A Necessary Correction: Affirming the Need for the Uwe Boll Petition

"So bad, it's good" has been a significant draw for audiences all over the globe. It seems like audiences like to watch the worst of filmmaking, almost as a sort of cleansing of the palate. However, audiences do not like to watch offensive, senseless, and useless filmmaking - that has only resulted in lost revenue and lost credibility. One of the most outstanding examples of this "style" is that of German director Uwe Boll, who, over the years, has made some of the worst-reviewed movies, almost all of which are video game adaptations, such as In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (right). Unsurprisingly, his name has become an insult in the video game community. Boll's films comprise the majority of video game film adaptations, and this has been instrumental in creating the public image that the video game is an unintelligent, immature medium that is incapable of any real storytelling.
While Boll is usually only referred to in asides and jokes, there has been a storm of activity due to a petition to permanently stop Uwe Boll's filmmaking career. The petition collects signatures as a sign of community-wide discontent with the director's filmmaking, and asks Boll to permanently retire his camera. Normally, petitions carry nearly no weight. Petitions for everything from political misnomers to cartoon DVD releases have floated through the internet, and have had a history of getting absolutely nothing done. However, the stakes are different on this one - in an interview, Uwe Boll personally stated if a million signatures landed on the "Stop Dr. Uwe Boll" petition, he would stop making movies. As soon as he made the declaration, sites for both video game and film aficionados all over the internet jumped at the news, posting it in an attempt to get as many signatures as possible. As of today, nearly 200,000 signatures grace the petition, which is almost a fifth of the requirement. However, Boll has shown early signs of not making good on his word, challenging the legitimacy of the petition. He claims that the petition is signed by a very small group of people, only twenty or thirty times per person. Of course, while that is possible, it would require twenty or thirty computers per person, as, according to slashfilm, the petition records the IP addresses of the voters. Any real debate over the petition is pointless, however: A filmmaker made a verbal, nonlegal agreement to stop his career when a virtual piece of paper had a million signatures on it. The entire deal has no legal backing, and is more a representation of a community hope to squash a terrible filmmaker. In other words, there's no guarantee that anything happen when the petition eventually reaches the one-million voter mark.
So, since there is no real reason to believe that this petition will go anywhere, is there a reason to continue it? Absolutely. In championing this cause, I have decided to look back at two blog posts written before the petition became such a championed cause. The first one, written by freelancer writer Dave White, a writer that seems to have made a name for himself discussing the worst that Hollywood has to offer. His article on MSNBC did not have a space for commentary, so I went to his website and commented on his blog post regarding the article. I responded to his favorable review of Uwe Boll's filmmaking, arguing that reading into his films for genius is a dead end. The second, by Dave McAvoy of film blog Whimsical F-Bomb, ("Film" being the four-letter word), questions the elitism of attempting to wipe a percieved bad taste from the film world. My responses are provided below.

Uwe Boll: Bad Filmmaker or Trash Visionary?
Response:
Mr. White, I have to say that I enjoyed reading your article on the liveliness of director Uwe Boll. In doing research for a blog post on Dr. Boll in the wake of the famous petition, I have to say that your article, as the only article respecting Boll's creativity, was a surprise. That said, I have to strongly disagree with your opinions on Mr. Boll's films.
Boll's films don't 'dismantle filmmaking,' even in his attempted lampooning. The camp that is derived from this is little more than a sinking desperation and a willingness to smear the lines of taste in order to make a profit. If these movies had been as bland as "Are We There Yet," as you pointed out, then the movie would have made next to no money at all - something we saw with "In the Name of the King." Instead, his movies belay an attempt to be a video game version of Micheal Moore - throwing controversy at the audience in the hopes of achieving success. Without the video game footage (a move probably made to milk the video-games-as-art controversy) and decapitated zombie, would anyone have gone to see "House of the Dead?"
I would argue that instead of a lovably off-the-wall screwball filmmaker, Boll represents a liability - in using the names of video games to sell his films, he has hurt the video game community. He has made fools of the German government by exploiting a loophole that allows him to write off his production costs. He may be no Spielberg, but he is certainly no Ed Wood, either.

Uwe Boll, Anti-Fan Activism, and the Tensions of Convergence Culture
Response:
I really appreciated your analysis of the psychological response to Uwe Boll. I have to admit that I have not read Hume and Kant, but your quotes very directly related to the topic at hand.
I do, however, take issue with your implication that this petition amounts to a "final solution," as you say, to what would be the Uwe Boll problem. Attacking something that one considers tasteless is not the same as attempting to eradicate anything under a certain standard of taste. This isn't a form of censorship; rather, it's an expression of outrage, in the same vein as Al Sharpton protesting misogynist stereotypes in rap music. The communities that have dedicated themselves to the promotion of this petition do so because of the very same capitalism that allows Boll films to exist. While Boll's films exist as part of a loophole in the idea of capitalism, their continued production is a sign of something that simply needs change, not something that should stand to be studied. It is an expression of fierce hatred, and one that, even if ignored by Boll himself, serves as a warning to potential investors and distributors. Attempting to make what amounts to a million negative reviews is not much different from any other protest - Boll's actions hurt the video game community, and as a community, they have chosen to create awareness and make a change. I don't think this is any more elitist than calling for micheal moore to make more truthful documentaries, or challenging the racism in the Resident Evil 5 trailer.

The 5-Year Lapse: Hollywood and the Iraq War

It is often said that Hollywood is five years behind the times. That is, whatever happens today will be explored in a film five years from now. While this has much to do with the long development cycle that a movie (especially a big-budget movie) requires, it speaks more to the desire to avoid turmoil. Controversy can certainly bring a movie into the spotlight, it can also cripple a movie's chances of doing well. Last weekend, MTV films' Stop-Loss (right) opened in theaters nationwide. It garnered generally positive reviews, but nevertheless did poorly on its opening weekend. As of this weekend, the movie is in a limited amount of theaters - a search for the movie in downtown Los Angeles this weekend shows only four theaters playing Stop-Loss, as opposed to the 7-10 theaters for movies like The Ruins. When it comes to Iraq, it seems, the five years since the invasion isn't enough time at all.

But is this necessarily unexpected? For years after the 9/11 tragedy, movies shied away from the event - even video games had to remove any mention of the towers. The rationale was that the subject was just too sensitive. Similarly, as soldiers are dying in a war zone there may not be much of an audience wanting to watch them die onscreen. In a broader sense, war movies are often an incredible litmus test when it comes to public perception of a war. Before American involvement in World War II, Isolationism was policy, so when Warner Bros. put out films decrying the Nazi's Anti-Semitism, they had to testify before congress. Once Americans started fighting the war, films tended to be standard escapist fare, or rabble-rousing propaganda films. However, It was only after the war that classics like Tora! Tora! Tora! and Bridge on the River Kwai, films that imagined battles through Hollywood eyes, came to be - and many were made quite a few years after the war itself. Once the threat of the enemy to American soil and American sons was no longer tangible Hollywood started to comment on the social changes and situations that had happened due to the war, such as women in the workplace.

Though not all may believe it, however, the Iraq War is quite different from World War II. Its biggest difference is in public opinion -- most citizens recognized the need for action after Pearl Harbor, but even before that, there was growing resentment against the Nazi war machine. The public opinion during this war is more similar to the one during the Viet Nam war. In that era, there were two staunchly opposite sides - the youth and "hippie" movements against the war, and the "silent majority" that supported the war as a fight to Communism. This divisive split was the battleground from which movie makers could draw their revenue.

The path of Viet Nam movies, therefore, can serve as a guide to the very similarly sculpted landscape of the current populace. Few can deny that great and piercing films were made about the Viet Nam war. In fact, most of the Iraq-themed movies are born out of attempts to capture the feeling of films such as Platoon or Born on the Fourth of July. However, the first successful Vietnam film was not known for its artistic purpose. It was The Green Berets (left), which came out nearly ten years after the conflict had started. Even at this point, the only movie that had any success was a brawny action movie that celebrated a conservative, anti-communist, pro-military stance. In fact, the first fifteen minutes of the film shows a group of Green Berets fending off a liberal news media, arguing many of the points that this "silent majority" wanted to hear. When a housewife asks why she never heard many of the soldier's accounts in the newspapers, he replies, "Well, that's newspapers for you, ma'am. You can fill volumes with what you don't read in them."At one point, the prodding of an anti-war journalist prompts a soldier to point out the weapons they captured from the Viet Cong, and he notes that the weapons are made by Chinese communists, Russian communists, and Czech communists. It seems obvious to him, he says, that this is a communist takeover of the world.

Why did this film do so well in the box office? It came out in 1968, America's most tumultuous year. Amidst all the shouts of the hippie movement and the political protests, conservative Americans wanted something that affirmed their view of the war. John Wayne and his Green Berets provided just that. Looking at comments being made today in regards to Stop-Loss, it is obvious that the the situation still stands. One commentor wrote that "The reason no Iraq war movie has done well is because they have all been anti-American themed, with the exception of The Kingdom (which tried to be somewhat neutral)." While this is quite far from true (The Kingdom seemed rooted in the same soil as 24, while Stop-Loss is strongly sympathetic to the American Soldier). Drowning in protests against the war and in media that sings to the choirs of those against the war, the conservatives that believe in the war are aching to see an obviously pro-soldier, pro-military stance. In fact, that is likely a large part of why The Kingdom did so well in the box office. If the Battle of Fallujah, for instance, were to be turned into a movie like, say, Black Hawk Down, with soldiers "just fighting for the man next to him," it would tap straight into that frustrated conservative audience.

But the key here is not to look at time lapses, or key points in the war. The most important thing to note is public opinion. In many ways, the current opinion on the war is divided just as it was back in 2003. The left still claims that this is an unwanted, unjust and illegal war, and the right still claim that it is a war for freedom, and an essential leg of the War on Terror - basically, the same rhetoric that was tossed around when Michael Moore lambasted President Bush in his acceptance speech for Bowling for Columbine. The majority of the Iraq war movies being presented today (such as In the Valley of Elah or Redacted) preach to a certain demographic that already knows this to be the truth. Young filmmakers, who grew up with the mythos presented by films such as Platoon, probably wanted to make films in the same vein. But in this case, five years is certainly too soon.

So what has to change for this sort of atmosphere to shift? First of all, the war needs to end, one way or another. Once that happens, and American men and women are not in danger, audiences will be more responsive to seeing these images on film. But what is needed most is time. The safest time for a critical look at the war would be years after the effects of the war on the international political scene are played out. World Trade Center capitalized on this - the two largest audiences for the film were conservatives and teenagers. The conservative angle is obvious, but the teens are a little more elusive. The reason? Those who were teens at the time of the film were too young to understand the situation in 2001. Thus, they went to see World Trade Center to tap into the feeling that they missed. Eight or nine years after this war, films that show this war as a tragedy may well be accepted as great films, possibly as great as Platoon. Even Platoon was made more than ten years after the war was over.

But what should filmmakers push now? Something that addresses both sides of the war, and looks at soldiers as currently fighting, not relics of a distant war. A spy thriller that leads viewers on a chase to hunt down a terrorist. A movie that doesn't remind Americans of the war's worst, but relays its complexity. While public opinion is still divided by the same lines as the ones at the war's onset, films should open a dialog with those opinions. As good as it may be, Stop-Loss doesn't present itself as part of either view, and that proved to be its downfall.