Stranger 109

I recently discovered a forum community dedicated to making machinima with the Half-LIfe 2 SDK and Garry’s Mod called Facepunch Studios (FPS). If you enjoy machinima made with this game as much as I do, I urge you to check it out. There’s a rich community of machinimators sharing in skins, textures and techniques for making the best possible films. In addition you can find a wide selection of films that you may not find on Machinima.com. Today’s film was one I came across while browsing the site. Mike Munson’s The Tyrant is over a year old as far as I could tell from the posting and cannot be found on any of the other machinima sites I frequent. As I have indicated before, I am very much interested in the political applications of videogame technologies. And though machinima offers a great resource for expressing political viewpoints, the medium has not been utilized for that purpose on any large scale. Aside from Alex Chan’s well-known The French Democracy, the number of political machinima films account for only a handful of what is out there. Other examples include An Unfair War, Korea Condemned and the various works of Eddo Stern.

Anyone familiar with HL2 immediately recognizes the game’s iconic villain, G-Man. Which is why so many machinimators use him in their films. From Jack Nicholson to Borat, G-Man has taken on a number of roles over the past years. Munson opts to cast him as none other than GW himself, call him G-Bush. Though the likeness may not be spot-on, the skinning creates an eerie resemblance that facilitates the narrative well. The film plays out in two parts with the first consisting of various closeups of G-Bush during a press conference set to the audio of Xzibit’s “State of the Union.” Similar to the many Bush speech mash-ups found online, the track uses sound bites to make him say things like “I have directed the administration to support the use of violence against all of you.” The remainder of the film depicts a violent slaughtering of a crowd while G-Bush looks on. Mixing slow motion with varied camera angles, Munson sets the scene to an Akira Yamaoka track from the Silent Hill series. While many find the juxtaposition of ultra violence played in slow motion over a gentle and lyrical soundtrack to be an overused trope in either machinima or traditional filmmaking, I found it effective in this piece. Largely due to the way in which it tonally flows from the speech, which itself is already unnerving and disturbing, the technique suits the film. My only critique of Munson’s work would be its extensive end credits which runs for nearly two minutes of a 5:39 minute film. But even more curious is the closing statement at the end of the credits: “There was no political message in this video.” I found this particularly puzzling as the film clearly had a strong anti-Bush message. Even if Munson is claiming that he merely brought together preexisting media like the Xzibit track, the choice to set it to the G-Bush character and then have him overlook a mass slaughtering gives a clear position of what he thinks of Bush. It is unfortunate enough that machinimators choose not to take on political issues as a fear of turning off their core audience. When they do, as I believe Munson clearly does here, I would hope they would own up to it and be proud that they are elevating the medium to something more substantive than an in-game joke.