Academic Papers and Essays

Abstract
There are many types of entertainment that people can enjoy in their free time. From going to see musicals, playing Mario Kart tournaments in a bar, or simply deciding to “Netflix and Chill”, there’s a huge amount of activities we can do to give our minds a rest and relax in our free time. I’ve chosen to read the novel “No Country for Old Men” by Cormac McCarthy; go to the movie theater and watch the film “The Hateful Eight” starring Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson and Walton Goggins, and play the video game “Super Mario Maker” for the Nintendo Wii U, along with interacting with people online through the Miiverse, Reddit and Gamefaqs website about the game to share and critique the levels that we’d built. I will compare and contrast these entertainment experiences, based on what I’ve learned in this class, and talk about my enjoyment of each activity.
 
On January 27th, 2016, my fiancé and I decided to brave the cold and go see the film “The Hateful Eight”. It’s the first time I’d been to a movie theater in a couple of years, as the pickings for films have been quite slim lately. We arrived at the Franklin Park Theater just in time to get some popcorn and hard root beer, and settled in our seats for the show. The theater was sparsely packed, as it seems like not many people like to go out to see three hour movies at 9:00 PM on a Wednesday. Still, it was quite an enjoyable affair. Other than maybe a dozen other people sprawled throughout the theater, we had it to ourselves and we were able to enjoy the show. I recall being warned prior to seeing it that it was Tarantino’s bloodiest, and was wondering how that was possible because about half of the film went by and there was barely any violence, at least by Quentin Tarantino standards. Then came the massacre, and the hanging at the end. The theater collectively gasped at the fate of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character. Not that, in frontier justice terms, it wasn’t deserved, but it was quite brutal. Still, it was a very enjoyable experience, a fantastic film, and one that certainly benefitted from being seen on the big screen.

The following weekend, I read the novel “No Country for Old Men” by Cormac McCarthy. It’s a book that follows an aging sheriff as he tries to deal with what is basically “his kind” becoming obsolete, all the while trying to catch a brutal killer named Anton Chigurh. Chigurh was after a man name Llewelyn Moss who had come across some money of his after seeing the aftermath of a shootout, and he wasn’t taking any prisoners as he killed his way through Texas to find him. I saw the film adaptation of the movie nearly a decade ago, and it was quite faithful. That was a pleasant surprise, because it is one of my favorite films, and I am always pleased when books don’t stray too much from the source material. Some of Sheriff Bell’s inner-monologues are cut from the book, and Llewelyn’s wife flips the coin and dies on the page rather than how the directors just inferred her death in the film. Also, one of the teenagers who helped Anton Chigurh after his car accident ended up being arrested with his gun a couple years later. These are all minor things, though. The book was a very quick read, though very dark and depressing- a standard Cormac McCarthy novel.

That weekend, I also started playing the game “Super Mario Maker” for the Wii U. I had received it for Christmas and tinkered with it somewhat, but not on this level. In this game, you are able to create your own Mario levels based on four different game styles from the Original Nintendo, Super Nintendo and the Wii U. You can make puzzle levels, rather than your standard platforming adventure levels. You upload these levels to a database only after you yourself can beat them- you need to prove that it’s possible and that the whole thing isn’t just some giant death trap. Then, other people play your levels, comment on them through the Miiverse, which is Nintendo’s social networking service, and rate them. I quite enjoyed this part of the assignment, because it brought out my creative side and sense of humor. One level I made was called “Mario Visits Chernobyl”, and you enter the nuclear power plant after the meltdown in the 1980s. From there, you take a warp pipe into the Pripyat River, where there are mutant zombie fish that can attack you. I got so many compliments on this level that it was crazy. People said that they were thrown off by the title at first, but that once it said “Nuclear Power Plant” as the level started, they knew it would be something special. I also created a level called “Yoshi’s Zoo”. You play as Yoshi, Mario’s dinosaur pal, and all of the enemies are in cages, calling to be helped by the ASPCA because Yoshi is a sadistic zookeeper. Then there was “Mario Faces Judgment”, where you just run through and it tells Mario that he’s a war criminal for what he’s done to the Goomba race and he needs to face his crimes. Playing other people’s levels was a lot of fun too, though some of them were quite frustrating, I must admit. Nowadays, if you are having trouble with a video game level in a traditional video game, you can just look up a walkthrough online. Not so with “Super Mario Maker”, as these are all user-submitted levels, and that would mean millions upon millions of walkthroughs for every level uploaded every minute. That would be impossible. Still, there were a lot of gems in there, and it was fun giving people support through the Miiverse, as well as reaching out to them on the Gamefaqs website and Reddit.

It was quite interesting when you compare the communal experience of playing a video game online with other people to simply interacting with people in another entertainment setting. While there were few others at the film, it was still a communal experience, something you can’t manufacture over a keyboard, iPhone or gaming system. Honestly, as much fun as it was to create those levels and play “Super Mario Maker”, it was kind of a lonely experience. I enjoy co-op games, where you can play with other people in your home at the same time. This game did not offer that. And while reading a book is a solitary experience, it is often something that is meant to be that way, and if the story is good enough, you really don’t care. While W. Deresiewicz pointed out in his review that the characters were thinly drawn and the book was explicit with violence (Deresiewicz, Pg. 51), it was still a very engaging story to me. And comparing it to McCarthy’s other books like “Blood Meridian”, which is probably the most violent thing I’ve ever read, or “The Road”, which is one of the most disturbing, the gore was actually minimal.

Another interesting thing to me is how the cinema has changed over the years. When you look back in history, some of the first films could actually be quite risqué. This all ended for about three and a half decades, thanks to Will Hays of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. He put in place the Hays Code, which was a list of rules that film-makers had to abide by in order to have their film put up on the big screen. It was the morality police of films, was put in place in 1930, started being seriously enforced in 1934, and wasn’t repealed until 1968. (Ashby, Pgs. 233-234; 397.) So with this code, you couldn’t have sex and nudity, you couldn’t have gay relationships shown as anything positive, and you couldn’t have criminals getting away with their crimes. There had to be retribution for the bad guy, and good had to triumph over evil, or else it will corrupt the minds of the gullible American public. Or something. And while I don’t think that the Hays code would have an issue with the theme of Tarantino’s film or the story itself, the incredible violence would definitely be a no go. And even the films made immediately after the Hays code was dismantled got over-the-top ratings. “Midnight Cowboy”, for example, was originally rated X. Had that film been made today, with the exact same script, it likely would have received a PG-13 rating. My fiancé’s father went to a seminary boarding school, and the priests who taught there even thought the film was no big deal to show to a bunch of high school students and took them to see it. Some of it was very arbitrary. So while some may point to the advancements in film techniques, CGI, films being in color or sound in pictures, I honestly think that the ratings system, and the way we can make films more liberally now, is a larger part of the change in cinema over the last century.

With video games, I honestly can’t find much of an analog to them in what our amusements used to be. When we had concert saloons, people would bare knuckle fight, get into shooting contests, have dogs chase rats and cockfight. (Ashby, Pg. 48.) That is a lot of violent, cruel stuff that is actually inflicting pain on living beings. Playing video games, on the other hand, is just a simulation. While I’ve never been into the first-person shooter games and would rather retreat into the world of Mario or Zelda, people do play those games with fierce intensity, and it is all just a virtual world, with virtual guns and a virtual death count. And while playing these games supposedly can be an indicator of neuroticism (Beutel, M. E., & Egloff, B. Braun, B., M., Müller, K. W., Stopfer, J., Pg. 408) they can also just be a way to blow off steam and relax. So honestly, despite my feelings of loneliness while playing “Super Mario Maker”, and just reaching out to people on the Miiverse, Reddit and Gamefaqs, I would rather have that than the concert saloons of yesteryear. At least if I kill a Goomba, it feels no pain.

Books, on the other hand, really have not changed much. Going from personal experience, reading stories from ancient Greece to Shakespeare have been filled with sex and violence. While Shakespeare’s stories were written as plays, people have been reading them as books for a very long time, and teaching them in high schools. The story of “Titus Andronicus”, for example, is filled with gruesome death after gruesome death, and even includes the baking of two of a character’s children into a pie, for that character to unknowingly eat. (Goldstein, Pg. 99.) This story, mind you, was written in the late 16th century. So people always had the capacity to write violent and sex-themed works, and they always wanted to consume them in one form or another. “Lysistrata” was a sex comedy about women cutting their husbands off from sex to get them to stop fighting in a war, and it was written by Aristophanes in ancient Greece. (Holzappel, Pg. 100) It’s quite remarkable to me that some people view the past through rose-colors glasses, thinking things were a lot more chaste and valiant. They weren’t.

Going over these experiences has been quite interesting to me, particularly when comparing it to what I’ve learned in class and have seen in documentaries. The over-all impression I’ve attained is, people need some sort of entertainment. Also, the enjoyment of said entertainment is going to be subjective. There are still people in this would today keeping up with the concert saloon traditions, in a way. Boxing is an actual recognized sport that gets you endorsement deals. People still, unfortunately, cockfight, and they like to dogfight, bullfight and bear bait as well. The latter is quite shameful. And while films have changed a lot over the years, and I did enjoy “The Hateful Eight” very much and the way that Samuel L. Jackson remained, as S. Weinberger put it about the character Mr. Pink in “Reservoir Dogs”, an “ultimate professional” (Weinberger, Pg. 49) I honestly prefer a lot of older films to what is out today. The reason I hadn’t been to the movies in over two years isn’t because I lacked the time, it’s because there has been nothing worthwhile to see. At least, nothing I want to see with urgency, that I can’t just wait for it to be released on HBO or Netflix after a few months. I’d rather go to a concert, despite the fact that the members of my favorite bands are in their 60s and often can’t sing as well anymore, and have that sort of experience. Books, I can always read more of. I have a couple lined up on my nightstand already, as I count down the hours for spring break. And I will definitely keep playing “Super Mario Maker”, just not with the same intensity as I did for this project. I think that you need to find the kind of entertainment that works best for you, that you enjoy, and just veg out once in awhile.