Just about done with Death 24x a Second

Provisionally I have some pretty big disagreements with Mulvey. But more profoundly and historically think DVD watching has much more in common with video games than with cinema. Complex video games have a narrative 'drive' that is halted by play sequences, or held back. It's been speculated that advancing this plot, or in other (pretty much Mulvey's) terms acting in service of the death drive, is the main impetus for players to persist in a hard game and also the main source of ludic (rous--I hate that word) pleasure therein.

I guess the big question must be, How strict is the formal separation between game and narrative? How do their goals differ? Especially in an extremely open-ended 'role-playing' game is it really true that an inevitability of ending/death manifests of its own accord (notwithstanding practical concerns in the real world)? Months ago I would have said, no, when the cutscene ends and Squall is standing in the infirmary there is a dead stop of narrative momentum that can only be restored by a radical and irrational intervention. Perhaps the 'internal audience' with an imperative to play subsumes the player through the closed loop of the interface? Even so, part of what makes it an RPG is the player's arbitrary power not to play, to let it sit... But maybe that is just a sort of, well, neuteredness in RPGs whereby they're always exerting only a weak narrative impetus, where time is broken from the beginning but always there--its repair no less a goal for the impossibility of the task. As a contrast you see fighting games or other more athletic types where time hardly matters except as rhythm.

On a more positive note the digressions about (movie) stars and fandom were pretty helpful, crystallizing what I vaguely understood and making me cognizant of some truly new ideas too. For the most part the lessons of this book are ones that I might have learned just from obsessively replaying and screen-capturing music videos; in fact I made a very prescient commen to this effect a few months ago (You can't tell by looking... you have to see by obsessively replaying). But I never saw the broader linkages: star, almost-stillness with gesture, like dance, the essential tension between correct motions and stillness that pushes for and to an extreme of control--hence the aspiration of the human toward the mechanistic. That's an alarming idea that I don't so thoroughly appreciate yet. I've only thought of it in reference to the face of a model before, the beauty of an uncommunicative look, or the minimal gesture (for example, Tomiko's mouth in the Farewell PV--telling virtually all there is to tell; she 'lives in her mouth').