Violence, '80's Video Games and Cute Blonde Vampires

[sauvin]

When Owen takes his girlfriend out for a night on the town, he introduces her to video games.

Owen is said to be a dark little boy, given to violent fantasies, witness his penchant for purchasing or purloining knives and brandishing them in his solo rehearsals in front of bedroom mirrors or using courtyard trees for sparring partners.

This alone would confuse me just a bit, Owen being and American boy and therefore presumably much more inclined to be fascinated by bombs or firearms, all the better to increase his reach, minimise his vulnerability, make unsubtly forceful statements and enhance his whatever-peen, but Owen is just a preteen boy living in rather confined circumstances in which guns don't figure largely in the home life, and so Owen seems forced to make do with shivs.

I remember life in the early 80's in the US. Even in my little wasteland corn patch, there were coin-operated video games everywhere. Bars, restaurants, grocery stores, you name it. Some towns had businesses whose sole business was being a video game arcade, and some of these were in malls. Games of every sort to appeal to every taste of psychological profile imaginable. Sometimes you ran around on ladder-like mazes trying to avoid getting clobbered by falling objects and making your way to the top to rescue damsels being threatened by oversize gorillas, other times you batted a ball back and forth in a tennis-like setting or bounced a ball against a wall trying to shatter it and so escape confinement. I personally enjoyed racing around on several different kinds of racetrack. Remember Q-Bert, Frogger, Rally-X, Lunar Lander and Mario Brothers?

Most of the games, though, were shooters. Space Invaders, Defender, Galaxian, Xevious, Centipede, Asteroids, Tank Batallion, Missile Command, Tempest, Galaxian, Galaga and this dumb little game mimicking the shooting gallery at a carnival whose name I forgot but involved shooting all the ducks before they got off the bottom row to come eat all your bullets. These are games I remember spending hours on, and enjoying; when walking into an arcade, I'd nearly always look for a shooter.

So, what's the deal with Owen showing his girlfriend something like Pacman? Worse, not just any old blue and yellow Pacman, but a girlie pink Ms Pacman!? Is Owen maybe trying to get in touch with his feminine side, or at least trying to seem to be doing so for Abby's sake? I don't think it was kind of game he usually plays, given that he wipes out so quickly, even if he knew its basic ground rules well enough to demonstrate the game.

Maybe he'd been trying to steer Abby away from remembering how they'd first met, him trying to tear chunks out of that tree and all.

But there's a subtext to the Pacman class of games. It's a maze game where often enough you can only go up or down, or left or right, and if you want to change axis of movement, you have to find an opening to it. Not always convenient. You go merrily along gobbling up little electronic bread crumbs for points and avoiding these roaming phantasm-like things that'll gobble YOU if they catch you - unless, of course, you run into one of these energiser cells first, in which case you can gobble them for lots more points, but only for a limited time.

Mostly, it's a game of running as best you can while your movements are restricted and while you're being hunted, a little bit like that old nightmare about being chased by a monster and being unable to move as fast as you'd like because your feet keep getting mired in the mud.

Why did Owen choose not to play one of the games where you're the hero with a bag full of bullets and an ability to blast away aliens, monsters and other bad guys? Doesn't he care about his whatever-peen?

Could he be tacitly admitting to Abby his life is a Pacman-like maze?

[cmfireflies]

No, it's because Abby noms people, and is chased by the ghosts of her past, but for short bursts of time, can turn around and kill everybody. Also, Pac Man is yellow and Abby is blond.

[DavidZahir]

Put more simply, methinks Owen chose a game he thought Abby might like. And he strikes me as someone not particularly interested in video games, else he'd have chosen one he was good at--one he'd think the most fun to share and at which he could most easily show off.

[sauvin]

Put more simply, methinks Owen chose a game he thought Abby might like. And he strikes me as someone not particularly interested in video games, else he'd have chosen one he was good at--one he'd think the most fun to share and at which he could most easily show off.

Oh, come on, man! Play with it a bit!

[DavidZahir]

But there's a subtext to the Pacman class of games. It's a maze game where often enough you can only go up or down, or left or right, and if you want to change axis of movement, you have to find an opening to it. Not always convenient. You go merrily along gobbling up little electronic bread crumbs for points and avoiding these roaming phantasm-like things that'll gobble YOU if they catch you - unless, of course, you run into one of these energiser cells first, in which case you can gobble them for lots more points, but only for a limited time.

Mostly, it's a game of running as best you can while your movements are restricted and while you're being hunted, a little bit like that old nightmare about being chased by a monster and being unable to move as fast as you'd like because your feet keep getting mired in the mud.

This, though, makes sense as to one reason Matt Reeves chose that particular game--or any game at all--for his version of the story. I'm not familiar with what kids did in 1980s Sweden, but 1980s USA kids got into those video games in a big way. It formed as much a part of the milieu as talk of satanic cults, conspicuous Christianity, Ronald Reagan and Boy George. To various degrees all these ended up in the movie, helping make the story 'American.'

I've a friend who's from Sweden and talks about how Swedes are depressed, how they talk around things rather than about anything, about how so many things seem low-key there as opposed to America. LTROI certainly feels that it comes from a place and a time. LMI conveys a similar feeling, but of (especially) a different place. Video games are part of that.

And that Owen isn't really good at them marks him yet again as different, out of the mainstream, with little in common with his peers. Somehow you know Kenny and/or some of his pack/friends do play video games--probably involving guns or driving cars or both.

[EEA]

I thought Owen was trying to impress Abby. He was probably really excited and went to the first video game he saw. Interesting theory about Owen's life resembling a Pac-man game.