Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction

to this, in order to instead set up rhythms of immediate
stimulation and manipulation’ (2009).
Films like Gamer deliver, Shaviro argues, ‘something
like a cognitive mapping of the contemporary world system’
(2009). The film opens with a montage of contemporary
and archaic sites overlaid with corporate advertising,
immediately describing a pure present defined by
consumption. Similarly, television news obsesses over
the games ‘Slayer’ and ‘Society’, demonstrating how the
interface has merged reality and entertainment. This
is also true of the game scenarios, which use real body
avatars to collapse the distinction that usually organises
the interface film’s dominant question; what is reality?
In Gamer its all real, or its all unreal, however you want
it. The question is irrelevant, because now ‘reality’ is the
constant and exaggerated s(t)imulation of the game, the
permanent hormonal hysteria of teenage sex and violence
where every taboo can be broken and ‘excess’ simply
doesn’t exist. As a result, the entirely generic climax of
the film, when the corporate control mechanism inside
the protagonist’s head is finally turned off, signifying his
‘victory’ and ‘freedom’, is nothing more than a somewhat
disappointing visual ‘pause’, a moment of suspension
begging us to push the ‘restart’ button. Even the film’s
sentimental moments seem deliberately desultory, with the
final shot of the car containing Tillman’s reunited family
entering a tunnel to give a rather flaccid echo of North by
Northwest’s (Hitchcock, 1959) memorably erotic punch.
All of this means, at least according to Shaviro, that ‘the
strategy of Gamer in this regard is not to offer a critique of
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