EPISODE 523: DON'T HANG ON TIGHT

Sometimes news reports about the New England Patriots make me wonder if I'm in Hell.

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

This week I started playing God of War, which so far is a game about a guy who I think might be a Norse god who for some reason went into hiding and now has a kid who doesn’t know anything and the kid’s mom died and now for some reason they have to head up a mountain and there are trolls and yesterday I freed a dragon.

It was a big day.

ANYWAY, whenever you die on God of War you end up being sent back to the last “chapter” of the story. A lot of the time that just means you’re back at the scene where the guys who look like they are filled with radioactive gas poisoned you. Sometimes it’s a little farther back. For those not up on the lingo, like me, the 50 year old priest who bought a PS4 for his mid-life crisis, this is known as a “respawn”.

Then you play out the scenario again. Hopefully this time you remember that if you hit L1 and R1 as you’re swinging your axe it creates a kind of freeze blast that can slow down a whole bunch of irradiated orc creatures all at once. But maybe you won’t and they’ll get you again. Fine. Rinse and repeat.

Most games today are like this. Even a lot of non-video games. In football you get four downs and what seems like an eternity to move the ball ten yards. In baseball you get as many pitches as it takes to get you on base or out. Each one of those moments is the same as a respawn: another chance, and you potentially succeed insofar as you adjust. Do the same thing again, see a green poison cloud hurling toward you, and/or be stuck watching the New England Patriots win the Super Bowl again, which let’s just agree to admit would actually be worse.

I don’t even watch football and I find the Patriots exhausting.

Now, imagine a game where the opposite is true. That is, you get to continue to play so long not as you adjust, succeed and move farther up and farther in to the adventure, but as you prevent any real change from happening. Think Tetris. Space Invaders. Centipede. Missile Command. (There seem to be a lot of old timey arcade games set up this way, actually.) The goal is status quo.  

They often call them tower defense games now. I don’t know why. Towers are for climbing, not defending.

To my mind defense games get old kind of fast; they’re so repetitive. And yet they can be very hard to stop playing. It’s like when you run too long on a treadmill (or in reality for that matter), then a half hour later you feel like you’re moving. Your body has gotten into the habit and so now there you are. This is what you do now.

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Human life looks like the first kind of game, right? The world unfurls around us and we move through it, having adventures, fighting trolls, developing intimate relationships with dragons that make us question whether J.R.R. Tolkien was a speciesist.  

But in fact aren’t we’re all mostly playing Space Invaders instead? Yes, we move through the world, but with a pretty clear view as to how things are supposed to go, or how we want them to go, and a fierce desire to see them go that way. McDonalds drive up window attendants, hinky computer that shuts down at random times, pandemics—they’re all the same, from this point of view, things we’re trying to fight off.

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Last week a bunch of new #MeToo revelations came out of the comic book industry, television and Catholic liturgical music. You know, the big three of U.S. pop culture.

One of the figures mentioned in the comic book space was Warren Ellis, whom I’ve mentioned here many times. He’s one of the most significant and well-liked comic writers of the last twenty years, and also has for a long time posted a weekly newsletter that I have found deeply encouraging on many occasions. He’s been accused of using his influence in the industry to groom and harass women, and has since apologized for exactly that.  

The revelations in each of these fields beg the question once again, are these industries ever going to change? Do we ever get “through” these deeds and cover ups to a better place.

Then on Juneteetnh I attended a Writers’ Guild Zoom with a great panel of black writers and activists talking about how to get Hollywood to actually be diverse rather than signal diversity.

CUT TO: MAKING TV, BEHIND THE SCENES

The big thing that has happened in writers’ rooms for decades now is that networks or studios will chip in money for a “diversity hire” – aka someone who is not a white straight man. It sounds amazing, and it definitely creates opportunities for people of color, women and queer writers.

But then that’s usually about as far as the industry goes. That’s what diversity means to them – we have one spot for someone who is not a white straight man . If you’ve got “one”, you’re “doing diversity”, I guess.

Which is not only nonsense but often a scam. The money for those hires is usually just for a year, which means after one season these writers are often dumped. And because their funding is separate from the rest of the salaries, they can sometimes be treated as temporary or as having not earned their place, too.

When I was on Preacher, the co-lead Tulip was a black woman, played by Oscar-nominated actress Rose Negga. And yet the only person of color on our staff my year was our writing room assistant Emily Cheung—who was amazing, God bless Emily Cheung now and always, but not a writer. The other 7 of us were all white.

There was an episode in that first season where Tulip get pulled over by a white cop. Ruth had some big questions about how her character would react to that. And I remember us being surprised, because in thinking through that moment in that episode we had never considered the implications of that moment.  The scene was not about that.

Ruth’s point: Um, if you’re black it’s always about that.

That story is not a slam on Preacher. That’s some of the trouble in Hollywood right there.

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So I’m listening to these conversations this week and realizing they’re pretty much the same conversation. Things are messed up. The people who suffer are calling the problems out. Others want to be allies, to be part of making a change. But we’ve heard all this before. In the Church I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that we’ve improved things, that we’ve changed, and then there’s a whole new round of revelations.

What are we to make of that?

My current theory: Being an ally, changing culture requires moving from Life as Space Invaders to Live as an Unfolding Game.

It requires that we stop looking at the world as first and foremost Dancing Aliens That Are Trying to Keep Us From What We Want and rather as a run through dark tunnels into unknown territory where I don’t know what is waiting and all I’ve got is this axe and limited hit points and joystick moves I seriously cannot remember (why are games so complicated).  

Who wants to do that? It sounds like an adventure in the abstract, but that is hard, scary work. And that’s just not how we play, yo.

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Every time we hear about a bad actor getting exiled from whatever industry they’re in, I think, well thank God. And from both a safety and justice standpoint, often that move is absolutely necessary.

But if that’s all we do to respond (and how often do we not even do that?), we’re still playing Space Invaders. We’ve just identified Person X as the latest alien who we have to shoot down.

Or you’ll hear – at least I hear in the Church – about new policies we put in place to protect vulnerable people. And that, too, is essential and ultimately if it’s the only thing we do a tower defense strategy.

Meaning: We’re trying to stop the bad guys from getting in and doing harm. But the tower remains the tower. The culture that both enabled this situation and then was warped by it remains.

Imagine playing Missile Command only to find out that the country you’ve been protecting has enslaved half its population just because, you know, that’s how they do. You might not say, well then let’s let all the missiles through. But you sure as hell would have some serious questions about what the hell is this game you’re playing.

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Another way of saying this might be, everyone loves the message of Groundhog Day, the journey it presents of a guy learning to become a good person.

But is anyone actually willing to go through all the suffering and letting go respawning that Bill Murray has to do to get there?

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Still another way of putting it: If I freak out when I have to talk to a customer service agent about the fact that iTunes keeps charging me full price for TV seasons that I’ve already bought episodes from, am I really likely to be behaving as an ally of anything?

And also, is me writing this just me thinking all of this stuff out for myself, a step toward a positive, time to take the journey kind of step? Or is this my way of avoiding real action?

Hey I wrote about it. That’s how I helped.

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THREE VIDEOS!

Remember when we all got to that point where we were like, I don’t know what this musical Hamilton is all about, it sure sounds amazing, but could everyone would stop talking about it and also the New England Patriots for a few hundred years please?

Then it finally happened and we all breathed a big sigh of relief and started talking about, I don’t know, HBO Max.

Well, get ready for round two.

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Also, are you a sucker for quantum entanglement and/or the multiverse?

Yeah you are.

This is a great song about that.

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Finally, discovered this for the first time last week. I’ve watched it many times since. So so powerful.

Another week coming right at us. I’ll tell you what: I’ll try not to let my first reaction be to fight it off if you do the same. Deal?

Be good to yourself and others. And I’ll meet you back here next week.