But this joke is now taking an interesting turn. Several months ago, some Boll anti-fans put up a petition asking him to retire from making films. And now, in an interview with FEARNet, it seems that if he garners a million signatures, he might actually quit. StuffWeLike reports on this development:
So there you go. A chance to make cinema history. While we wonder if 1 million people have even seen a Uwe Boll movie, we will still hope that the petition (currently at 21,000+) gets a magical boost by the Will of God.
I sort of wonder whether he'll actually do this. He did challenge critics to fight him in the boxing ring, and he put his money where his mouth was in that case. Of course, that was kind of lopsided: he had been an amateur boxer for years, and he fought a bunch of out-of-shape film critics. One wonders whether this kind of pride will extend to his entire career.
Even so, beyond the novelty (absurdity?) of the whole situation, it fascinates me on a number of levels. First, in terms of fan cultures and taste culture in general, this is merely another example of how aggressive our defenses of "good taste" can be. Certainly, this is something resembling fan activism, but it is a curious anti-fan activism in which people are actively calling for the end of what they perceive to violate their sense of good taste. A number of critics have shown over the years how hierarchies of taste are necessary among taste cultures (and fan cultures) in order to legitimize the authority of those who judge, to legitimize the very subjectivity of those within the culture against those who are outside of it.
But we tend to forget that these hierarchies are also something of a zero-sum game. While those tastes that exist outside the norm set by the taste culture are necessary to some extent in terms of the power dynamics involved, it doesn't mean that the taste culture doesn't still want to eliminate other tastes altogether. Barbara Herrnstein Smith comments in her fabulous book Contingencies of Value that the effort to evaluate requires both the assumption of a natural, objective understanding of what is "good" and an attendant assumption that those who cannot recognize such "quality" are necessarily pathological in some way. There's the assumption in some older criticism (think of the New Critics, but this goes back, according to Smith, to Hume and Kant as well), for instance, that people unable to appreciate great works of art were not only "deviant" but also somehow socially unfit: in other words, there's a kind of natural selection that weeds out those less sensitive to aesthetics. This doesn't merely apply to cultural elites, though:
The first [point] is that communities ... come in all sizes and that, insofar as the provincials, colonials, and other marginalized groups mentioned above--including the young--constitute social communities in themselves, they also tend to have prevailing structures of tastes and may be expected to control them in much the same ways as do more obviously "establishment" groups. (41)
The second point of interest for me is what this means in terms of how consumers are engaging with new forms of production and distribution. Boll's films are not only critiqued for their quality, but for their mode of production. After all (the argument seems to go), it's as though the guy has seen The Producers too many times: Boll uses a particular loophole in German tax law that is intended to stimulate investments in German-made films and thus boost the national film industry. Oddly enough, though, the tax law stipulates that films that make no profit become completely tax deductible. In other words, Boll corners the market on movies that he knows will tank in order to reap the benefits. He and his investors win. According to his many detractors, the German government and the movie-going public loses.
Boll in some ways serves as a manifestation of the weird ways in which capital circulates to produce things that nobody really wants in order to continue its own perpetuation. He is in this way not postmodern in the way that Jameson and others characterize "late capitalism" (seriously, does this mean that capitalism will be "ending" soon?!), but rather in a more Deleuzian sense of how capital operates as a purely productive force: productive of commodities, certainly, but more importantly productive of pure capital (out of nothing, seemingly) and of desire as a byproduct. This process is very rarely so nakedly displayed for consumers, and Boll's spectacular display of his own production/distribution methods has drawn sharp criticism. In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins describes the ways in which this new transition in media culture is above all a convergence between producers who are producing capital and desire in new ways and consumers who now have more power and potential avenues through which to understand and engage with that capital and desire. Jenkins proposes a new political activism to be one possible consequence of this convergence, a possible avenue toward an "achievable utopia." I sort of wonder whether this is what he had in mind.
In case you're wondering: yes, I signed, not to assert anti-fan allegiance but rather as some feeble mark that I can make regarding the weird ways in which these new practices of capitalism in global convergence culture can be exploitative of the average consumer. For the record, there were 18,000 signatures when the interview was publicized, and, two days later, I became signature #100,505. So the numbers are skyrocketing. If you would like to jump on the bandwagon for whatever reason, you can sign the petition here.
***Update***
As the number of signatures on the anti-Boll petition approaches 165,000, Boll has responded by claiming that he's "the only fucking genius in the business." See his video response here. Or, if you feel kinda bad for the guy and want to show "support," sign the pro-Boll petition here. I say "support" because the justification for saying that Boll should not be forced to quit in this petition is basically that his films are so detestably bad that they're worth a good laugh....
4 comments:
I really appreciated your analysis of the psychological response to Uwe Boll. I have to admit that I have not read Hume and Kant, but your quotes very directly related to the topic at hand.
I do, however, take issue with your implication that this petition amounts to a "final solution," as you say, to what would be the Uwe Boll problem. Attacking something that one considers tasteless is not the same as attempting to eradicate anything under a certain standard of taste. This isn't a form of censorship; rather, it's an expression of outrage, in the same vein as Al Sharpton protesting misogynist stereotypes in rap music. The communities that have dedicated themselves to the promotion of this petition do so because of the very same capitalism that allows Boll films to exist. While Boll's films exist as part of a loophole in the idea of capitalism, their continued production is a sign of something that simply needs change, not something that should stand to be studied. It is an expression of fierce hatred, and one that, even if ignored by Boll himself, serves as a warning to potential investors and distributors. Attempting to make what amounts to a million negative reviews is not much different from any other protest - Boll's actions hurt the video game community, and as a community, they have chosen to create awareness and make a change. I don't think this is any more elitist than calling for micheal moore to make more truthful documentaries, or challenging the racism in the Resident Evil 5 trailer.
Thanks for the thoughtful response to my post (I'll also post a response on your own blog for continuity's sake, since no one ever really stops by here).
One thing that I think I failed to get across is that I have an extremely ambivalent attitude toward this form of collective action. I love it on its face: it's so incredibly rare to see genuine political action taking place in the sphere of taste politics. I'm also very sympathetic to any allegations about his exploitation of economic loopholes to purvey crappy movies on the rest of the world. I find it offensive that so many people can be making so much money simply for producing something (in an industrial sense) that doesn't actually produce anything (in the more creative sense of producing something that can be of genuine use to somebody). It's a sign of the weird times we live in, and it's certainly something that needs to be stopped (just shocked the German government hasn't put an end to it; can't be helping them any). For that reason, I signed the petition....
On the other hand, I feel that too many wrongs have been committed in the name of "good taste." The concept has gone unchecked as one of the single worst purveyors of class, gender, and racial division for the past two hundred and fifty years (and that's if we use Pierre Bourdieu's conservative estimate that this began with Kant). It has been every bit as divisive as laws that create and sustain these unequal divisions. Just because we're defending the integrity of video games, does that make the concept of "good taste" any less problematic. The games Boll butchers appeal primarily to a demographic of college-age white males from the middle- to upper-class: aren't we essentially positioning ourselves as the defenders of this singular demographic when we are anti-Boll? Would a more productive form of collective action instead urge for other social subjects to be represented in some way? I'm not saying I know how to do that, but I just don't think this petition is doing it.
Ultimately, I'm just really ambivalent about the whole thing, even though I'm checking the petitions daily to see what will happen. Even if I am ambivalent, this is a very exciting time for fan activists!
I absolutely agree with you when it comes to the dichotomy of the situation. It is genuinely impressive to see action meaning something in the world of 'taste'. I loved the way you outlined Boll's "production" as a lack of production. Interestingly, the German government has closed this loophole, though wikipedia has an interesting view on this - Boll's filmmaking may have been exactly what the loophole was intended for. But that's another story for another time.
I read an argument somewhere that asking Boll to stop filmmaking is like asking the same of Ed Wood. I personally find the cases different, but I'm not exactly sure how I feel about that argument. Would you really see Uwe Boll as cleansing the palate? I am not so sure. But, look at the history of these attempted purges of bad taste. Most of the time, when some dominant culture tries to squash something, doesn't it just go underground, or form a counter-culture? this is what happened with much of drug culture, and hippie culture, and even comic book culture. I guess what I'm saying is, then, that attempts at regulation of taste are as natural to the cycle as counter-cultures. It's almost a darwinian inevitability, if that makes any sense.
Finally, I don't think I agree with your argument that attacking Boll is solidifying a singular form of thought from one socioeconomic group. There's a wonderful video game blog attached to MTV called MTV Multiplayer, that's currently doing a special on minorities in video games. it's amazing to see how much of an influence the video game world has on the black community. One person interviewed declared that the three essential ingredients to making a rap album were "a bag of weed, a bottle of hennesy, and a playstation with a copy of Madden." As much as we as a society would like to position gamers in the 'suburbia' category, the demographic is immensely wider than that.
But your argument is about something besides that, so let's assume that you were speaking of the entire video game demographic. Is speaking out against Boll propagating the beliefs of this demographic? Maybe. But is it unproductive? not any more than the actions of any other group that tries to refute something tasteless (the MPAA and, well, every political lobbyist in the country come to mind). I'd still have to argue that it is a necessary part of a capitalist society, and one that will have to be balanced by other competing forces, such as the pro-Bollers.
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