The Press Box - 'Damage Control' - Keeping It 1950s Woke With ‘Suburbicon’ and ‘Wolfenstein’ (Ep. 371)

Episode Date: October 28, 2017

There goes the neighborhood. The Ringer’s K. Austin Collins and Justin Charity are skeptical of George Clooney’s satirical misfire, ‘Suburbicon.’ But they’ve got high hopes for ‘Wolfenstein: The New Colossus’ and the future of Nazi punching — strictly in video games, of course. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm Justin Charity. I'm Cameron Collins. Welcome to Damage Control on Channel 33, part of the Ringer podcast network, a show where we unpack what excites, upsets, and divides us in popular culture. Today, we're going to be talking about punching Nazis and video game violence. But first, Cam, we saw a movie. Everyone pour one out for charity because he's only seen five movies this year. And one of them was one of the worst movies of the year.

if not the worst movie of the year, George Clooney's Suburicon. Mr. Lodge, I have a Lieutenant High Tower. Tell him I'm not in. You're on speaker, sir. Any new progress on the investigation? Well, you know a character name Rosoli? He was a loan shark for the mob.

Hi, pal. Never heard of him. So Suburicon. Suburban is partially a movie about Matt Damon, teeming up with his sister-in-law, played by Julianne Moore, to kill his wife, also played by Julianne Moore because they're twins. And it's a basic Coenbrother movie in that regard. It's like Fargo before Fargo. The Coen Brothers wrote it in the 80s. And basically, it's a zany mob noir in part.

But the part that we're interested in is the part that George Clooney tacked on in 2016 when he was making the movie, which is where he reproduces the story of Levittown, Penne. Pennsylvania, 1957 when a black family moved to an all-white enclave and all kinds of drama and white nonsense ensued. Charity, how do you feel about this Frankenstein, woke, misfire of a movie? I love it when black people are tacked on to a movie, by which I say I hate it when black people are tacked on to a movie. Yeah. I found this movie incomprehensible and I didn't, we're going to work through it because the racial politics of it are very strange. and the fact that the racial politics of this movie were sort of stapled on to an old Cohen Brothers script. Make sure a very interesting Frankenstein of a movie.

I should say up front, the trailers for Suburban Khan interestingly leave out the whole, I mean, they leave out the black characters, period. But they do not hint at the fact that the real point of this movie is basically there's a white family where the husband is literally getting away. with murder next to a black family that's just trying to live the American dream and is getting attacked all day, all night by this white mob. And so there's a very basic liberal idea here of look what's happening. No one's paying attention to the actual violence. We're all pinning all of our hatred onto this black family by way of actual history through Levittown, Pennsylvania. And I got to say, yeah, there is something a little weird about, I mean, George Clooney's been thinking about making this movie since as early as I know, 2005. He's interested in making

the Suburban-Con script that's just the Matt Damon and Julianne Moore part of the movie. And then the Trump election season happened last year and they started filming in October last year. And I guess that's when everything sort of he became a soothsayer, I suppose. Right. Right. The future of American races, I don't know. And the interesting thing I feel like about this movie reaching back to the 50s to make a cobbled together race parable is that the black characters in the movie, they're supposed to be, as you noted, this sort of virtuous contrast with these,

you know, this white family that's having this very strange identity crisis. Look, I think it's very immediately apparent to me how George Clooney could conceive of that and think he's being, that it's a virtuous telling. Right. Whereas the two of us looked at it maybe more as a condescending characterization. Right, because I mean, at the end of the day, you end this movie and you think, so these black characters were hardly, they were abstractions. Right.

And a smart movie that's going to do something like this takes that and says, you know, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. We know that movies like this generally just rely on a black, silent, proud, flawless, kind of stereotype of the perfect human being who has no personality who gets to be the sort of black angel that's the white devils. And it's usually like white artists making this movie, this kind of movie. But this movie does not have that kind of self-awareness. It just reproduces everything that's bad about what it's critiquing in the guise of being forward-looking about our current political moment.

I got to say, like, what bothers me is someone taking our current moment and thinking that Levitown is the place to go for a parable. A parable. Levitown being a moment when, you know, Black people already knew that white people did not want them in their communities. Levitown is really notable for white people becoming. apparent to other white people, like white northerners revealing themselves to be as racist, they say, as Southerners, et cetera. Like, 1957, that Levittown incident is the same year as Little Rock Nine, just to give you a sense of, like, the kind of history we're dealing with. So it's like, interesting to me that George Clooney thinks that the way to tell the story

of our present moment is to go back to a moment when nothing is being revealed to black people. It's just white people who are being awakened, I guess, to the idea of white racism. But... I could see why George Clooney think that that's an interesting point, but I think it's revealing in ways that maybe he does not intend. Yeah, because the way we're talking about the movie right now, like somebody might get the impression that the black family and the neighborhood tension we're describing, it's a big considered part of the movie. Right. But the weird thing about the actual balance in the movie is that it's an afterthought. It's this thing that every, well, you want to say like every 25 minutes or so, the movie cuts back to it.

And it's like, oh, yeah, remember this black family lives here? Right. It's cutting from Damon's family. The funny thing is the content running through the movie is on TV screens, you have clips of white people ostensibly from Suburbanon doing these news interviews that are actually taken from a documentary about Levittown, called Crisis in Levittown that I feel like I've seen so many times because of museum trips in grade school or whatever, where it's just. is just like a bunch of white people saying things like, well, I believe in equality between the races, but that doesn't mean they have to be moving up in our neighborhood, things like that where it's like white people hear. Oh, no, they say when they're ready, when black people are ready.

Right, right. And it's just like, lose me with this, this like easy irony of white people saying one thing and me and another. Wow. You know, like, I like, you know, I wrote about this and in my piece about this, I reference a great South Park episode from the fifth season from 2001 called Here Here Comes a Neighborhood that takes the same kind of premise but does a smart thing with it where all the black people who move into the town are rich and the white people get to

pretend white people of South Park in case you've never seen the show value themselves as poor white trash is one of the ongoing jokes of the show so when a bunch of black rich people like Oprah and Snoop Dog move into the town they get to do the same thing like mob outside of their houses. They dress up as quote unquote ghosts, but they're really the KKK. They burn like a tea on a lawn that stands for time to leave, but it's obviously a cross. All these signifiers, very recognizable, but it's with a veneer of, no, we hate them because they're rich. They're the richers. That was it. We just saw the last of them speeding away in a van. All right. They were so scared. I'm sure they'll never be back. That's great. And now we can sell other homes and become millionaires.

What? But then you had us do all that for nothing. Nothing. Don't you see? If you get rich selling these homes, then there will still be rich people in South Park. Yeah, you'd become what you hate. Well, yeah, but at least I got rid of all those damn names. And then in the end, the punchline is, no, I mean, actually, it's just because they're black. But that shows so much smarter as a satire than this, because that show understands what all the signifiers are. And it's like, no, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to toy with the ways that people hide their actual prejudice beneath another form of prejudice in order to get away. with it. That's smart. This is just bullshit. Does any of that stuff work?

Well, it works insofar as the script, because of when the Corn Brothers wrote the original script, it works if you think of it as a practice run for Fargo, which has basically the same plot minus, well, Fargo has race stuff too, but it's a different kind of race stuff. But it's interesting as an artifact in that regard for me. It's sort of like, oh, this is what the Corn Brothers were thinking about before they made Fargo. This is a sort of early example of that. But other than that, Suburbancon mostly interests me in a bad way, in a scary way, as an early, I mean, one of these early examples of Trump era art. This is a phrase that I'm going to hate for the next four and not eight years. Something I'm really going to hate, which is

people doing a lot of bullshit art in the name of political art about Trump. Like George Gluen, very clearly has said it was a 2016 election season that inspired me to attack this race story onto this Coen Brothers script. We've already seen things like American Horror Story, et cetera, like directly responding to some idea of the Trump era. I have not really been satisfied by much of it. Maybe that's because we're so early in the Trump era that really no one knows how to wrestle with it in a useful way. But altogether, I've been let down and I don't see that changing. I think I see a lot of hand-fisted, well-ed. No meaning, but not good, not useful, and not as often as I would like made by people of color art.

I know, that was a whole M&M sub-tweet. That was interesting. You just slid in M&M. You just got M&M subtweet bars in the suburbiccon segment. I mean, but he at least, Eminem is better than George Clooney at this. Okay. I would say. I would absolve him of quite this critique.

But again, he's still in the category of people doing. a very responsive thing. And so far, it's going to be a rough four years. Speaking of satisfying art, satisfying artistic experiences, our next segment is DIY, where Charity and I take a thorny or controversial or in some way enticing cultural product, try it out and see what we can make of it. Charity, what did you bring for us today? Oh, man, I've been playing the new Wauphinstein game called The New Colosses.

It's a first-person shooter, the Wolfensstein series for people who aren't familiar with it. It's a popular first-person shooter game where a basic, definitive, and deeply gratifying objective is to kill Nazis. My brothers and sisters of the United States of America tonight, we the free people of the resistance ask you to become one of us. Did you forget? They beat us. They murdered us. They executed us. But guess what?

They fucked with the wrong country. Come and fucking get me, you fascist Nazi pigs. That's it. I'm excited. It's not just any Nazis, right? It's mutant super soldier Nazis with prosthetic lasers and robot suits and power armor. So it's souped up Nazis. This is apparently a whole, I learned.

I learned when I was looking up Wolfenstein clips. I learned about all kinds of other games where you. where you kill Nazis. Right, because there are a lot of games that, well, first of all, there are a lot of first-person shooter video games, and there are a lot of games set during World War II, and there are plenty of games where you get to play,

where you get to kill Nazis. Right, like movies. Just like movies, exactly. The difference with Wolfenstein, with, I would say all of the games from the beginning, dating back to, like, you know, Wolfenstein 3D, which is a very different game

than the sort of more cinematic Wolfenstein that you'll play on a modern console. But the thing is, in those games, you're not just, you know, it's not just the allies or fighting the Nazis who will win. It's, you know, you are playing as a character, B.J. Boscovitz, who is basically outnumbered by the Nazis

a thousand to one at any given level of the game, right? And so when you're walking around, in Wolfenstein 2, sort of the earliest levels you play are, You play on a Nazi U-boat that this... This sounds so intense. Yeah, it's like you're on a Nazi U-boat that this resistance group, this resistance group is captured from the Nazis,

and you're in a wheelchair. It's sort of a continuation of the previous game, and you basically, you wake up in a hospital bed, you've lost the use of your legs temporarily, and so you're rolling around in a wheelchair with machine guns in your lap in a Nazi U-Boat and you have to clear out the deck that you're on and you just have to fight the Nazis from a wheelchair.

On a 19, I would say, on a 1950s U-boat, so it's not like the most wheelchair accessible U-Boat. And it was made by the Nazis, so it's definitely not. Jesus. So it's funny that you bring up this game because I feel like the last time I heard about a game like this or sort of a hyper-relevant-to-a-moment game was when I got a bunch of people texting me,

like, have you heard of this game Mafia 3? Where I guess at some point in that game you shoot up a clan rally? Is that how it goes? I have not played it, but that... I'm just curious about these kinds of games existed before the last 12 months, but is there something about them

that seems especially cathartic or something right now? Like, is there a certain kind of particular pleasure that you get out of this game now that you weren't getting out of Wolfenstein of your, you know, two years ago, three years ago. Wolfenstein certainly is more cathartic to play in 2017 when neo-Nazis are basically making a mockery of American politics. Right. Yeah.

So, Wulfenstein is resonant in a peculiar way because it's, again, unlike a call of duty game where it's just sort of, okay, World War II, this is a setting, you're fighting the Nazis, everyone's in beige, go for it. Right. Wolfenstein is very, it's very thoughtful about how it characterizes the Nazis and how it characterizes B.J. Blaskovitz and his fellow members of the resistance as people who are basically the losers of Nazism, right? So it's sort of the band of people that you're fighting with in Wolfenstein. They're black people and Arabs and Poles and Jews and, you know, at one point, because this is, I'm the disabled. Right, right. But it's, and the deformed, the overweight, it's basically people who, you know, the resistance group that you're a part of, all of these people who make a mockery of the Aryan ideal.

Right. You can overhear Nazi soldiers in the game talking about all the time. And so in that sense, because Wolfenstein specifically engages with Nazism and takes Nazism seriously as an ideology and is interested in sort of making the Nazis say things and target people and be arrogant in ways that sort of jog the national memory about why America at one point very uncomplicatedly hated the Nazis. I think that's why it's cathartic. coupled with the fact that you then get to slaughter lots of Nazis in any given boiler room or any given crevice of the ship that you're on or the Empire State Building at one point there's a shootout in the Empire State Building in Manhattan. For people our age and we're like, you know, millennials I guess, but like on the older end of a millennial, it's funny to hear about a game like this because we grew up in the moment of like hysteria.

I feel like for most of our lives there has been hysteria about video game violence and we're also right now in a moment of like is it okay to punch Nazis so this game is sort of I don't know like what is this game doing for you in that context like obviously punching

killing a bunch of Nazis in the video game is not the same as punching Richard Spencer and probably is also inherently less gratifying for those of you who are sympathetic to punching Richard Spencer but I wonder like what does this do with those in the context of those kinds of questions? It's a question that the marketing started for the game,

started to address before the game addressed. Basically a couple weeks ago, so a couple weeks before the game came out, Bethesda, which is the company that publishes Wolfenstein now, they had a tweet with the video embedded, and the video, just the video is sort of like a flash card where it says,

is it okay to punch a Nazi? And then the subsequent footage is like a bit of the game. I don't remember where it happens, but it's just a bit of the game where, you know, B.J. Blascovitz, like, you run up on one of the Nazi characters and you punch him in the face. Oh, shit. Although it's, there's something weird about that

because I, the main way that would happen in the game would not be bloodless punching. It would be a hatchet. Oh, oh. The main physical, the main melee way that you would take out of Nazi in that way in the actual game as opposed to that demo is you would hit them twice with a hatchet in the face and then in the chest. But the game, the marketing for the game very clearly positioned itself as, hey, play

Wolfenstein to the new Colossus. If you have come down on the pro-punching Nazi side of the, is it okay to punch Nazis debate? What I'm curious about from your perspective, though, is I, I, I, I, I, I, have come down on the pro-hunching Nazi side of a, of the, is it okay. I just help me understand why we've gotten to that, why that debate has developed in popular culture right now. Right. When it, you know, basically after Charlottesville, right? This debate over whether preemptive violence against neo-Nazi activists is appropriate.

It seems like such a weird debate because it's about the nature. of violence and politics. Right. You know, it's funny you asked me that today because actually not two hours ago I was walking down the street near our office and I saw a guy with America Great Again hat on and I did, you know that moment

like in a movie where it's like you have the fantasy the thing plays out but then you cut back to the reality where the person didn't actually like violently attack that person. I had this fantasy of just like knocking his hat off but there were cops nearby and who feels like getting bothered with all that. But it was just like, there is this, I mean, I think part of what we're clarifying in culture right now is what is violence? Somehow we're still having a conversation about what constitutes acceptable forms of violence and is violence, is there a form of violence that is acceptable

for fighting violence? Somehow, like, we on the left side of things have sort of talked ourselves into this knot over the question of whether it's impolite somehow to get in the face of someone who stands for ideals that put your life in danger. There's a sense of decorum to all of this that just is not interesting to me, which is why this video game is interesting to me, because video games, like there's a fantasy terrain where you just don't have to bother with all of these, to be honest, ethical questions, and anyone who kind of wants to get hung up on that stuff, it's like, well, where have you been?

Because how many World War II movies and video games, et cetera? How many times have you seen an inglorious bastard with, like, the bear Jew, with the bat, beating the shit out of Nazis. You know, like, at some point, I get like the difference between fiction and non, but at some point it's like, we do live in a culture that is actually for most of our lives, all of our lives since World War, too, glorified and violence against people who identify it with Nazism. I get maybe why you don't want to punt someone like Richard Spencer in the face, but this automatic recoil is interesting to me because this is a fantasy that I thought we all shared in. Right, right. Like how many, how many years of my life have I,

entertained people suggesting that if they could go back in time, the first thing they would do is kill baby Hitler. And remember that kill baby Hitler debate? So my final question for you, Charity, is do you recommend Wolfenstein as a supplement to therapy? Do you think that this should be on my palate of things that, you know, in my regiment of things to survive the Trump era? Oh, definitely.

Yeah. If I were designing a survival kit, I would certainly put a PlayStation 4 for one in it, just in general. Just because, yeah. Just because. And two, a copy of Wolfenstein II, the new colossus. I mean, the thing that Wolfenstein 2 is alleviating in me is this sort of frustration with the fact that Naziism is, we're talking about the real world now, by the way. But, like, Naziism is this inherently obscurantist idealism. where it's like Nazism is inherently violent, right?

The people that we're talking about in these hypotheticals, you know, is it okay to punch Richard Spencer? They are, everything they stand for is violence. It's the promise of catastrophic violence. And I think that's the only appropriate way to consider sort of political violence against Nazis is to represent, is to understand that they represent a down payment on future violence. against marginalized people who, you know, since the advent of Nazism, have been the people

that Nazism cannot tolerate. Which is why, in a video game, at least, I am very willing to fight back. All right, on that note, that's all from us. Thank you for listening to Damage Control. I'm Cameron Collins. I'm Just a Charity. We'll be back. We'll be worked up about something else, and we'll be back.

In the meantime, though, chill out. Relax. Bye.