fine film. I enjoyed it, and Harrison Ford delivers perhaps his best performance of the last 15 years. It faithfully reproduces the story from the book, wisely leaving out one of the main subplots to focus on the main storyline.

On the other hand, by trying to collapse the essence of Ender Wiggin's saga into a span smaller than 2 hours, there are crucial details that are lost - details that can only be reproduced with time. Ironically, I never felt Ender's exhaustion because I never had time to feel Ender's exhaustion. There were a few five-second "you-can-breathe-here" stations in the movie, but it was mostly focused on constantly driving the plot forward. I never felt exhausted (as I did halfway through Zero Dark Thirty), but I did feel a bit empty.

I would have had no problem with the movie being divided into two parts, especially with the whole of the subplot left unexplored. However, with the movie being as it is, you should go see it. You should enjoy it. And you should remember, after it's done, that you can take time to glory in the unnecessaryness of any given moment you happen to have free. Because that's where your soul breathes.

SimCity, Spielberg, and Horton Foote - A Comparison

Sometimes you need to write about something, and the best place to write about it is a blog. This is one of those times.

The latest version of SimCity (simply titled "SimCity") came out recently to much rancor and vitriol. It's not unusual for games to receive bad reviews, even highly anticipated games. But SimCity is being torn apart for a problem not typically found in games.

If you don't know, SimCity is a city simulation game where you, the player, get to try your hand at building and managing a city. This may sound either tedious or overwhelming, but the game is constructed such that the player has just enough control for their actions and decisions to be meaningful without delving into the realms of micromanagement. For the past several iterations, the game has been single-player only. With the recent release, however, players are required to be online. From my perspective, the reasoning for this decision makes sense. Cities do not exist in a vacuum, so for this version, the player must be connected so that they can interact with other cities, both locally and globally. Hypothetically, the idea is solid.

Here's where the problem comes in.

SimCity launched last week, and the number of players trying to access the game is overwhelming. Literally. The servers they had in place were incapable of handling the load, leaving the publishers scrambling for a solution. Unfortunately, gamers are a fickle bunch, and have spent the past week defaming and attacking EA for the launch, even though EA has promised to continue working on the problems and has offered everyone who has purchased the game EA store credit towards another game. All of this has happened after EA had the peoples' money.

Despite this, the gamers continue to attack. "EA has ruined another franchise!" "Don't release a game if it's not ready for release!" "This belongs in a museum!" (OK, maybe not that last one.) But I think that all these people complaining are, to be honest, immature and stupid. Here's why:

a) Video games with online multiplayer do not exist in a vacuum. They can't. If World of Warcraft was still using the same code they used when they started, the game would be horribly outdated and unbalanced, and possibly flat-out horrible by today's standards. It's not that WoW shouldn't have been released as it was, or that it was a bad game when it was released. The fact of the matter is, in games with a large community of interacting players, there will need to be on-the-fly adjustments made to that game.

b) We no longer live in an era without patching. If you bought Final Fantasy VII when it came out and it had a game-breaking bug, there is no way it would have received the acclaim it now enjoys. If Final Fantasy XIII had a game-breaking bug, on the other hand, Square Enix could have easily released a patch to fix the game. With games getting more and more complex, this is a good thing. It's not that game developers are getting lazy (although in some cases that's probably happening), it's that they're dealing with more moving pieces to fit together. Having the ability to patch post-release is a blessing, not just a fail-safe, as long as the developers are careful in the initial release to fix as many bugs as possible.

Which is where I come by the title of the blog. Allow me to compare a movie to a play. In a movie, a group of artists collaborate to create a finite product which, in most cases, will remain in that finite form for eternity, or at least as long as copies of it survive. Directors who go back and change their works after release (I'm looking at you, Spielberg) are often denounced and reviled. Plays, on the other hand, are similarly collaborative, but change slightly night to night for each production and change drastically between stagings. It's not that a playwright changing dialogue after an opening night or an actor changing his action for a line in the middle of a run is a sign of a bad performance; rather, it's a sign of a playwright capable of sensing the audience's reaction to a line. While he was alive, Horton Foote, a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, was a sharp critic of his earlier works and would rewrite lines for newer productions.

What does this have to do with SimCity? It's this: Video games have reached the point where patching is a simple (relatively speaking) process for players. Gamers no longer have to go to the game's site, or possibly a sketchy mirror site, to download the much-needed patch. In many cases, the game automatically checks upon starting up. While there are still several purists out there, clinging to unconnected games, most gamers have passively embraced this shift. Unless it interferes with their gameplay, that is. And that's where SimCity's problems lie. The gamer's launch-date gameplay experience didn't live up to expectations, which means the game deserves to be thrown under the bus. Which, to a certain extent, is true. But the sheer volume of vitriol being shown towards the game, even with massive steps being taken towards fixing the issues, is unacceptable and disgraceful. (It's bad, you guys. I highly recommend you not go look it up if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

So don't be so grumpy. Be patient enough to give the developers a week to fix the problem. After all, since we all know plays are better than movies anyways, I figure we should embrace the change, yeah?

-Josh

Sometimes Life Sucks

I've been trying to figure out where to start this story. From a dramatic standpoint, it's compelling to start it as I drive down the road, heading from Marshall to McKinney, as the lightning flashes around me. Or I could start it from the moment I discover that my Xbox 360 has been stolen from my dorm room - the second time such a theft occurred within a month. But I've decided it's probably best to start from the beginning of the day.

Thursday of finals week. Three finals down, two to go, and they're my two most dreaded finals - Intro to International Relations and Real Analysis. I already know I'm not making an A in Intro, but I'm hoping to pull out a B. And as long as I don't utterly fail my Reals final, I should be able to make an A - my scores in that class up to that point had been high enough that I didn't have too much to worry about. Still, it was an upper-level math course, and one must never be complacent with an upper-level math class.

I know I said I'd start at the beginning of the day but, well, midnight is the start of the day, right? At that point I was probably watching my fifth or sixth episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 3, since I had a day off and it was on Hulu. My textbooks and notes from the two previously mentioned courses were around me, and I would offer an occasional glance at them, especially during the commercial breaks. Finally, I decide it's time for bed. I brush my teeth, set my alarms (I use my cell phone as a primary and my alarm clock as a backup. I've only overslept once, and that was my freshman year. If it ain't broke, don't fix it), and after reading a chapter of Proverbs, I went to bed.

I'm pretty sure my dream involved me in some sort of Buffyesque scenario (six episodes will do that to you), but the details are murky there. I got out of bed, brushed teeth, drank a glass of milk, and went to take my first final. It was pleasantly simple, and even though I didn't have a clue on about half of the multiple choice questions, I had confidence as I powered through the two essays. At this point, I feel pretty good, especially after I get back the research paper I bluffed my way through to discover a 90/100. All this optimism, however, was about to get thrown out the window.

OK, I really do need to backtrack at this point. After Thanksgiving break, I returned to my dorm room to find my Wii and two Rock Band microphones stolen. Not the 21" CRT TV. Not the N64. Just the Wii and the microphones. (And a Wii game, but that's hardly important right now.) I figured someone accidentally left the door unlocked, and some hooligans snuck in and grabbed it. End of story.

Flashback over. I return from my first final and notice the 360 is gone. Again, TV and N64 are untouched, along with the half-dozen Rock Band instruments I have sitting in the corner of the living room. I was ticked. I got as close to wigging out as I ever get to wigging out. (That is, I smacked a wall with my open hand and vented about it on Facebook.) After a few minutes of surfing the interwebs to calm down (which didn't really help), I went to the campus sub shop to get myself lunch, since I still had a balance left on my student debit account and really didn't feel like going to the cafeteria.

I decide I don't particularly want to eat my sub in the Student Center that day, and therefore make my way back to my room. At the time, it was either raining lightly, or had recently stopped raining. Regardless, as I walked back, I was splashed by water from a puddle splashed up by a passing car. Yes, that old cliche that happens to mopey people in movies and TV shows happened to me in real life. Looking back, I smile at the irony. In the moment, though, I was upset.

The sandwich was no good. The bread was too chewy and the whole thing lacked any decent flavor. I wasn't particularly hungry anyway. Regardless, I ate the whole 6" sub, allowing me to spend the remaining 30 or so minutes trying to focus on the upcoming final. I don't think any of that stuck, but it was a valiant effort nonetheless. Having done as much studying as I can, I leave for my final final.

This final is, appropriately, pretty stinkin' hard. I have a decent handle on some of the material, but the rest is familiar in name only. I'm pretty sure the concept of a function being continuous left my brain early for Christmas break, which is a darn shame, because I really could have used it. However, I eventually am satisfied with all my answers, knowing full well that some of them are at least mostly wrong. I turn in the test and leave to go clean my room, still in a rather sour mood internally.

You don't really want to hear about me cleaning my room, right? Right. The only important factoid is that my Dad helped me move some things, since he was en route from Virginia to McKinney. I'm sure he would have come anyway if I had asked, but it's a detail to know.

So, there I was, driving down the road from Marshall to McKinney. The weather throughout the drive was either light sprinkles, medium rain, or heavy downpours. (I even got to have it hail on me as I drove for the first time. That was exciting.) We were taking backroads to avoid holiday traffic or something, which meant that when the lightning flashed, it lit up the whole area, which had previously been obscured by shadows. And that's when it hit me.

A revelation, mind you, not the lightning. I'm not sure what ideas all came together in my mind, but I remembered C.S. Lewis saying something about pain being God's megaphone. When lightning strikes, of course it brings some amount of destruction, but it also brings illumination - even if it is brief - to the darkest of circumstances.

I won't say this was a pull-off-to-the-side-of-the-road, give-my-life-to-God kind of revelation, because it wasn't. It was God speaking at me through a megaphone. I didn't need to give my life to God because He already has it. I needed to realize that and stop being an idiot about a collection of plastic and metal I call an Xbox. Did it have some sentimental value? Yes. Did I log more hours than I'm comfortable admitting on that thing, and therefore lose some save data? Yes. Did it cost a lot of money? Again, the answer is a resounding yes.

But God, through the juxtaposition of "You Probably Shouldn't Move Here" by Five Iron Frenzy on my car stereo and the torrential downpour surrounding me, reminded me that things are things. They're temporary. They can be replaced. Almost all of them won't matter in 100 years, and my Xbox certainly won't. Was it aggravating that it had been stolen? Yes. Do I need to be more mindful of my things? Yes. But that's not the main lesson. The main lesson is that God is in control of every single situation, no matter how small, and He always will be.

This afternoon, as I was finishing unloading my car, I noticed that the ornament I had gotten at the Theatre Christmas Party had broken. Completely my fault - I should have realized how fragile it was. But it the rush of packing, I had neglected to give it any sort of special care. The damage was irreversible - a great gash in the side of it. But I didn't mourn too long. I liked the ornament, and I was grateful to the person who had given it, but that wasn't what was important. I had been reminded that every situation is in God's perfect, redeeming plans, even when life sucks. Whether it's a broken ornament, a broken arm, or a broken heart, God has a plan for it that is unspeakably wonderful. I just hope to see the other side of the tapestry some day.

Post-Show Blues

It's almost 1 AM, and yet I sit here still, typing away. My mind is still buzzing from the last six weeks of rehearsal, build, light hang, and all the other exciting aspects of the show that closed just 8 hours ago. And now? It's gone. Lost to the ether. There's something melancholy about that part of theatre. After so many hours of investment, all the practice and work is suddenly meaningless to the casual observer.

But anyone who knows what's what can see that isn't so. Over the past six weeks, I've built relationships, learned new skills, and probably gained a few scars, too. There's no doubt in my mind that this was all worth it - whatever "it" is, exactly. I still use things I learned from my first shows, even if I don't realize it at the time - By this point, picking up other actors' cues is second nature. What did I learn this time around that will be second nature ten years from now? (Don't put your arm near a hot ellipsoidal? ...I hope I can learn that one a lot quicker, actually.)

Of course, now that the show's over, I still have school to contend with. A test on Tuesday; rehearsals for the scene I'm directing starting on Monday; and, of course, this is not to mention all the social ordeals I still have to deal with on a daily basis. Life doesn't slow down just because the show ends; in fact, I need to kick myself into high gear to catch up with everything else. I do my best to not fall behind during a show, but it always happens somewhere. But, well... It'd be boring otherwise, right?

I still remember the first time I heard of a college class not giving a comprehensive final. I was baffled. Shouldn't you need to remember everything you've learned? On top of that, shouldn't everything you've learned build on top of each other, so that the previously-covered aspects of the final would be somewhat easier? (That's what I get for being a math major, I suppose.) Regardless, it's my belief that everything - From Directing class to Real Analysis tests to eating lunch in the cafeteria - is part of a greater tapestry than I could hope to understand at this point in my life. How can you not be asked to remember what you learned within the past four months on a final? I'm still using things I learned ten years ago in my daily life; again, not directly, but those habits have laid a foundation which have made me a certain kind of person that I wouldn't trade for anything.

Which brings me back to now. It's about twenty minutes later now, and the buzz is still there. Maybe buzz is a good word. The blues haven't quite set in yet. They might soon... Or they might not. I might not have time for them to sink in. But either way, I know that eventually I'll be involved in a new play, investing in it mind, body, and soul. And that will pass too. And that's not OK. It's great. If I clutched to the experiences of just one of my plays, I wouldn't learn the intense memorization I learned for Tartuffe, or the dynamics of an open space I learned in Mother Courage, or all the nonsense I learned from Into the Woods. (Still trying to discern exactly what I learned from this show. I'll get back to you on that.) Every play has a limited moment, but that doesn't mean it has a limited impact. I'm excited to see exactly what I learn from this show, and I'm hoping it's something amazing.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this space, but whenever I have musings about my theatre life, I'll have somewhere to put it. Don't expect weekly posts, or even monthly posts... But I'll try to keep it interesting, even if it isn't coherent. If you put up with the jumps in logic, I'll tell you vaguely interesting stories about the life of a theatre brat. Deal?