I can make you hate

by Charlie Brooker

  Actually, it’s vaguely refreshing that he didn’t know what it means. Cameron is forty-five years old, which means he has been allowed to not know stuff for at least a decade. He’s a few years older than me, but I got a head start by wilfully deciding to ignore huge chunks of popular culture as far back as 1999. That was the year the film American Pie was released. Lots of people seemed to be talking about it, chiefly because a teenager has sexual intercourse with a dessert in it. Being twenty-eight years old in 1999, I considered myself too old and sophisticated to watch such a thing. As a result, American Pie is forever tagged in my mind as a ‘new’ film for ‘youngsters’.

  So imagine my horror on seeing a poster the other day for American Pie: The Reunion, a film in which the original cast reconvene after thirteen years, presumably now in their thirties and dealing with kids and mortgages and paunches and OH SOD EVERYTHING. It’s a piece of nostalgia cashing in on something I was too old for first time around.

  That’s how you know you’re really getting old. That and the way your eyebrow hair goes all wiry and starts sprouting away from your face like it’s afraid of something, which to be fair it probably is, considering how knackered you look.

  Youth fare aside, I’ve generally always been interested in what’s going on, culturally. But recently I’ve undergone some kind of involuntary detox. In particular, I seem to be developing a serious aversion to almost every example of mass-appeal entertainment I spent most of the previous decade writing about in disparaging terms.

  I don’t write a TV column any more, partly because doing so was driving me mad, but sometimes it’s fun to watch something junky while snarking about it on Twitter. I tried getting into this year’s series of The Apprentice for precisely that reason, but only managed one-and-a-half episodes before my brain rejected it. It was like staring into the cogs of a pointless machine. I couldn’t remember any of the contestants’ names, even when their names were being clearly displayed on the screen in a caption.

  I haven’t seen The Voice, can’t name anyone in Britain’s Got Talent, don’t use Facebook any more and, thanks to the magic of modern telly, I fast-forward any adverts I stumble across, so I don’t even know which commercials are annoying people right now. It’s like I live overseas, in a small sealed cube.

  Not that I’ve replaced lowbrow enjoyment with more refined pleasures. Right now I rarely listen to music, don’t have any books on the go, and can scarcely get through any kind of written article without wandering off for a sandwich.

  I don’t fully understand what’s caused this hardcore cultural detox, although I suspect it’s got something to do with becoming a parent and having to spend hours gazing at a tiny bellowing human instead. Apparently the next stage involves getting up-to-date on kiddywink culture by proxy, as soon as your offspring’s old enough to give a shit about Peppa Pig and so on.

  This will never do. At least when I used to enjoy hating rubbish, it was rubbish aimed at adults, and I’d chosen it myself. So I’m trying to get back into mainstream culture. It’s just that everything popular seems so … childlike. This week I’m going to carve out a few hours and go see the new Avengers movie, which I understand is wildly popular, just so I can feel more in touch with my fellow man.

  I’ve already done my homework by attempting to sit through Kenneth Branagh’s Thor (2011). If you haven’t seen Thor, it’s a ‘motion picture’ in which a Swap Shop-era Noel Edmonds wanders around claiming to be a Norse god and waving a hammer. He also kisses Natalie Portman on the hand. He’s a dick.

  The film cost $150m to make and is less entertaining than an episode of To Build or Not To Build. The final twenty minutes consist entirely of shouting and lights and made me feel so infinitely tired, my mind left my body and manifested itself as a small clear crystal floating beyond space and time. Unless I dreamt that bit. It is the worst film that has ever co-starred Anthony Hopkins and Stellan Skarsgård, unless they’ve teamed up to make Vileda Supermop: the Movie while I was sleeping.

  I’ve been told it’s not essential to have seen Thor in order to enjoy The Avengers, but it helps. I guess I’ll get a lot more out of it now I understand Thor’s complex relationship with his brother Loki, who I also couldn’t give a shit about.

  Once I’ve got Avengers under my belt, I’ll try to catch The Voice before it ends. Possibly while eating jelly and ice cream and dribbling. I’ve been left behind by popular culture for weeks now, but boy am I looking forward to getting back up to speed.

  It’s not regressing. It’s not. LOL.

  Behold: the Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D experience

  21/5/2012

  Last Monday, because I’ve been feeling out of the loop, I resolved to catch the new Avengers movie.

  I call it ‘the Avengers movie’ – in fact, the word ‘Assemble’ was added to the UK release so it wouldn’t be confused with the 1960s TV series of the same name. Thus the film I saw was called Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D, which sounds like a badly translated Japanese videogame from the mid-nineties. Or something you might oil and push up your arse while wearing a confused look on your face, a bit like civilisation has failed.

  No visit to a contemporary multiplex is complete without a bit of shit being rubbed in your eye right from the start, which happened in my case when the automatic ticket-printing machine spewed a rectangle of air at me instead of a ticket. Pathetically, I looked around for human assistance, only to find a big queue at the box office, where a solitary staff member was gradually processing incoming fleshbags with the joyous gusto of a woman forced to slowly count dust motes in a jail cell forever.

  A nearby sign claimed I could purchase tickets from the popcorn counter instead, so I rode the escalator to the brightly coloured ripoff desk, where another lone staff member had been sentenced to life imprisonment. He called a manager, who spent five minutes trying to retrieve my ticket from an uncaring and unco-operative operating system before giving up and commanding the usher to wave me through before the computer found out and had me destroyed.

  ‘Where do I get the 3D glasses?’ I asked the usher, who looked at me as though I’d asked whether the film would have colours and shapes in it, before explaining that I’d have to go to a different counter and buy a pair separately for 80p.

  When I arrived there, a customer was trying to buy pick-n-mix with a credit card, thus hopelessly crippling the cinema’s IT system. I asked the cashier if I could simply put cash in his hand for the glasses, but no. Apologetically, he explained that everything had to go through the computer. So I stood there and waited.

  Cameron’s Britain.

  Finally I entered the auditorium just in time to enjoy an anti-piracy commercial depicting an abandoned cinema wreathed in cobwebs, accompanied by a doomy John Hurt voiceover saying what a shame it would be if all the cinemas closed.

  Yeah, imagine that. I’d have to approximate the experience by punching myself in the kidneys and eating a £50 note each time I put on a DVD.

  Then Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D began.

  Some scientists were worried about a glowing blue cube they kept underground, so Samuel L. Jackson had turned up to make things easier by shouting at them.

  Then the cube went bonkers and spat out a bad guy called Loki, who looks like a cross between Withnail and the sort of grinning pervert who’d have sex with a fistful of Mattesson’s liver pâté in the window of an apartment overlooking a hospice bus stop.

  Then some vehicles raced around and everything blew up.

  Then Samuel L Jackson gathered some superheroes together on a sort of impossible flying aircraft carrier, and they spent some time mocking each other’s costumes in a post-modern fashion before Loki’s henchmen arrived and everything blew up again.

  Then they all went to New York and some aliens in hovering chariots flew through a hole in the sky and everything blew up for the third and final time.

  And then, because the Avengers had won, the film decided to end.

  Despite being almost
completely incoherent, it’s enjoyable bibble, and as good as superhero films are ever likely to get, which is excellent news because it means they can stop making them now. Seriously, they needn’t bother releasing Batman Bum Attack or whatever the next one’s called, because it won’t be as good as Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D. Finally we can move on, as a species.

  Still, entertained though I was, I did find myself occasionally checking emails: a first for me in a cinema, and surprising when you consider the amount of spectacle on display. It’s like watching buildings and cars and girders and fighter jets endlessly smashing around inside a gigantic washing machine for two hours, interspersed with wisecracks. That’s what mesmerises humans, just as surely as cats are fascinated by bits of string being pulled across the carpet. Up to a point, anyway. Once you’ve seen 10,000 cars exploding, you’ve seen them all. I rapidly succumbed to spectacle fatigue.

  Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D cost $220m to make and is 143 minutes long, so whenever I glanced at my phone for one second, I missed $25,641 worth of entertainment.

  (As an aside, I bet you could find someone prepared to shoot a stranger dead on camera for $25,641. What if you paid that person $220m to shoot 8,580 strangers dead on camera – that’s one per second – and then while you were watching the footage afterwards, in your lair, your phone beeped and you glanced at it for five seconds and didn’t notice all five members of One Direction taking a bullet? You’d miss out on a real cultural talking point.)

  Finally – and this is an odd accusation to level at a superhero film – it didn’t feel very real. I reckon only about 8 per cent of what was on screen was actually there. The rest was imagined by computers.

  And please, leery tragi-men, don’t dribble on about ‘Scarlett Johansson’s arse in 3D’ being ‘worth the price of admission’. The film was shot in 2D and converted to 3D using software, which means you’re actually drooling over a 2D image of Scarlett Johansson’s arse wrapped around a wireframe model of an arse that isn’t there. You’re sitting in front of HAL 9000, jerking off like a monkey. Somewhere, the machines are laughing at you.

  *

  My confession that I checked my emails during the film earned me a staggering amount of opprobrium, although in my defence I should point out that a) the cinema was virtually empty and I was sitting about three rows behind the only other occupants and b) for fuck’s sake, it’s only Marvel Avengers Assemble 3D.

  The ultimate betrayal

  10/6/2012

  Eleven weeks ago I wrote a column about my experience of becoming a dad. I also promised to never write another ‘parenthood’ piece again, on the basis that prior to becoming a parent, the mere mention of babies in newsprint was guaranteed to make me vomit all over the page in protest, paying special attention to the author’s byline photo.

  I held true to that promise. Really I did. And then a few weeks later I wrote an article on becoming jaded with popular culture, in which I had the temerity to mention parenthood again. Briefly, and only in passing – but boy did some readers go for me in the comments section.

  ‘Oh Brooker, you smug, simpering, self-satisfied, mimsy, middle-class, latte-sipping, fleece-wearing, washed-up, shark-jumping, progeny-spawning embarrassment. I remember way back when you used to be relevant. When you wrote those columns slagging off reality show contestants. Remember those rebellious glory days? You said Anton du Beke looks like a man who jizzes sherbet or something and it was hilarious. Now look at you. You’ve become everything you used to criticise – literally everything. AND you’ve grown your hair a bit: the ultimate betrayal.* You’ve let yourself down, but worse than that, you’ve let me down – me, your cherished reader: the single most important person in your life.’

  I hereby resign from whatever contest of cultural significance these keyboard-bothering nincompoops think they’re conducting.

  The key point these wailing children fail to appreciate is that becoming less relevant is my inevitable destiny. It’s their destiny too, but they’re way too full of snot and pep to notice. The real tragedy is not that I’m doomed to fade, but that I’m doomed to fade just to make room for these pricks.

  Well prick away, cocksure Sharpington Sharp, because one day, you’ll be so irrelevant yourself you’ll actually stop breathing. Your body will decompose to a grey, pulpy mulch that will fertilise the soil the next generation will nonchalantly trample over on its way to the hologram shop. And that’s how I picture you when I read your comments – as a shovelful-of-putrefied-matter-to-be making the very least of its brief window of consciousness. Under those circumstances, your level of snark merely strikes me as tragicomic.

  All of which is a longwinded and possibly over-defensive way of saying I’m going to mention babies again. And again and again and again. Look, I’m mentioning them now: BABIES. I’ll mention them as often as I like. In fact I might ask them to print this entire column in a special Winnie-the-Pooh font, with a photograph of a mobile, just to make it more off-putting to the cool kids.

  A common theme in the comments expressing dismay at my shameful acceptance of fatherhood is that people go all sappy when they have a baby; ergo, every word I wrote from this point on would be shot through with gooey, complacent sentiment. I don’t understand that. I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t gain an additional nine layers of rage the nanosecond they become a parent. There’s the sleep deprivation and the stress, of course, but that’s largely offset by the underlying sense of delight that babies radioactively plant in their parents’ heads in a cunning bid to stop them murdering them.

  It’s the rest of the world that’s the problem. When you’re suddenly tasked with steering a defenceless, vulnerable creature through life, the state of the planet instantly feels like less of a wearying joke and more of an outrageous affront to human decency. The world has slightly sharper edges than before.

  Still, it’s probably best not to succumb to this over-protective mindset, in case you turn into Sting and accidentally write the anti-nuclear-holocaust song ‘Russians’. ‘How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?’ he sang, doubtless in the grip of new dadhood. ‘Believe me when I say to you, I hope the Russians love their children too.’ Nothing wrong with the sentiment, but no one ever danced to it at their wedding.

  But I guess Sting wrote that because his son was precious to him. And I can relate to that now, just as I now understand why parents think their kids are unique and wonderful geniuses. It’s simple: for the first six weeks or so, a baby is effectively little more than a screaming pet rock. It can’t even hold its own head up, so any expectation you had regarding your child’s abilities is instantly reset to zero. You get so accustomed to it doing nothing but yelling and defecating, the moment it does anything new – smiling or batting vaguely at an object – it’s a miracle, like a chair has learned to tap-dance.

  How clever, you think, forgetting that ‘batting vaguely at an object’ is hardly worth mentioning on a CV. All your baby has actually done – in geek terms – is receive the latest OS update, which fixes a few bugs (it goes cross-eyed less often), clears up some performance issues (it feeds more efficiently), and enables new features (object-batting now included).

  Of course, everyone on the planet gets the same OS updates, at regular intervals, for their entire lives. Before long, he’ll get the crawling update. The talking update. The walking update. And so on.

  Personally, I downloaded all of those years ago. I’m way ahead of the little idiot. Way ahead. I’ve already got the hair-greying update, and am hoping to collect the complete set of related physical ‘improvements’, such as weaker eyesight and sagging flesh. Eventually, in a glorious climax, I guess I’ll install and run the ‘afterlife’ routine, encountering the inevitable fatal system error halfway through.

  Unless by then they’ve ironed out that final, unfortunate, inescapable glitch.

  Moving on from Ms. Pac-Man

  18/6/2012

  In the early eighties, the arcade game Pac-M
an was twice as popular as oxygen. People couldn’t get enough of the haunted yellow disc with the runaway pill addiction and soon clamoured for a sequel. Namco, the Japanese creator, was working on a followup called Super Pac-Man, but this was taking too long for US distributor Midway’s liking. So it bought an unofficial modification of the original game, changed the graphics a bit and released it as Ms. Pac-Man: possibly the first female lead character in a video game.

  I say ‘possibly’ because no one knows what gender the shooty-bang thing you controlled in Space Invaders was because it didn’t have stubble or knockers to define itself by. But then nor did Ms Pac-Man, whose name was confusing: at the time the prefix ‘Ms’ was a clear nod to feminist independence, whereas the surname ‘Pac-Man’ – not ‘Pac-Woman’ – screamed of subjugation to the patriarchy.

  This intense paradox often caused gender studies students who encountered the Ms. Pac-Man cabinet to suffer such cognitive dissonance they fell to the ground, fitting and flapping like panicking fish. Arcade owners had to shove sticks with rags tied round them into their mouths to stop them chewing their own tongues off and distracting people from their game of Q-Bert.

  ‘Pac-Man was the first commercial video game to involve large numbers of women as players – it expanded our customer base and made Pac-Man a hit,’ claimed a Midway spokesman at the time. ‘Now we’re producing this new game Ms. Pac-Man as our way of thanking all those lady arcaders who have played and enjoyed Pac-Man.’

  Thanks, men! But was the game itself a compliment? Pac-Man himself had no visible gender-specific features, presumably because his penis and testicles had been chafed away by years of sliding around on the floor of the maze – which explains why he was constantly necking painkillers. Yet Ms. Pac-Man had to wear lipstick, a beauty mark, and a great big girly bow on her head. Despite being a limbless yellow disc, we were expected to find her ‘sexy’. Some men will screw anything.