Triumph In Blog

What can we learn about ourselves from our dumbest impulses?

Recently, I’ve been getting back into Iron Maiden a bit. They’re a favorite of mine from when I was a teenager–one of the first inspirations for me to start playing bass. Despite the fact that I haven’t consistently practiced with that thing in like, 2 whole years, if I pick one up it shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes to muscle memory myself back into “Genghis Khan” or “Mother Russia.”

Or, perhaps, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a 13-minute rhapsody recounting the story of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic poem, of the same name. I used to be able to play the whole thing once upon a time, transfixed with its hilarious length and sort of hilarious concept. It seems kind of funny that one might make such a song, the power metal symphony that describes a man’s epiphany at the power of god. There were actually quite a few of these back in the day; old-school heavy metal is notorious for long, overwrought, pseudo-symphonies that retool epic poetry, gothic literature, or even historical myth into anthemic prog music for drunk Englishmen. Even Coleridge himself went represented more than once if you consider Rush’s “Xanadu,” but even sans the specific allusions to individual pieces of literature it was the spirit of romanticism that drove this style of music. I said “overwrought” and that’s really the word for it: Ozzy Osbourne wailing into the mic in 1969, 4-part vocal harmonies for 20 minutes per Queen song in 1975, Cliff Booth sneaking 8-minute instrumental suites into Metallica albums in 1986, ridiculous saxophone interludes in hour-long Dream Theater concept albums from 1994. Hell, TOOL was making music in 2019! Metal music in all its forms is fixated on excess and catharsis, in finding the freedom to let go of inhibitions and let enormous, indulgent, overpowering sounds drown out the sounds of your internal (or external) screams.

There’s something primal and teenaged about the whole endeavor, but what can we really hold against it? It does seem funny that there is a time and place where the flying of the proverbial freak flag coincides with reading 19th century poetry, or studying classical music. But why? Listening to “Ancient Mariner” again has given me the chance to synthesize this here dialectic in that it may not be so contradictory, after all, that guttural angry music and fantastical poetry work well together. The operative idea in “Ancient Mariner,” to find the point within the example, is that Steve Harris was so taken with a work of classic literature that he felt the need to repackage it into something loud and provocative. He hoped to both drive young, unruly fans toward his preferred literary greats (see also “To Tame a Land”), and to express the powerful, soaring emotions he felt that the story conjured, finding the song itself to be a favorite of his and of the fans’ even decades later.

What we see here is the beating heart of art, isn’t it? That someone would be so taken with the imagery and fantasy of yesteryear that they would try to express their unknowable, indescribable feelings in a new style and a new format. Many people make fun of the Helloweens and the Annihilators and the Rainbows of old for being squeaky, squealy catnip for old men who can’t let go of their adolescent fantasies. Take a look at any Cirith Ungol album cover and you should understand a bit of the world in question. Is it so wrong to admit that we have these feelings and then try to confront them? It can certainly get pedantic to spend your whole life retreading the same ground, sure, and many bands that try to generate their own “lore” or “universe” (Coheed and Cambria springs to mind, Dream Theater’s “Metropolis Pt. 2” does as well), come across as impenetrable and meaningless to anyone who wasn’t there from the ground floor. But this isn’t so different than what we see in any other form.

In truth, my impression of Iron Maiden has been on my mind because it coincides with many of my other recent ventures. Spending time confronting a lot of great works of the past has left me with similar thoughts. It’s worth considering how these incredibly commonplace and widespread ideas come to be, and whether we can learn from them. Video games, for an example, are something I’ve been studying a lot recently; this is why my writing and producing has slowed down a bit, and why I have significantly halted my studies into film. That modded minecraft server ain’t gonna run itself! More seriously however, investigating some of the beloved games of my youth under a new lens has taught me a lot about the way we express our juvenile feelings, much like in progressive metal music. Is it any wonder that there is a significant comorbidity between the two, as interests in young men go? It is very convenient to describe something like a video game as “escapism,” wherein we summon a separate world from our own just to imagine ourselves there instead of at our shitty jobs in our shitty country. But this is deeply insufficient, analytically. If an escape was all that was wanted from our media, consciously or otherwise, why would we make anything other than porn games and power fantasies?

There is more than hedonism to this, and more than delusions of grandeur. Cry of Fear, the subject of some of my recent writings, is a great example of how personal fantasy in video games is developed, and subsequently undeveloped. We may start from a place where our shooty, bloody video games are direct avenues to masturbate over a fantasy of power, yet the development of this game and the consideration of the player’s input inevitably leads us away from something so direct. The game’s gunplay is intended to be obtuse and difficult, and we are often overwhelmed by horrific creatures far stronger than us, lurking in the dark where we can hardly fight back. Even if one develops the skills to mow down legions of monsters with secretly obtained, impeccably detailed assault rifles, the game inevitably ends with a snap back into a vision of reality where our main character is a wheelchair-bound drug addict, failing to write his own, metatextual power fantasy much like ourselves.

There is a level of self-awareness in a game like this, and many games have followed suit. Taking a format intended to immerse unmonitored teenagers from the 90s in exaggerated violence (in Cry of Fear’s case, this would be the GoldSrc game engine for first-person shooters) and forcing prospective players to at least begin in a weak, desperate position: this can’t be just escapism, can it? Why escape to a world with seemingly no other people, where you are a morphine addict constantly getting stabbed by ghosts with books for heads? And why jerk us back into our dingy bedrooms at the end, to tell us we need to let go of the dismal, gruesome world we’ve become accustomed to?

Perhaps the fantasy of surviving in this hostile place is what we ultimately grab onto, being that through the process of developing such a game, its own creators were able to move on from their more basic obsessions with running and gunning in the virtual space. “survival games” are quite popular and have been for some time, and many people use them to imagine themselves more resilient or capable than they may really be, finally given a struggle to test themselves as opposed to the doldrums of the suburbs and the desk jobs. It is a bit fascinating how we can be so affected by images of strife and horror, and imagine it as some kind of adversity we wish we could overcome. Power again, in a way, but not always so. Fallout, a game I’ve written about before, emphasizes (in a less neurotic manner than what we consider “survival games” today) the role of a player-controlled Nietzschean superman in a dead, unresponsive world of war and dust, but what does our obsession with power bring us? The player is made acutely aware at the end of the original Fallout that their stat checks and remarkable weaponry are all kind of useless in actually affecting the world as we see it, and that our subconscious desires for war and violence are self-sustaining things that we can’t quell just by overfeeding them.

Again, like with epic metal music, we see another form sort of misconceived. Video games generally present virtual worlds in which we can act out our subconscious desires, that which we can’t indulge otherwise–the popularity of Grand Theft Auto, for example–but we often see these fantasies immediately undermined, in context, during the process of game development. Much like some songwriters were so taken with romantic fantasies of sea monsters or grim reapers, some game designers have been taken with similar fantasies of loneliness, powerlessness, and futility. In both senses, the metaphysical is invoked as a way of admitting our limitations, of asking ourselves what we really want out of the imaginary scenarios we dream up for ourselves. This is, again, how things like “lore” or “worldbuilding” can become very irksome and childish with time. The mechanics of our fantasies are far less important than the implications of having them in the first place, and obsessing over fictional details and fictional events is, though often a fun way to pass time, ultimately pointless.

This seems to manifest in each and every form. Fanfiction, fandom, powerscaling, shipping, you name it. We can have a song about “The Ancient Mariner” because we are smitten with the idea of nature’s omnipotence, and the crushing power and size of the sea compared to ourselves. We can have games like Cry of Fear or Fallout because we are keenly aware that our unconscious desires for power are inevitably unresolvable urges, symptomatic of other repressed aspects of our thoughts and our culture. But what can we learn from tiktok comment discourse about Jax and Pomni from The Amazing Digital Circus being allegories for various flavors of internet transgenderism? What can we learn from hours of youtube videos summarizing Warhammer 40,000 extended universe books as lists of fun facts about space racism? What can we learn from My Immortal?

That last one may actually have some answers…but my point is that all we would learn is very cynical, and probably depressing, and probably nothing that isn’t obvious from the get-go. What we see in all the years of fiction and imagination through artwork is that our fantasies are generated from the outside-in. We are only capable of imagining what we have seen, or at least some sort of perversion of it within the bounds of our own perception. Perhaps all those gacha games where pretty girls shoot space lasers at magical robots or whatever seem totally inscrutable, but they’re actually quite simple when you consider that staring at women’s cleavage is the main attraction, not the world around it. We find excuses to work our own real feelings into even the most alienating and bizarre of fantasies. Art imitates life, as it were, and material reality is inextricable from immaterial reality.

This is obvious in film as well, a form where “reality” is all we have. You are literally putting something in front of a camera and recording it. The lines between acting and doing can become very blurry very quickly, despite all the potential tricks we have developed to technologically render the reality unnoticeable within the frame. Méliès, one of the earliest and most influential filmmakers, saw the manipulation of film as a way to create effects that tricked and bewildered audiences into believing they were seeing the impossible, and yet the action of these tricks is still carried by people in costumes. You may write a script and you may instruct someone to play pretend, but you are ultimately still recording someone doing something; those Avengers movies might be almost entirely faked with CG and AI by now, but many are still captivated by the simple imagery of human beings performing superhuman tasks, with any number of motivations. Superman loves his parents, Batman seeks vengeance, Aquaman gets to hang out with a bunch of fish (we all love doing this, haven’t you been to an aquarium?)

So many different approaches to film have been born from confronting this fact, that the camera can only capture what is really going on in front of it. In anything, at any level of wish fulfillment or fantasy, you will ultimately be reflecting only your ordinary, real desires. Pornography is a perfect example, and I described earlier the concept of straightforward escapism and wish fulfillment: this is often attempted! But, again, even the most explicit detail is ultimately pointless. As observers, those analyzing works from outside the process of their creation, what is most instructive is how the process was informed, not necessarily the hypothetical mechanics of the end result. Animation was developed as an early way around the limitation of a camera, that suddenly any kind of imagery, no matter how abstract, could be formed without the necessity of recording anything more than one’s imagination on paper. Ask yourself which concern is of greater value to study: the motivations behind the insertion of Bugs Bunny into the recognizable situations he often subverts, or the logistics of how he acquires so many carrots despite not having a job?

Later on, people like Brakhage or Snow would find other creative ways to circumvent simple representations of reality, things which (through stageplay, through Brecht), may have already been so familiar as to be almost meaningless within the form of film. Their abstract imagery represents (among many other things) a radically different kind of fantasy, the kind where we reject our own perception wholesale and withdraw from our material circumstances, almost not consciously thinking at all. Or perhaps we do–what makes it abstract is that there are no preconceptions, and one may approach the lights and the colors with whatever thoughts they like. Like a Rothko, or a Twombly, there is a certain freedom in the approachability.

And so, we come back around to the idea of “freedom,” which may be what all of these different fantasies seek to provide. Really, I keep using the word “fantasy,” but that describes such an enormous assortment of ideas as to be almost meaningless. I have come close in my orbit around the world of art to many different spots that provide insights into other people’s desires, and learned a lot about my own, but the scope may be so wide as to simply take in too much to describe. I wrote this because, as I said, I feel it is worthwhile to say out loud that we create works of fiction as ways of confronting the facts of nonfiction, but everyone might not feel as bottled-up as I do. Some have a very easy time finding freedom and relaxation, and their “fantasies” may simply be the stream-of-consciousness straight from their frontal lobe to a page, or a canvas, or a screen. Listening to old Iron Maiden songs definitely does make one feel “free,” which may be the goal of all artwork independent of any other motivation. To cast off chains and set aside rules, and do whatever it takes to reach the impossible goal of explaining why we feel the ways we do. “The eradication of dogmatist thinking,” (Mao) an attempt to completely accept reality and embrace “the very essence of objects.” (Lenin)

So the next time you see me write a Finnegan’s Wake’s worth of text about a video game nobody else remembers, keep in mind that I’m doing a socialism, thank you very much. We need to understand that we are never above fantasy, and that everything we externalize carries a sort of idealism in it. It is incredibly difficult to consciously think from the outside-in, and doing so can often lead to frustration and signposting. To create something that you specifically wish to represent something else can be a very limiting thing. I, like many, search for freedom in artwork and try to set my dumber, more vulgar desires aside, sometimes to little avail. Maybe when I release the music I’ve been remixing this week and it all sounds like Detroit techno again, I’ll think of Russ Meyer or Tinto Brass, or anyone else who sort of can’t help themselves from being sidetracked by their simpler wants and needs. Paul Verhoeven, that’s also a good example. But that can be fun too, can’t it? As the one on the other side, it can be fun to think uncritically and let such things just wash over you, then forget about them. Gunfights, boobs, electronic music, things like that: are these also paths to freedom through art?