Review | Like with Dark Souls...

Generated on 2022-07-22 12:55:46

Result #1

Like with Dark Souls before it, Elden Ring's best starting point for the story and lore come from its intro cutscene. In it, you learn about a crucial point in the history of the Lands Between and the fallout that happened from it. From there, you can put together how those characters collide—sometimes literally—with your own character, the lowly Tarnished. Elden Ring, at least at the outset, is a game about an incorporeal god giving its fleeting power to a bunch of weaklings so that one of them can hopefully restore everything back to the way it was, except the way it was doesn't seem all that great. The problem with this piece is that when the story really gets going, as it does here, you start to wonder what happened in the intervening period between the start of the piece and its conclusion. At this point, the story starts to get really sad, and the way it does gets really scary. The little guy in the suit and tie looks like a demented love child of David Lynch and Marnie Mae. The little guy with the big floppy hands is more a psychological or post-psychological equivalent of a lesser evil in a video game. That the little guy is the hero of the piece is hardly a virtue in itself, but it certainly adds to the atmosphere of the work. As if he werent enough, the other hero is a woman wearing nothing but a dog tag and the kind of high heels one usually finds on television drama pups—well, basically every shoe shape, and only one silhouette. She walks through an unremarkable city with a clumsily kept right step, as if she had to steal her savior from some god of few steps. I am sure she did, but hes on the street. Shes a steal, and shes going to have to show me the door.A number of people were kind of grossed out by the piece. Maybe its necessary to explain that. In terms of tone, I got most of the mileage from the urban setting and the sense of aural or visual freightiness, and the whole thing felt like a pratfall. One person commented to me that the guy was creepy; there were plenty of women in the city, lots of good women. I can't say whether this comment is surprising or not. I think that the urban setting has a lot of obvious (but not really obvious) misogyny in it. The sexual content was clearly sexual harassment, and the little guy in the suit and tie was just kind of a dick. The installation, however, was a terrific, disturbing success.

Result #2

Like with Dark Souls before it, Elden Ring's best starting point for the story and lore come from its intro cutscene. In it, you learn about a crucial point in the history of the Lands Between and the fallout that happened from it. From there, you can put together how those characters collide—sometimes literally—with your own character, the lowly Tarnished. Elden Ring, at least at the outset, is a game about an incorporeal god giving its fleeting power to a bunch of weaklings so that one of them can hopefully restore everything back to the way it was, except the way it was doesn't seem all that great. Set in a theater in New York, the installation, its title and script (written by Jane Campion), and the gallerys ample inventory of memorabilia and video clips help to make the film a kind of retrospective of the spirit world of film. Using a set of keynotes—three of which can be seen at the gallery—the director is reciting, as if on a stack of film noir dicta, several of the names of dead heroes (including Robert De Niro, Man Ray, and Andy Kaufman) in a kind of dream-pop script. The dream-pop head-cranks up the crowd's adrenaline-pumping pace, but that doesn't really do anything to offset the slow-moving performances and the film's perfect formality. Maybe Ring has a crush on the effete humor of the sixties, but its not much of a stretch to see it as a nostalgic farce.A good portion of the film consists of a scene in which a middle-aged woman is observed going through a long list of contact sheets. The tension builds as a replay of these is gradually overcome by a pair of concerned, rather dim and stoic white lissome figures, who seem to have come in order to be told the extent of the women's inexplicable exposure of her supposedly intimate activities. This scene quickly devolves into a little pileup on a soap-box. Or a bomb. As the woman walks through the door, she realizes that she is watching a video of a man in a suit and tie to which her real name is being admitted—here an artificial one at that. This discovery has nothing to do with this woman's private, spontaneous activity. Just what kind of an intimate experience is this? It seems more about the violation of privacy and expectation of privacy.

Result #3

Like with Dark Souls before it, Elden Ring's best starting point for the story and lore come from its intro cutscene. In it, you learn about a crucial point in the history of the Lands Between and the fallout that happened from it. From there, you can put together how those characters collide—sometimes literally—with your own character, the lowly Tarnished. Elden Ring, at least at the outset, is a game about an incorporeal god giving its fleeting power to a bunch of weaklings so that one of them can hopefully restore everything back to the way it was, except the way it was doesn't seem all that great. That's not to say that the idea has much to do with reality, of course. The point is that the story is about a god that takes possession of someones shoulders, pushes through all the resistance, and suddenly gives it back—whether the kick-ass savior is the role's vicariously punning protagonist or a sort of quiet, trashed-out, draw-string avatar of the will to power.What makes the game so compelling in this case is that it's more about the difficulty of this particular god taking possession of the body than about how the body takes possession of itself. Theres a lot of hand-holding, of where the body's part played and how the process is seen. All of these details are not made clear by the video's clear narrative, but they are taken quite seriously by the woman's performance. The job's as hard as it is easy. In fact, the story's structure makes it seem as if a simple man had to work up a set of requirements—the subjects, what I call the Kink, the operation to show that a dress's about as doggy-friendly as a hairy foot. And, because the artist's presentation of the eroticized body is still the only line of self-reflexivity between the content and the narrative, the other's lack of expertise seems glaring.Taken as a whole, the video's dialogue seems at once agnostic and ecstatic, the quiet of the artist's voice (who, by the way, has come a long way since he last performed) and the active presence of the personality's body as it moves from clear-cut authority to all-out cluelessness. I want to like the video, but it's got to do better than that. The result is a caustic critique of a narrative and a generalization of bad social media's effects on an alienated (i.e., self-)reliant body, and a perpetual fetishization of the feminine.

Result #4

Like with Dark Souls before it, Elden Ring's best starting point for the story and lore come from its intro cutscene. In it, you learn about a crucial point in the history of the Lands Between and the fallout that happened from it. From there, you can put together how those characters collide—sometimes literally—with your own character, the lowly Tarnished. Elden Ring, at least at the outset, is a game about an incorporeal god giving its fleeting power to a bunch of weaklings so that one of them can hopefully restore everything back to the way it was, except the way it was doesn't seem all that great. The idea was simple: Have a little fun with a, well, not exactly famous asshole. The classic works, for example, are as uncharacteristically benign as Scars on a postapocalyptic street. In other works, Elden Ring employs a little too much of the sort of deftly inept humor and ironic deconstruction that used to be called mortonarrative, the use of cliché as a means of discovering and emphasizing the surreal, and the sort of funny, and the sort that occasionally reminded me of the kind of works done by some of the late Bob Newhart's. More than any artist, Paul McCarthy's or Robert Ryman's, Elden Ring's main weakness is that he takes up the role of the anonymous father figure, telling no one what his kids should be. Indeed, in contrast to the figure that tells it, Elden Ring's is one that tells no one anything.All that said, the pieces—the paintings—are on a par with, if not the best, than they were, but just above the standard. The paintings are a lesser-press—you might say, theyre a better dance number than his videotape—and certainly not that great. However, a couple of them do have a certain charm that I can only look at for a very brief time, as in Paintbrush Girl, 1983, with its goofy, girlish girl with her swagger and deadpan personality. Its clear that McCarthy's line has a way of getting better, and its certainly evident in the excellence of the others. But the lack of charm, their commitment to pretension, that gives these paintings their singularity—along with Elden Ring's—really hits home. Still, if we should suddenly remember that the central problem in making a really good game is the problem of the artist's own pretension, its not a bad thing.

Result #5

Like with Dark Souls before it, Elden Ring's best starting point for the story and lore come from its intro cutscene. In it, you learn about a crucial point in the history of the Lands Between and the fallout that happened from it. From there, you can put together how those characters collide—sometimes literally—with your own character, the lowly Tarnished. Elden Ring, at least at the outset, is a game about an incorporeal god giving its fleeting power to a bunch of weaklings so that one of them can hopefully restore everything back to the way it was, except the way it was doesn't seem all that great. But that's what happens when a world needs superheroes, and here one did. In the middle of the map, there's a little stone and a bunch of stones; it seems like a big plain with a couple of inclinations. From here you can see a couple of trees, but they look like they should be gigantic trunks. Theres a rock right next to it and a couple of little ones, but the only thing they have in common is that theyre flat. Theres also a boat, the sort that may or may not be a house, but its got nothing to do with the map. There's a tower on the ground, and you can see through it to a beach. Behind the tower is a bridge, and its got a beach in it, with the sand over the bridge. On the beach, you can see a couple of trees, but theres no sign of life. And so on and so forth. There's a lot of stars and a lot of planets and so on. The map has all these things going for it; you can take it in all sorts of ways, but even the planets seem to be small little pea-green things on a smooth blue ground. This map's about as big as the map that you could make yourself, and it's a map of a world that you have made by conquering it. The whole thing seems quite routine, and it's not like the latest comic-book world or some other kind of utopia. Even the gods in some versions of the comic seem to be bit players in a world ruled by a tall, skinny man. The gods in the map are all big dudes, but their business is merely to point and shoot each other, and they leave behind a side of paradise.The theme is perhaps better with the locals. You could drive a couple of hours up there to find these people and none of them would have cared to notice the map.