Despite many noble dead on the field, the battle to prohibit video games from the hall of art has long since failed. The temple is to be widened by a pillar; bemused art historians must install pavilions in which Pong fends with the immortal classics of human expression; the laurel leaves of prestige now rest upon the ears of baby’s first casino. If Hollywood’s action figure dispensaries are afforded (at least the qualification for) artistic status, then it is entirely fair that a medium that occasionally reaches beyond the dispensing of action figures should be given equal opportunity. Perhaps it is true that large-scale video games exist in a state of arrested development, owing to the significant moral imperative to squeeze money out of drooling toddlers; and perhaps many vaunted video games borrow their artistic grammar from other, pre-existent modes. One thinks of the feature-length cut scene toward the end of Metal Gear Solid 4, whose artistic relationship to the surrounding game may equate to that of a stage play that exploits a pre-recorded film segment midway. But this is certainly true of cinema, which for most of its existence has leant heavily on the devices and structures of literature and theatre; there is perhaps no other major artistic medium more reliant on other forms than the cinema.
But the truth of an artistic medium resides in its unreplicable feature: that a work can be made in one medium and not in another. In cinema, we might look to Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera as a foundational and specifically cinematic artistic text; for video games, we could nudge Shadow of the Colossus to the fore, whose interactive component is essential to the emotional and reflective catharsis provoked. In each of these examples, an adaptation would have to remove or malform the essential expressive device inherent to the work, and it is this essential expressive device that therefore defines a work’s artistic potential. Since the recent anointing of video games on the Mount of Art, the modes from which it previously borrowed have now turned round in envy. Games that originally ripped off movies — Rampage via King Kong or Uncharted via Indiana Jones — have now been yoinked back into the cinema, creating weird cousin-like mirrors to their original sources. These adaptations, and the many others that proliferate, typically borrow their narrative, or aesthetic, from the games, and otherwise translate them into a strictly cinematic grammar. But the festival circuit of 2024 introduced two films that made attempts to greet the video game in its own territory; not to transform one convention into another, but in some way encounter the form or texture of one medium through another.
One of these was Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion. The other was Grand Theft Hamlet, from Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane. To take the second first: Grand Theft Hamlet is premised as an attempt to stage Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto Online, the multiplayer component of GTA V. The film, structured as a documentary, is shot entirely “within” the online space, with character avatars representing the filmmakers and participants throughout. The effect, therefore, is a triple-aesthetic blend. To occupy the space of a(n authentic) video game, via the cinematic structure, in order to stage a play. The dissonance in this attempt is when the film is most compelling. A camera that lingers on the digital intermediate: areas and zones that would typically represent a background blur are here blown up and observed; the strange loops of non-player characters; and the unexpected interference of rogue agents. The random element of the multiplayer game is perhaps the most specifically “video game” feature of what is otherwise a despairingly cod three-act documentary; it appears that Grylls and Crane are less interested in documenting or reflecting on the nature of GTA Online than they are in exploiting its potential as a digital hangout zone — not too unlike Mark Zuckerberg’s infinitely ill-fated MetaVerse, or the doldrum deeps of VR Chat. Where the early film depicts the legitimately unpredictable and often malevolent nature of an online space predicated on violence — and the comedy in attempting to co-opt this space to play the Dane — it becomes apparent that in the latter part of the film private servers have been established, that extra-diegetic means of organization have been exploited, and that GTA Online has been rendered into little more than a sub-par animation tool for live performance. A Zoom readthrough, with tassels. Despite its pretence, this is another example of conventional film grammar enforcing itself on the peculiar contours of the video game ecosystem. The beast is tamed: film structure doth make cowards of us all.
Baby Invasion is an entirely different proposition. This film is not composed within a pre-existing video game, and most of its footage is live action. A bookending frame implies that we are watching an augmented reality-style copycat game, in which a livestreamed armed burglary is modified (in real-time) to resemble the leaked Baby Invaders game developed by several remorseful Filipinas. The exact mechanics of this system are, in a similar haze to AGGRO DR1FT, difficult to discern. My own, perhaps unique, read is one of several layers. That a player (who represents our POV) logs into a “game” server; that this server is linked to the bodycams of real-life criminals; and that this “player” is interacting with the criminals as an intermediary, his feed being streamed on a Twitch-like platform. As such, the player is not always viewing the POV stream of Mr Yellow (who comes out as the film’s protagonist, of sorts) during the two raids; occasionally, the film will cut to footage of a game engine, in which the player explores various rooms, encounters strange visual interference, and marks “anomalies” that appear in security camera footage of the attack. But being too scientific with the visual strands of this film is perhaps self-defeating; frequently Baby Invasion will cut to images of an AI-generated rabbit, who overlays the POV of Mr Yellow — several other strange images will occur at similar intervals, whose meaning is at best metaphorical (rabbit-holes, angered deities) rather than mechanical.
But there is another strand additional to these, featuring a third raid in which there is no augmented reality paraphernalia, or any implication of video game aesthetics at all — Korine presents this parallel narrative without comment. Where Grand Theft Hamlet looks to commandeer the aesthetic of a familiar video game, Baby Invasion instead appeals to many vague, video game signifiers. Retro pop-ups and icons; coins that collect with a ping sound; glowing save zones; archaic player sprites; the idle knife play of Counter-Strike; the plain-textured corridors of a Unity mod; random Japanese; and an almost constant stream of livestream comments on the left side of the screen. Despite this fact, the environment never feels like a video game, insofar as there are no direct goals (though plenty of incidental goals); no clear mechanics; and a generally listless mood. These criminals arrive at their target house, ruffle the hair of their targets, and then wander about, plink-plonk on the piano, take a ride on a scooter. The obvious explainer for this fact is that the film does not depict a traditional video game, but rather invents a world in which the observing party can filter any kind of heinous act through the familiar aesthetic of a head-up display and find fun (or at least progression-reinforcement) in genuine atrocity. Korine distracts from this emphasis by never depicting any form of extreme violence directly on camera; this is perhaps less a deliberate act in the style of Funny Games than it is a consequence of an almost wholly improvised shooting method.
In structural terms, however, there is a sense in which Baby Invasion moves away from the filmic tendency and approaches the video game, in that it occupies an indeterminate space and time. The narrative, or the progression of the film, is determined by the actions of the POV character, who does not seem to be governed by standard means of editing or motivation. This experience is not so far from watching a lazy or bored streamer, or the situation in certain video games in which inordinate waiting is required to progress. At this point, the incidental level in which the mission is set becomes an inert kind of playground, whose various corners and minigames are sought out to fill the void. Easter eggs here become rabbit holes. This is not the arbitrary space of a video game, however, but the actual space of the real world. What Korine presents is not, therefore, “the world according to video games,” but rather the extraction of a particular attitude that is then applied universally: this film at once depicts reality, and the game, and the observation of both — the lines have been entirely smushed, and the two qualities have merged. The digital is overlaid upon the actual, and our reaction — much as the reaction of the column of live-comments — is modified by that fact. There is something grotesque about the AI filter that masks the gang in baby faces, though it’s an inherent distancing effect in a film that is, more than anything else, an experiment in total distance. Various livestream comments refer to the abyss, or the end of the world, but most are making jokes: this is the persistent dissonance in Korine’s film, which cycles between the (implication of) extreme violence with broad comedy, flashy graphics, and the fully branded wardrobe of the EDGLRD online store. The objective of Grand Theft Hamlet is to flatten the vulgarity implicit in the video game and discover the True Art of Hamlet and Friendship; the object of Baby Invasion is to magnify the alienation of a video game aesthetic applied to (the remnants of) a living and breathing world. All associations to familiar value judgements and aesthetic structures have been destroyed; all expectations of moral restitution are vanquished; even cinematic structure is gone, in a film that might last forever — as in AGGRO DR1FT, Harmony Korine is a master in making 80 minutes the longest possible length of time.
Whether Korine has necessarily made the best use of his hard-won aesthetic is the necessary follow-up question. Baby Invasion a film discussed with conceptual detachment, whose moment-to-moment quality is almost irrelevant to the effect; or rather, this is the common hole contemporary art must tumble into. Down there, legs broken: conceptually bold. A work reduced to a concept, or a style, is almost inevitably better served if this concept can be applied; if there is an object formed by the subject, the one necessarily uplifts the other. Korine’s now-rapid style is not without cost: he seems obliged to piece this film together with the dilatory footage that came out of a day of improv; the concept (which included hiring some men who attempted to rob some of his friends) is necessarily more powerful than the content, which often flirts with total incoherence. AGGRO DR1FT shared a similar, if inverted, problem. That film featured a narrative, of some kind, lost in a vague script and choppy edit. Baby Invasion is intentionally freeform, but given the emphasis on formal (rather than performative) expression, there seems to be no reason why the action could not have been choreographed more tightly (even if the choreography demanded glassy nothing) in order to better express the disorientation that otherwise naturally occurs. The emphasis of EDGLRD’s output appears to be in formal innovation and the maintenance of a certain aesthetic; in these objectives, they have so far been wildly successful. AGGRO DR1FT and Baby Invasion are unlike any other mainstream film in circulation, and sufficiently unlike each other in both their form and texture; both seem to take this experimental vim as sufficient justification to forgo any kind of structural emphasis, be it cinematic, video game, or some other thing. There is something genuinely fresh, and genuinely bold in these films, but they cannot survive on concept alone.
DIRECTOR: Harmony Korine; CAST: Juan Bofill, Steven Rodriguez; DISTRIBUTOR: EDGLRD; STREAMING: March 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 20 min.
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