WaPo | The scenario in “Ready Player One” seems extreme,
but it’s not so different from the fundamental dynamics at work between
fans and corporations in the entertainment industry today. Wade and his
friends, including Aech (Lena Waithe), Art3mis (Olivia Cooke), Sho
(Philip Zhao) and Daito (Win Morisaki), don’t love the Oasis not because
it represents some ideal of independent artistry — in fact, it’s
flooded with licensed versions of video game, superhero and anime
characters. They love it because the game gives them the opportunity to
live inside their fantasies, whether that means dressing in Buckaroo
Banzai’s suit to go to a club or wandering around the Overlook Hotel
from “The Shining.” And Sorrento and his fellow IOI honchos differ from
contemporary entertainment executives mostly in that they aren’t very
good at disguising their eagerness to monetize fans’ passions.
Though
the conflict between Wade and Sorrento is meant to seem epic, there’s
something strangely small-scale about the core of their disagreement. As
BuzzFeed critic Alison Willmore put it on Twitter,
“Ready Player One” is “a super dark story about how the world is a
disaster but all its main character cares about is keeping ads out of
his [massively multiplayer online role-playing game].” It’s as if “Ready
Player One” were an epic movie about whether it’s okay for the
streaming service Hulu to charge a few extra dollars a month to let
viewers skip the 30-second spots that air a few times per episode.
While
Cline’s novel and Spielberg’s adaptation both suggest that it’s
probably good for people to spend some time outside of the Oasis
developing their real-world relationships, neither is capable of
grappling with the idea that, whoever owns it, preserving the Oasis
means preserving the status quo.
If IOI wins
control of the environment, spending time there may be more expensive
and irritating, given the ad placements IOI hopes to sell. If Wade and
his diverse group of friends win control of the Oasis, they intend to
preserve it as a purer experience and run it without the abuses
routinely practiced by IOI, including encouraging people to rack up debt
they can’t pay off, purchasing those debts and moving the debtors into
IOI labor camps.
But as bad as debt peonage is,
the biggest problem with the world of “Ready Player One” isn’t that IOI
is press-ganging people into spending their time in the Oasis. It’s that
reality is such a hopeless mess that everyone would rather escape it.
Closing the Oasis for a couple of days to force people to spend time
with their actual friends and family doesn’t actually make a country
defined by savage economic inequality, environmental degradation and
social unrest a more appealing place to live. If Wade and his friends
make the Oasis a more appealing place to spend time, saving it from
becoming an ad-cluttered wasteland, they may make escape even more
enticing, sapping energy from making the world habitable and enjoyable
again. Tweaking the exact organic composition of a drug doesn’t make it
something other than a narcotic.
(It’s
also true that “Ready Player One” quietly rebukes the idea that giving
women and people of color the opportunity to tell their own stories
would automatically result in very different stories getting told.
Aech’s race and gender don’t mean that she plays as a version of Audre
Lorde; rather, her avatar is a formidable, orc-like brawler and
engineer, and Wade spends much of the movie assuming she’s a man.
Art3mis isn’t just a woman; her avatar is the Oasis’s version of a Cool
Girl, an expert gamer who looks equally good in leather motorcycle gear
or a ballgown, drives a motorcycle and is lethal with a gun.)
On
a smaller scale, this dynamic is also at play in conversations about
the contemporary American entertainment industry. None of this is to say
that fighting to get power and opportunities in Hollywood for women,
people of color, people with disabilities and members of other
underrepresented communities is a worthless task. Money is valuable.
Chances to decide who gets employed on a project are valuable. The
ability to tell your story is valuable. But it’s possible to acknowledge
all of this and to recognize that putting Kathleen Kennedy in charge of
Lucasfilm or tapping Ava DuVernay to direct a $100 million adaptation
of “A Wrinkle in Time” is proof that the corporate entertainment
industry is very good at adapting just enough to endure in its present
form. Developments such as these are preemptive reforms made by savvy
companies aimed at heading off a revolt, not proof that some revolution
is underway in Hollywood, much less the wider world.
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