Last weekend saw the long-awaited release of a video game called Cyberpunk 2077. The much-hyped, “feverishly-awaited” open-world game was announced almost a decade ago and its developer, a Polish company called CD Projekt Red, has kept it in the news over the years with a steady stream of expectation-raising marketing and big-time casting announcements. According to Wired, fans thought the game would be, more or less, one of “the most monumental digital experiences of all time.” Now, though, the reviews are in and, apparently, “it emphatically is not.” Though CD Projekt Red has reportedly already recouped its massive investment in the game – which sold over eight million preorder copies before release day on December 10 – the quickly-formed and widely-held opinion is that Cyberpunk 2077 is an uneven, “messy,” and politically flawed disappointment. In its “review roundup,” game and tech site Inverse sums up the game as “stunning but problematic.”
The reasons for these dismissals seem quite varied. The reviewers’ problems with Cyberpunk 2077 run the gamut (often in the course of a single review) from glitches and bugs (CD Projekt Red has apologized for the issues, and says it is releasing a downloadable patch to fix them, and has even offered refunds; also, per Bloomberg, Cyberpunk 2077’s technical glitches “have cut more than $1 billion off” the wealth of the CD Projekt’s founders) to unfortunately limited or stilted gameplay and perhaps a lack of originality, to, finally, the more weighty matter of its “content.”
The sudden, wide-ranging exasperatedly disappointed-to-negative media coverage Cyberpunk 2077 has received in the past week is interesting, and worth scrutiny. It is one of the highest profile and most recent examples of a long-simmering trend you see all the time in criticism, the media, and people’s perception of creative work in general, which is: to ignore completely the actual text of a work – the creative product itself, the “form” – and instead to move straight on to attaching whatever current political or cultural meanings one wants to it, no matter if such an overlaying, or “reading,” is appropriate or even remotely germane. Reading through much of the coverage of Cyberpunk 2077, I was immediately reminded of a line from Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Against Interpretation”: “Interpretation,” she writes, “takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there.”
Sontag begins the essay by first contrasting the earliest experience of art with the earliest theory of art:
The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual. The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality. It is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. For the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.
This inherently necessary defense of art, Sontag continues, “gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call ‘form’ is separated off from something we have learned to call ‘content,’ and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory.” Finally, then, what the “overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation.” And it’s this habit of approaching works of art “in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.”
Interpretation itself is not static and unchanging. In some cultural contexts, interpretation can be a liberating act. But in “other cultural contexts,” Sontag writes, “it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling. Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling.” So what exactly is interpretation, in this sense? What does it look like? In most modern instances, Sontag explains,
interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comformable.
In the case of Cyberpunk 2077 criticism, this kind of interpretation seems to run rampant. It’s especially dispiriting in a review published on December 11 by The Washington Post’s gaming vertical called Launcher. The review, entitled “‘Cyberpunk 2077’ is a thrill ride through an ugly, unexamined world,” by Elise Favis, is imprecise and critical in annoyingly simplistic terms. Favis interprets everything through her own contemporary world, reviewing the game as though she were reviewing a walk she took around her own city. She never satisfactorily establishes the fact that she is talking about a piece of work, a purposefully-designed artwork in which its creators are consciously making decisions in an attempt to create a good piece of fiction. Instead, she’s just “frustrated” by things she “came across” that she personally doesn’t like, politically or otherwise. It’s hard to overstate how antithetical such an approach is is to actual criticism, and it’s always strange to read such things, especially in a publication like The Washington Post.
At one point, Favis mentions that “she” (the character in the game she is playing as) “overheard” “two men” in a bar (two male characters in a bar in the game) talking about “how consent is no longer necessary when free will can be switched off with a biochip.” She presents this as damning evidence of the game’s sexism, as something illicit that she discovered by accident (“overheard”) instead of assessing it for what it actually is – a line of dialogue, scripted, recorded, and put into the game in order to show, with as little exposition as possible, an attitude possessed by certain inhabitants of Night City, the metropolis in which most of Cyberpunk 2077 takes place. Yes, the sentiment and the technology it describes are both misogynistic, but clearly misogyny is present in Night City.
There are other strange collapses of game and reality in the review. Favis offers her thoughts on the ambience, again failing to differentiate in any meaningful way between the aesthetics of the game and her own preferences in a real life situation. “Dimly-lit bars brim with life, though an uncomfortably loud, orgasmic moan – originating from a television ad nearby – may interrupt your experience.” No: that is the experience. The cacophony and the relentless sex and obnoxious advertising is there on purpose, for aesthetic reasons. This is the world you enter when you play Cyberpunk 2077. The aesthetic merits of each of these decisions is of course up for debate – I’m not defending any of them, per se – but it’s not the critic’s job to dismiss creative decisions based on arbitrary preferences.
It’s also important to note the context in which Cyberpunk 2077 exists as a piece of work. “Cyberpunk” is a subgenre of science fiction, which gelled into existence in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It comes complete with its own conventions, narrative tropes, and aesthetics. Sci-fi author and cyberpunk luminary Bruce Sterling has noted that the genre is a mixture of high-tech and low-life. There are often underdogs, a thriving black market, heist plots; hackers, AI, and violence are present. The settings are dystopian, often sprawling, squalid, overpopulated places full of social inequality, and usually more or less controlled by giant and manipulative multinational corporations. As The Economist explains, the “typical cyberpunk setting” is “a neon-soaked metropolis where life is cheap, technology has penetrated the very bodies of its inhabitants and anything is available for the right price.” And, perhaps most critically, cyberpunk explicitly avoids the “utopian” tendencies of other science fiction. The title is a (perhaps heavy-handed) attempt to clearly place the game in the cyberpunk lineage. It’s purposefully a distillation of cyberpunk tropes: in their review, The Guardian says, not necessarily disapprovingly, that
There’s nothing new here, though. The game is heavily based on the Cyberpunk tabletop game by Mike Pondsmith, but the writers have also taken every idea they can from The Fifth Element, Strange Days, Neuromancer, Robocop and, of course, Blade Runner.
This lineage, these artistic tropes, surely matter when experiencing the game.
Cyberpunk 2077’s characterization of trans people is one of its darkest failings, according to some critics and players. Favis says that she “felt frustrated when a billboard fetishized a transgender woman just to sell cans of soda.” And in Polygon’s review, Carolyn Petit writes,
In my 40-plus hours in Night City, I never met a single character of any significance whom the game made clear was trans, and one of the only queer-coded characters I encountered was an extremely unsavory cybernetic surgeon who does extremely unsavory things. I did spot a trans flag on one character’s vehicle, though that hardly counts as positive trans representation and doesn’t even necessarily mean the character is trans.
But even this kind of criticism is only lodged in relation to our own contemporary real-world politics, as a kind of projection of annoyance or despair at our own society’s shortcomings in similar social realms. In fact, Cyberpunk 2077 has nothing to do with these shortcomings – and certainly no mandate to do anything about them.
So it must be asked: what is the actual expectation now when creating something? What is the end goal? Do these reviewers and people like them expect every fictionalized world – in video games, film, television, novels – to be a perfectly equal, conflict-less, egalitarian society? If someone invents a story in which a character isn’t happy, or is poorly treated, does that automatically become truth in the real world, an offense the work must answer for above all else? Must every fictionalized place be a place where all our current real-world problems are magically solved, or not included? Why is our current narrow real world the only reference point when experiencing a piece of art?
At its best, Favis writes, “cyberpunk fiction can be a lens through which we examine our own world; a dystopian society is meant to be ugly.” But then, she says, the game’s “fairly apolitical nature does little to encourage players to reflect on real-world problems upon completing the game.” Favis concludes that, overall, the game “boils down to juvenile noise rather than thoughtful commentary.” The “implications of the cyberpunk setting,” she writes,
are rarely meaningfully examined. The result is a dystopian world that is cruel just to be cruel. It is simply taken as fact that this is the way things are – and they’re not going to change.
This is an entirely backwards way of engaging with a work of art, a work of fiction, or a video game. Backwards to the point of illiteracy. Again – at the risk of sounding like a broken record – the way things are in the game is the way things are, in that work, on purpose. If they “change,” it’s because in the context of the story, or the game, or the “plot,” they change. If they don’t change, that is also a valid expression with its own consequences. In his 1965 essay collection For a New Novel, the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet argues that the form of a work is inseparable from the work:
The existence of a work of art, its weight, are not at the mercy of interpretive grids which may or may not coincide with its contours. The work of art, like the world, is a living form: it is, it has no need of justification. The same is true of a symphony, a painting, a novel: it is in their form that their reality resides.
After all of it, Favis leaves Cyberpunk 2077 itself “unexamined” in any critical or aesthetic way. Really, what Favis is proposing throughout are not critiques of a work, but rather her or her cohort’s own strangely moralistic preferences – suggestions for things she’d do differently based on her own views of the world. As Sontag notes, “It is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else.”
This wish to “replace” elements in the game with “something else” is maybe the most consistent refrain throughout a great number of Cyberpunk 2077 reviews. In Game Informer’s generally positive review, Andrew Reiner still finds Night City to be nothing more than “home mostly to evil people doing terrible things,” “more like edgy set-dressing than meaningful commentary.” And in Polygon, Petit writes,
There’s real potential for a grim world like the one Cyberpunk 2077 offers to serve as a lens through which our own world is critiqued, but the developers at CD Projekt Red failed to do anything with the trans options and identities they incorporated into the game to make them function in this way, and… you never have the option to say or do anything about it.
And elsewhere in The Washington Post review, Favis confusingly writes that instead of mere acts of revenge or violence (though she does positively note that the “Gunplay feels sharp and snappy”), she wishes the game offered ways to provide “systemic change that can alter this fictional city’s regressive views.” Setting aside the fact that that sounds like a pretty boring game, and probably one without much snappy gunplay, it’s completely irrelevant as a criticism. It’s not a critique – it’s asking for a fundamentally different thing, something not on offer in the work. An open-world stealth-and-shooting cyberpunk sci-fi game like Cyberpunk 2077 cannot fall short for not providing an option to create “systemic change” within its fictional dystopian society: that would be an entirely different game.
Interpretation is, indeed, Sontag writes,
the modern way of understanding something, and is applied to works of every quality. Thus, in the notes that Elia Kazan published on his production of A Streetcar Named Desire, it becomes clear that, in order to direct the play, Kazan had to discover that Stanley Kowalski represented the sensual and vengeful barbarism that was engulfing our culture, while Blanche Du Bois was Western civilization, poetry, delicate apparel, dim lighting, refined feelings and all, though a little the worse for wear to be sure. Tennessee Williams’ forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something, about the decline of Western civilization. Apparently, were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois, it would not be manageable.
Not everything has to be “about” something, but more and more now that is how every novel, film, album, video game, or art opening is discussed. “Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art,” Sontag writes. “It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.” X is about – and only about – Y. A is a meditation on B. Why bother?
“Thoughtful commentary”… “meaningfully examined”… “meaningful commentary”… “apolitical nature”… “to serve as a lens through which our own world is critiqued”… What do these things actually mean? Why would players feel “encouraged” to “reflect on real-world problems upon completing the game”? Why should they? It’s worth dwelling on this for moment. These expectations are nonsensical. This attitude assumes that a work is only worthwhile if it pushes, explicitly, some didactic message or another, preferably one which precisely matches the views of the viewer. Favis et al. seem to want nothing short of an actionable political directive from Cyberpunk 2077. Why would you want to go through life experiencing works of art in this way?
It’s as if we’re now living the reverse of Andrew Breitbart’s famous observation that “politics is downstream from culture.” The opposite now feels truer, at least as far as artistic creation/perception is concerned. And when culture is downstream from politics – when art’s only purpose is to be roughly handled by ideological parties to clumsily, and often retroactively, didactically illustrate the pro/cons of political stances, or – worse – attempt to stand in for those political stances themselves, we run quickly into bad art, then propaganda, then authoritarianism. In 1965, Robbe-Grillet warned against this phenomenon:
That generous utopian way of talking about a novel, a painting, or a statue as if they might count for as much in everyday action as a strike, a mutiny, or the cry of a victim denouncing his executioners, is a disservice, ultimately, to both Art and Revolution. The total artistic indigence of the works… is certainly not the effect of chance: the very notion of a work created for the expression of a social, political, economic, or moral content constitutes a lie.
Put simply, art has no responsibility to include nods to current in-vogue politics, nor should it have. If this feels like a strange concept, it’s because for so long, and especially recently, our ideas about art and its “purpose” have been completely bent out of shape. But it is our obligation to try to unbend them. As Sontag writes,
From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art. We can only quarrel with one or another means of defense. Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice.
I propose that now our current methods of justification have become just that – obtuse, onerous, and insensitive to contemporary needs. And we still have an obligation to overthrow them.
But what is needed now? “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more,” Sontag writes,
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and, by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
We must allow ourselves to bask in the look of things, the craft, the form, the vibe, the mood, the aesthetic, the color, the weight, the shot, the sound, the editing, the fabric, the lines, the beauty of artwork. As Oscar Wilde said, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” We must unclench our jaws and enjoy more, without guilt. We must relax. Maybe the tide is turning in this direction, ever so slowly. This week, reviewing the current Donald Judd retrospective at the Museum of Modern art, David Salle wondered,
Why Judd now? Perhaps, having opened their new building with a deep wade into the multicultural waters, the MoMA leadership wanted to give the counterargument: art for art’s sake, or the love that today dares not speak its name. This is pure speculation, but it did occur to me that Judd was chosen at this moment to represent a time before meaning in art was largely identity-based, to show what “art and only art” looks like, to let Judd be the standard bearer for art that is not referential – that is, to use his preferred term, specific, whole unto itself, and not about anything.
Robbe-Grillet urged us to “once and for all, stop taking seriously the accusations of gratuitousness, stop fearing ‘art for art’s sake’ as the worst of evils.” Fifty-five years later, I’ll urge us again.
Live Bait 🍥
The Federal Trade Commission sued Facebook for illegal monopolization, challenging the company’s “multi-year course of unlawful conduct.”
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Buzzfeed News reports key employees are leaving Facebook and “torching” the firm in departure notes.
Are we at the beginning of the Substack backlash?
The New York Times on the “Undoing of Jeffrey Toobin”: “I read the Condé Nast news release, and I was puzzled because I couldn’t find any intellectual justification for what they were doing,” says Malcolm Gladwell of Toobin’s dismissal from The New Yorker, and much more.
New York magazine went deep inside The New York Times.
Anna Wintour was promoted: in addition to serving as editor-in-chief of Vogue US and artistic director and global content advisor of Condé Nast, Wintour will now also serve as chief content officer for Condé Nast, overseeing all brands and titles, including international editions.
It’s “a new era for Vox”: Ezra Klein, co-founder and editor-at-large of Vox, left Vox for The New York Times, where he will host a podcast and write an Opinion column; Jane Coaston, a Vox senior politics reporter, left Vox for The New York Times, where she will also host a podcast; Matthew Yglesias, another co-founder of Vox, left Vox to start his own Substack newsletter, entitled Slow Boring; and Lauren Williams, Vox’s senior vice president and editor-in-chief also departed Vox to start her own nonprofit news outlet; previously, David Roberts, a climate reporter at Vox, also left to start his own Substack newsletter, entitled Volts.
Matthew Yglesias went on Joe Rogan’s podcast; he also wrote a piece on Slow Boring defending his appearance on the podcast and criticizing the shunning of mass popular figures like Rogan.
Despite the talent “exodus,” Vanity Fair reports Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff says the company is “emerging out of the year in a really strong position” and compares Vox Media to Disney.
Also, Vox Media Studios, the audio and video production arm of Vox Media, is targeting $100 million in 2021 revenue and planning to expand its slate of shows, Axios reports; Vox Media Studios – led by president Marty Moe and head of entertainment Chad Mumm – plans to “double” its programming to “roughly 20 shows, spanning 8 distributors, including Hulu, Netflix, YouTube Originals, AppleTV+, HBO and more”; also this week, Netflix announced a new partnership with the meditation app Headspace for three new shows, which will all be produced by Vox Media Studios; and last month, Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff told Axios in an interview that the company has created a show with HBO “tied to its Vox editorial brand”; also, last year, Vox Media Studios acquired Epic, a Hollywood production company “focused on scripted adaptations of journalism and true stories” (Epic was previously covered by Chumbox).
Taylor Swift released a new album called evermore, a continuation of her recent reinvention as indie/folk persona that she debuted with this summer’s folklore (previously covered by Chumbox); reactions to evermore have been mixed: The New York Times called it a “journey deeper inward”, The New Yorker discussed its “intimacy and comfort,” while The Atlantic said evermore feels like a “rough draft”, and others saw the album as a savvy if cynical move by Swift.
Chris Nolan called HBO Max the “worst streaming service” after WarnerMedia announced it would debut its entire 2021 film slate on the streaming platform in tandem with in-theater releases: “Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service,” said Nolan, whose relationship with Warner Bros. dates back 2002; director Judd Apatow echoed Nolan, saying WarnerMedia’s decision was “the type of disrespect that you hear about in the history of show business. But to do that to just every single person that you work with is really somewhat stunning”; WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar defended his HBO Max decision, calling the move a “defining moment.”
HBO Max will honor Dave Chappelle’s request to remove Chappelle’s Show from the streaming service by the end of this year.
Tom Cruise warned the crew on the set of Mission Impossible 7 to take the on-set COVID-19 rules more seriously; in an audio tape, Cruise can be heard telling members of the crew, “If I see you do it again, you’re fucking gone. And if anyone in this crew does it, that’s it – and you too and you too. And you, don’t you ever fucking do it again. They’re back there in Hollywood making movies right now because of us. We are creating thousands of jobs, you motherfuckers. That’s it. No apologies. You can tell it to the people that are losing their fucking homes because our industry is shut down. We are not shutting this fucking movie down. Is it understood? If I see it again, you’re fucking gone.”
Michael Douglas and Christoph Waltz are set to play Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, respectively, in a new limited series.
Rashida Jones and Bill Gates have a new podcast.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are starting a podcast: Spotify announced an exclusive partnership with Archewell Audio, a new production company founded by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (in September, the Duke and Duchess also signed a multi-year production deal with Netflix).
Ben Smith’s newest column reports that Apple CEO Tim Cook “personally” killed an upcoming AppleTV+ drama series fictionalizing the defunct news/gossip website Gawker, which was pitched by two Gawker “veterans” (Gawker outed Cook in 2008, and famously got their hands on an iPhone prototype in 2010); more interestingly, though, Smith also outlines Apple’s somewhat sinister guidelines for its AppleTV+ content: no criticism of China or Xi Jinping, no violence or nudity, no crucifixes, and no depictions of phones being damaged.