Stranger Than We Can Imagine (34 page)

This did not sit well with oil corporations. Selling hydrocarbons was a far easier way to achieve short-term profitability than a long-term research programme into alternative energy infrastructure. The technical challenges involved in producing carbon-free energy at a price and quantity that rivalled oil were, as scientists would say, ‘non-trivial’.

The oil corporations and free-market think tanks began exercising their influence, in both government and the media, in an effort to prevent the international action on climate change that Thatcher spoke of. Their main tactic was a stalling approach which promoted a fictitious sense of doubt about the scientific consensus. This was an approach borrowed from the tobacco industry, which had used a similar disinformation campaign to cast doubt on the links between smoking and lung cancer. Those links were first discovered in 1950,
but the tobacco industry was able to pretend otherwise for over four decades. Their campaign was highly successful in corporate terms because, even though hundreds of thousands of people died in one of the most unpleasant ways possible, they made loads of money and nobody went to jail.

In a similar way, the disinformation campaign of the oil industry was able to postpone action on climate change. It made it politically impossible for the United States to ratify the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which aimed to set binding obligations on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from industrialised nations. After every typhoon, drought or flood, news programmes could be relied on to broadcast politicians angry at the suggestion that the extreme weather events now occurring could be linked to science which says that extreme weather events will increasingly occur. Even Margaret Thatcher had to amend her views after it became clear how much they offended her political allies. While her 1980 talks displayed clear scientific understanding of the situation, her 2003 book,
Statecraft
, fell back on the political talking points that cause climate scientists to bang their heads on their desks in despair. Curbing climate change was a front for a political viewpoint that she disagreed with, and for that reason no efforts to curb climate change should be made. Ideology beat science. Individualism beat environmentalism. So carbon continued to be emitted, topsoil continued to decrease and the ice sheets on the poles continued to melt. The debt which funded the consumer activity that caused all this continued to grow. As a result, the window when runaway climate change could have been prevented now appears to have closed.

And in the background, the Sixth Extinction continued. What chance did the Golden Toads have in a century such as that?

A screenshot from the 1985 Nintendo computer game Super Mario Bros
. (ilbusca/iStock)

FOURTEEN:
POSTMODERNISM

If you want to understand postmodernism you should spend a few hours playing Super Mario Bros., a 1985 video game designed by Japan’s Shigeru Miyamoto for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

In Super Mario Bros. the player takes control of a mustachioed Italian plumber named Mario. Mario’s job is to travel across the Mushroom Kingdom in order to rescue Princess Peach, who has been kidnapped by Bowser, the monster-king of the turtle-like Koopa people. None of that, it is worth stressing, makes any sense.

Super Mario Bros. is a combination of elements that don’t fit together under any system of categorisation, other than the game’s own logic. Fantasy kingdoms are all well and good, but they are not usually the playground of Italian plumbers. Likewise the mix of elements Mario encounters in the game, from giant bullets to fire-spitting pot plants, does not lend itself to logical scrutiny. There is no need to look for hidden meaning in the symbolism of Super Mario Bros., because it isn’t there. The character of Bowser, for example, was originally intended to be an ox, but he became a turtle-beast simply because Miyamoto’s original drawing looked more like a turtle than an ox. Mario himself was also something of an accident. He originally appeared in the arcade game Donkey Kong and was known as Jumpman, because he was a man who could jump. He was later christened Mario as an in-joke, in honour of the landlord who owned the warehouse that was being rented by Nintendo of America. Princess Peach was rechristened Princess Toadstool for the American version of the game, for no reason of any importance.

None of these things affected the success of the game. What mattered was that each element was fun in itself. This is probably the
most recognisable aspect of postmodernism, a collision of unrelated forms that are put together and expected to work on their own terms. The idea that an outside opinion or authority can declare that some elements belong together while others do not has been firmly rejected.

A related aspect of postmodernism is what theorists call
jouissance. Jouissance
refers to a sense of playfulness. The French word is used over its closest English translation, ‘enjoyment,’ because it has a more transgressive and sexualised edge that the English word lacks. Postmodern art is delighted, rather than ashamed, by the fact that it has thrown together a bunch of disparate unconnected elements. It takes genuine pleasure in the fact that it has done something that it is not supposed to do. A good example of postmodern
jouissance
can be found in the British dance records from the late 1980s, such as MARRS’ ‘Pump Up The Volume’ or ‘Whitney Joins The JAMs’ by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. These were records made by musicians who had just gained access to samplers and were exploring what they could do. They were having a whale of a time playing around and putting together all sorts of unconnected audio.

A third postmodern element can be seen in the mass-produced nature of the game. Super Mario Bros. is made from code, and that code is copied to create every instance of the game. It is not the case that there is one ‘real’ version of the game, while the rest are inferior imitations. The code that ran on Shigeru Miyamoto’s development system, at the moment he signed the game off as complete, does not have some quality of authenticity that a battered second-hand copy found in a market in Utrecht does not. The status of identical copies of a work of art had been a hot topic in the art world ever since the German critic Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
. As far as postmodernists were concerned, that debate was over. Every mass-produced copy of Super Mario Bros. was intrinsically as good as all the others, and no amount of hoping to find some magical aura imbued in an artist’s own copy could change that.

A fourth important factor is that the game is well aware that it is
a game. Super Mario Bros. makes no attempts to hide the conventions of the form, and will regularly highlight them in a way that games such as chess or tennis do not. Should the player find and collect a green and orange ‘1-Up’ mushroom, they will be rewarded with an extra life and hence extend their playing time. In a similar way, the game is littered with rewards, power-ups and other gameplay factors that affect the structure of play, and which only make sense in the context of a video game.

This self-aware element of postmodernism is sometimes associated with film, television or theatre, such as the 1977 Woody Allen movie
Annie Hall
. Allen’s character was able to win an argument with a self-righteous bore in a cinema queue by producing the media critic Marshall McLuhan from off-screen. At this point Allen turned to the camera and said, directly to the audience, ‘Boy, if life were only like this!’ In doing so he acknowledged the artificial nature of the situation: that he was a character in a movie, talking to a camera, in order to address a future audience of cinemagoers.

Postmodern moments like this are rare in the narrative arts, because they rely on the suspension of disbelief for their power. They are more common in the genre of comedy, such as the work of the British comedy troupe Monty Python. The final sequence in the ‘Spanish Inquisition’ episode of their second television series involved three members of the Spanish Inquisition being late for a sketch that they were supposed to appear in. Once this was realised they hurried off and caught a bus in order to get to the sketch. They knew that they were running out of time because the end credits had started rolling over them. They finally arrived in the sketch at the moment the programme ended.

Another postmodern aspect of Super Mario Bros. is that each time the game is played, it is different. There is no one true version of the game, and hence no true ‘authorial intent’ to provide the correct understanding of Miyamoto’s work. Some users even go so far as to alter the code in order to create different versions of the game, known as mods. For gamers, this is entirely valid.

Postmodernists have firmly internalised Duchamp’s insight that
when different people read a book or watch a movie, they perceive it differently. There are many interpretations of a work, and it cannot justifiably be argued that one particular perspective is the ‘true’ one, even when that perspective is the author’s. People can find value in a work by interpreting it in a way that the author had never thought of.

Finally, the game itself transcends the categories of highbrow and lowbrow, being simultaneously high art and populist fluff. When Super Mario Bros. was released in 1985 cultural critics would have dismissed it as lowbrow, had they been aware of it at all. Video games were then seen as dumb, noisy things for kids, and it took a number of decades before claims for their cultural validity were heard. Yet Super Mario Bros. was named as the best game of all time by IGN in 2005. It becomes difficult to classify a dumb bit of kids’ entertainment, which is hailed as the pinnacle of a recognised art form, as being either highbrow or lowbrow.

Monty Python were a good example of the way postmodern culture was happy to be deep and shallow at the same time. Their ‘Philosophers’ Football Match’ sketch depicted a game of football between German and Ancient Greek philosophers. Like much of their comedy, it was both silly and clever. As the football commentator describes the match, ‘Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside.’

Shigeru Miyamoto, it is not controversial to claim, is the most important video games designer in history. His impact on games can be compared to the influence of Shakespeare on theatre and Dickens on the novel. Like Dickens and Shakespeare, his work combines mainstream appeal with an unmatched level of inventiveness that places him in a different league to his peers. This is not to suggest that games are similar to plays or novels. A game isn’t attempting to emulate the complex understanding of human nature that the best of those art forms achieve. It is an attempt to create a ‘flow’ state in the player. The player reacts to events on the screen,
and the way in which they react alters those events. This creates a continuous feedback loop between the game and the gamer. Like so much else in the twentieth century, the link between the observed and the observer is fundamental.

To Miyamoto and his audience, of course, such concerns were unimportant. The distinction between highbrow and lowbrow was a meaningless excuse to look outside for validation. Postmodernism did not recognise the authority of any such external framework. Concepts such as highbrow and lowbrow, or ‘art’ and ‘not-art’, were projected on to the work by critics or gallery owners for their own benefit. They were not intrinsic qualities of the work itself. All that mattered, in games such as Super Mario Bros., was whether it was
in itself
any good.

The fact that a game such as Super Mario Bros. made total sense to an audience of children shows that the mainstream population was able to accept postmodernism, and take it in its stride, in a way that they never could with modernism.

Capitalism also had no problem with postmodernism. An example of this is the art world’s response to the postmodern refusal to be either highbrow or lowbrow. This is nicely illustrated by their embrace of the American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein took frames from cheap comic books and copied them on to large canvases. Gallery owners were in no way concerned about Lichtenstein’s copyright infringement. They took the view that his paintings were important art and that the comic-book images he blatantly plagiarised were not. A number of his paintings, such as
Sleeping Girl
from 1964 and 1961’s
I Can See The Whole Room … And There’s Nobody In It!
, have since sold for prices in excess of $40 million. To the business side of the art world, this is great stuff. The original comic art that those paintings were plagiarised from, meanwhile, is still viewed by gallery owners as either being essentially worthless, or as a curiosity that has become interesting due to the link to Lichtenstein. Comic-book artists are still not very happy about this.

Yet if audiences and the business establishment are so comfortable
with postmodernism, why has it become such an undeniably hated movement? Trying to find someone who has anything good to say about postmodernism in the early twenty-first century is a challenge indeed. The word itself has become an insult, and one which negates the need to engage in further criticism. Once something has been dismissed as ‘postmodern’, it seems, it can be dismissed.