The Physical Language of Action Movies

I was tagged into a conversation on G+ today about action movies and violence. It was a small circle conversation, so I'll refrain from giving names, but it was an interesting discussion about violence, maleness, and media. Obviously, those are things which are on everyone's minds since Mad Max: Fury Road is (depending on who's talking) the most feminist big budget film produced this century or a false prophet injecting acceptance of violence into feminist discourse.

I can't speak to that. I've not seen Mad Max and I probably won't until it's on DVD or streaming. Having a five year old and a wariness of expensive babysitters tends to curtail your movie options. Plus I just hate watching movies in theaters. I'm old and cranky. So this blog post isn't about this.

Instead, it's about the notion that violence is what action movies are about. I was tagged into the conversation because I wrote and am currently trading edits on ACTION MOVIE WORLD: FIRST BLOOD, an upcoming tabletop roleplaying game which will hopefully be out this year. My purpose with that game is to deconstruct what makes action movies of the genre's golden era (say 1980-1998, or roughly the VHS era) tick. Sometimes I write an article when I want to examine something, sometimes (rare) a blog post, every so often a game.

So here's my thesis: action movies aren't about violence. They are, of course, violent. Very violent. And that violence is very front and center. But rather than being about violence, what they're actually about is physical expression of emotions.

Think about action movies. Yes, anger turns into killing. But love and lust turn immediately into sex scenes. Friendships become about back pats, high fives, and surviving physical adversity together. Characters in action flicks yell and laugh louder than we do, because a big laugh or a loud yell are fundamentally physical acts.

The ramping up of the physicality in quick fashion is the trick. If the natural expression of feeling is physical in the world of action movies, going at a more traditionally dramatic pace is, by definition, unnatural. So you see action heroes behaving in really weird ways, like high fives turning into impromptu arm wrestling matches:

It strikes me that zeroing in on the violence of action movies misses a lot of interesting things. The scale of the violence seems like low-lying fruit when we talk about this type of movie. And, maybe counter-intuitively, I think the more low budget the action movie, the more honest and open this portrayal of physical emotion is. Deadly Prey isn't trying to subvert anything like maybe Mad Max or Alien are. It merely is, and that is is maybe ugly or funny or weird, but it's stripped down and lean. This is part of the reason why I love low budget and/or bad movies. You've got filmmakers and actors who aren't quite good enough to conceal their ids from the viewer.

There's definitely a discussion to be had about the maleness of action movies, their role as propaganda, whether they inure us to violence, etc. All of that is worthy. But I think that when we zero in on violence as the essential kernel of the genre, we're missing out on more interesting questions about how we express emotion and, maybe more importantly, how we wish we could express emotions in our dream worlds.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pure game talk: AMW is undergoing edits right now as we can. It will be published by Flatland Games, fine creators of Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures. Check the tags for past playtest documents and notes on the game's creation.

It's been an age, hasn't it?

I've left this blog fallow for quite a long time. I think my last post was in June and even it wasn't very long. Status updates, though, are good for the people who found out about Before Iron and ACTION MOVIE WORLD: FIRST BLOOD through here.

Before Iron: This is still in limbo, despite my having been told that I could talk about it a year and a half ago. It is, I am assured, still a priority. I've received some good news on the Before Iron front from Stewart, but it's not the sort of thing I can share publicly.

It'll be out when it's out. I don't know when that is, but it's probably best to not think of it until I post firm news.

ACTION MOVIE WORLD: FIRST BLOOD: Always in caps. Always.

As far as I'm concerned, AMW is feature complete for testing. Not feature complete for release, of course, but for testing, absolutely. You can find the latest playtest docs here:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0BxzKPjPAQ2CYcHBVY1hLX0pCMDQ&usp=sharing

The only reason I haven't been playtesting the hell out of this online (we've done some locally and it's gone swimmingly) is because Apocalypse World derived games are really tough to do properly without playbook pdfs to consult. There's something deliciously tactile about the *W experience, so doing it without those pdfs is both incomplete and lacks a certain ease of use.

The pdfs are slowly, ever so slowly, coming together. Work on them has been turned over to my brother and co-author on Before Iron. But he's started a new job at a new school, which slows things down, and I've started school again, been busy with other projects, and my daughter started preschool, which slows things down even further. Rest assured that our mutual breaks in the action are devoted to things like the playbook and script pdfs. I suspect testing will come in hardcore once the holidays roll around and everyone has some time off. I also suspect it might be ready for release by the end of Summer 14, though that is optimistic.

Release is already more or less settled. My brother and our friend (that's +Peter Williams and +John Cocking, respectively) have a company called Flatland Games which publishes a very nifty and well-regarded OSR titled Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures. AMW will be released there when it comes out.

Will there be a Kickstarter? That's unsure. Frankly, signing on with Flatland means that it's not strictly necessary; the infrastructure for printing on demand and having an awesome pdf are already there. That doesn't mean it won't happen, however; I like Kickstarter as a way of helping with lump sum payments to talent and getting the word out.

If we do go Kickstarter (and this is probably a topic for another post), it will be handled quite differently from many others. For one, it won't go to KS unless and until it's fully written. Since it's not necessary to have the operating capital a KS could offer to get it out in some form, I see no need to kickstart it and then write it over the next however many months. This is not least because I'm rotten at time management and I want precisely zero risk that it goes over my time allotment.

We also won't have any stretch goals as they've come to be thought of. It'll be very simple: more money means better art. Maybe there's a hardcover version. Maybe it's in color. The initial goal would be very modest, as well. I prefer things simple and streamlined as much as possible.

Geeky & Genki: I'm proud to be doing some entertainment writing over at Geeky & Genki. It's a bunch of cool folks I respect the hell out of doing podcasts and writing on all sorts of things. If anything's suffered because of my busy Fall, it's really G&G; I hope to write some more for them very soon (I already have my In the Heat of the Night cultural criticism magnum opus written in my head for Fall break).

Jacobin: Being a more or less lifelong socialist of one stripe or another, I've been very excited to be able to write for Jacobin (and by extension Salon) on geek culture. Jacobin is a magazine I really and truly respect, young as it is, and to have my name next to people like Eileen Jones, Bhaskar Sunkara, Connor Kilpatrick, Corey Robin, etc truly, sincerely blows my mind and humbles me.

If all goes well with the draft, I'll have a long read on the political economy of the video game industry in the next print issue. It should hilariously torpedo any hopes I may have had of returning to the video game industry (spoiler: I actually have no desire to return), but I hope it proves a thought-provoking read.

Anyway, keep an eye on here and follow me on G+ for updates. My next focus is AMW, AMW, AMW, at least once midterms are done.