I often say that my generation – the one that was a child in the 2000s, actually lived through a century in just over ten years. I think that this decade still had a 90s flavor, the past still seemed very close, but so did the future. I remember with gusto arriving at the cash register of the recently bankrupt Extra Supermarket and finding magazines accompanied by CDs with 100 computer games on the next shelf.
Although I already had several of them, I always asked my mother for one more and she hesitated, considering the hours I would spend on the computer. But in the end, she would take pity and give it to me, since I didn’t have a video game. There were all kinds of games, adventure, fighting, and sports. I will never forget a game about being a dentist where the objective was simply… to pull teeth (and watch the blood coming out of the gums).
I spent my childhood feeling a little powerless in front of the games, because I was terrible at them all: Prince of Persia, Super Mario World, Sonic (my favorites at the time). In the following years I kept getting worse, be it on Café Mania on Orkut or later on Criminal Case on Facebook. But despite this, still as a child, I had a curiosity that never went away, which was to forge new personalities. At the speed in which technology was developing, I thought I could be anything I wanted.
As I played, I imagined things like: Is it possible to fly if I add something to this controller? What if I fall in love with this character? Deep down I knew this was a limited reality, but I preferred to think that the unpredictability of the game – since I never finished them, would give me some kind of surreal reward, like someone who discovers a territory where no one has ventured before.
This feeling of “anything is possible” stayed with me for years, especially with the arrival of youtube, when I could see the video clips of the various songs that were in my mp3, downloaded from emule and 4shared. This is how I discovered that besides Daft Punk there was Interstella 5555 and this is where cinema came in.
In the film I knew I couldn’t intervene, but it gave me the comfort of the end, of the understanding of being who I was. A little sad? Maybe. It was a bit like watching home VHS’s. But I watched the same movies over and over again, I liked, disliked and “reliked” the plots and characters, always attributing new meanings to them.
It turns out that the movies I liked (besides musicals and some novels) had a question that went back to the exploratory nature of the game. At some point they went back in history, sometimes to the past, sometimes to the future, or to a space/time that didn’t even exist in the world as we knew it, such as the nuclear age, its spies, secret agents, giant monsters and time machines. It was science fiction. The assumption of everything and the certainty of nothing. Science fiction (the farce with a pinch of positivism, to give the tone of reality).
My references were the most diverse, from the cheesiest to the most sophisticated, as well as my observations about them. Armageddon (1998) for example, brought me the imminence of the end, where someone should die to the sound of Aerosmith’s I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing. However, in this case, the sacrifice was less messianic than it seems since, in my view, the young girl played by Liv Tyler would suffer much more for the death of her father than everything that would be destroyed if the asteroid hit the planet.
In science fiction, the end for me was no longer the last minute of the movie, but the relativity of the narrative it brought. That same feeling continued with other films and series such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Metropolis (1920), Matrix (1999), Blade Runner (1989), Arrival (2016), Ex Machina (2014), Stalker (1979), Solaris (1972), Black Mirror (2001), Altered Carbon (2018), The Midnight Gospel (2020), Love, Death and Robots (2019) and even Dark (2017), among others.
The “game” reminds me of the curious discomfort provided by the 8bit and sound mix of a cyberpunk aesthetic (at its fastest definition, high tech and low life quality). The “film” – and therefore the end, places itself for me in the overlap of the time of the real and the time of fiction. After going through creative processes and other worlds like programming, montage, editing, and sound mixing, this overlap suggests exactly the possibility of existence in this limbo between the nostalgia of an uncertain future and the memory of what can no longer return, the immaterial place where the image of the “game” and the “film” meet.
Just like the idea of circumventing the game or believing that it could have a life of its own – simply because my imagination wanted it to, cinema also proposes other understandings about the facets of time and existence. In Arrival (2016), fate is what governs the geography in which alien life chooses to allocate itself on the planet. In Stalker (1979), the future smells of old age, what operates is not technology and forms of power, but human desire, which can be far more frightening and distressing than a machine’s desire.
Soon, the comfort of completing the film no longer mattered as much to me, just as finishing a game was no longer synonymous with winning. The game and the film are real categories of thought, in the sense that they allow me to exist within the reflections engendered by them. Finally, I leave here my playlist of “sounds of the old future” for those who want to listen to it!
