Ready Player One - Digital forms (Review)

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Directed by Steven Spielberg

Ready Player One opens on a scene that immediately fits in the continuity of Spielberg's latest films: the young Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) tries to find his way among the prefabricated bunk, advertising screens and car debris forming the architectural fabric of Columbus, Ohio. The spectacle is less that of the place, approached by a quick dive, than that of the way it appropriates it by a series of gestures incorporated: to bend down, to go down a staircase, to jump, etc. In fact, Spielberg's pragmatic trilogy (Lincoln, The Spy Bridge, Pentagon Papers) already told nothing other than the learning of the essentially gestural or corporal nature of any ideal, learning that led the characters to move from one understanding of the body to another: first, a body determined by a position strict in physical space, reducible to spatial coordinates and, later, to a structuring of society; then, an expressive body, made capable of organizing the given according to its projects and thus creating, in a process always recommenced with a space become a practical medium, motor significances.
Example: when Wade rushes into a gap between two stacks of cars, we start not from the place (as a block of localizable objectivity, always already there and necessarily outside) but the active body,

Training form

It is in the light of this learning that we must receive what is really opening the digital world, via the position of a virtual universe (the OASIS). It is that the digital does not start from a space that is already there, subject to a pre-existing location that could make it the object of a conquest, an object on the flank of which to seek subjective takes. From a spatial point of view, the digital revolution consists first - and paradoxically, in that it is a priority the very incarnation of a mathematical construction of space - in the suppression of a pure datum that makes possible the appearance of things in the manner of a pre-existing background. In other words, the perspective of subjectivation of space no longer appears possible in a universe where space is never reducible to the myth of the given, and where meaning cannot be grafted afterward onto a neutral reality. The digital universe appears as an additional test in the understanding of space, which can only appear after the initial position of the possibility of appropriating it. Digital substitutes for space to transform space into formation which complicates the temptation to refer to it in the fashion of a thing simply there, under the hand, subsisting while waiting for a use.

The peculiarity of the digital space is that it shows itself as being at the same time that it dispenses the spectacle of its self-genesis and makes it participate in its formation. It carries with it an agreement of the form where this one, far from a configuration enclosed in itself, would be permanently in track of itself that is to say, not only in movement but absolutely outside of itself. The film is indeed innervated by this perpetual self-movement of the forms: avatars whose pixels fly at the same time as they constitute a skin; places which can never be seen in a finished form, but keep open the possibility of their extension; forms (circles, triangles, lines) that intertwine in a dialog always renewed. The first characteristic of this movement is that it implies in each phase, simultaneously, opposite directions, allowing then to make each digital object a form : when digital pieces are detached from a body, it is at onceto get rid of it and to guarantee the possibility of its reformation; when a space seems to end in sharp contours, it is at once the immovable collection of the formation that engendered it (ie: the meeting of lines, lines, circles, points, etc.) and the pledging of a promise - a promise to be transmuted again or to disappear in the nothingness from which it comes.

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Connection Impossible To Fade

To grasp more clearly the implications of this approach, it would be necessary to return to a connection which, in the form of a fade, has opened in Spielberg a new understanding of the life of forms. This is one of the first plans of The War of the Worlds: on a leaf of a tree, a simple drop of water (which one comes, through the animation of micro-organisms, to examine the composition) is transformed for a moment into the Earth itself, which Earth will then be isolated from the leaf that made it appear to survive in the dark. Beyond a diegetic element (the smallest forms of life will help to eradicate extraterrestrials), the fade tells at least three things. First, and prosaically, it makes possible an equalization of scales by founding the infinitely large in the infinitely small. But in doing so, he acts of the dual nature of all forms, which in itself carries the possibility of the immense and that of the tiny as so many dynamic directions towards which it makes itself capable of tending. Finally, if the drop and the Earth can be connected,

Concretely, this meant that Spielberg had to break with the conception of the connection that founds the specificity of his cinema. In a work so obsessed by the encounter, the connection was essentially splitting: in other words, it acted, in the passage of a face to what it turns to or what captures it, the irremediable difference with a form of pure otherness. The meeting has always been at home the spectacle of the clash between two contrary tendencies: on the one hand, the subjective effort to go towards the other; on the other, the disempowerment, imposed by the power of otherness, vis-à-vis the intentional relationship, and consequently the rupture, incarnated by the close-up dive on wide-eyed eyes, with all forms of context. (a world, a company, a third party). The connection was literally made impossible by the rule that always what I meet is more than what I was about to meet. But with the fade, it is the possibility of a common ontological flesh which seems to overflow the relation of face to face. The connection becomes possible or, more precisely: the language of the fade hatches a world that does not betray the unconditionality of the ethical experience but is direct to its measure.

Communication As A Dynamic Law

If it does not betray it, it is because it gives itself to see as much the link as the irreducible difference (the one which opposes the big and the big, such texture and another, such gesture and such movement) between the different members of the form thus conceived. The form does not shrink the opposites one on the other but articulates them in a rhythmic movement. When a horizontal wave is transmuted into a vertical pyramid, the interlacing reduces both movements less than it supports the communicative singularities : in the foam traced by the wave, it is already the snow which is indicated, and its cylindrical groove looks like a mountain filmed from the inside, converging towards its peak, in the same way as in the snow-covered pyramid still maintains the power of the wave. It belongs to the very being to borrow qualities from its neighbors or others, so that the digital does not allow any more partition between elements, like so many partial and opposite particles, but poses the communication or the metaphor as the dynamic law of the real, which detracts from the very appearance of things. It is only in this energetic movement of communication/maintenance of difference that the encounter can be incarnated in the real and find the world.

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This break must be at the very foundation of Ready Player One's writing. Virtuality is indeed the condition for going beyond the face-to-face relationship: Wade, for example, is first filmed as a typical Spielbergian hero, lying on a washing machine and gazing at an image projected on the wall of a woman. in front ; but in contact with OASIS, he will become aware of the forgetfulness of the world that underlies his relationship to images by participating in the effective foundation of a community. Farther on, the digital becomes the culmination of the logic of fade in that it delegates to the things themselves the formal power of rhythmic articulation of the opposites, without it having to go through a montage necessarily splitting. The digital as an auto-genetic form is the condition of an ethical experiment where things are bound not by an external force but by a breath that is absolutely immanent to them. Equalization logic, as such, is the next step in what was started inThe Good Fat Giant, where the digital obeyed a principle of listening which allowed, by the flattening of the signifying structure of the image, each thing to make event (in the scene of capture of the dreams, for example, a colored passage rather than an insect, or in the den of the giant a droplet of water rather than a figure). Admittedly, the digital equalizer still leads things to arise, beyond any possible modal: for example, everything can be grown or animated, according to the scheme that the virtual contains in power all the possible, possible that the forms choose or not to objectify. But we must go further: things, in the very movement of their arrival, finally manage to become fully autonomous, Tintin ) as a constantly revived interaction between things that have arrogated to themselves the function defined for them, measuring their space and their time.

Digital Tragedy

It would be necessary, however, to return a moment more on the drop-Earth of the War of the worlds : the fade, as mentioned, is articulated by a movement which it is easy to qualify as vital. But to rule univocally of its vitality would be to omit the black on which it closes itself, the way in which, to the letter, the completion of the fade makes the plunge in a bath of absence that same which gave birth to it. In fact, the autonomy of the forms (here, the autonomy of the Earth as innervatedby the meeting with the bubble), even if it would open the possibility of a fluid movement where the plastic encounters would succeed one another smoothly (in this respect, the first incursion into the virtual world of the OASIS is a perfect example), does not go without its tragic part. Since digital forms have the capacity to simultaneously include opposite directions, then the moment of empowerment, if it opens the possibility of an endogenous ethical language, is abstracted with the same intensity. Around the form, there is nothing, nothing from where it comes from and nothing towards which it is directed, swallowed that it will be in the form to come.

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This double movement of forms (between full and empty, that is to say also between vital breath and death) could only be exalted by the horizon of virtuality, because virtuality is par excellence a universe of surfaces holograms, in short, figures which, instead of giving themselves to the gaze as in a full presence, surreptitiously signal their absence. Intensifying in this respect the first experiments on motion-capture (especially in Zemeckis' Pole Express ), Spielberg is perfectly aware of the fact that a hologram joins in its own movement the presence and the absence, the appearance and disappearance. It supports the nested tension at the heart of the motion-capture, where the suppression of corporeality for the benefit of abstract movement builds a spectral world of hollow envelopes, where the movement is given to see even before being attached to some form of presence. The memory of the motion-capture , which retains only the gesture without the corporeal aim, and further the drawing without the gesture, is a memory of the absence. It converts presence into absence and brings back the absence in the digital presence, a digital presence that keeps alive, in its texture itself, the memory of its journey.

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The film joins in this perspective what Maldiney, in Regard Parole Espace , wrote of Cézanne by opposing it at the same time to the Egyptian sacred art and the monochrome Song: when Egyptian sacred art is manifested " in the openness of 'an absolute appearance ', and when the monochrome Song reveals things' in the Open to their disappear Cezanne mixes abandonment and collection, expansion and contraction, in the instant of appearance-disappearance of a properly rhythmic form. What has been said of the opposite directions (as a movement supposed by the autogenetic character of the forms) becomes clear here in the light of the permanent resistance of the absence: bodies with holes (sometimes even by the eyes of a head of dead), empty (filled only with silver), mass of particles in perpetual process; places tending towards pure nothingness (thus, in particular, of the club or the ballroom of the Overlook), with the 3D like digging of the tension between the bottom without bottom and the animated figures; refusal of the present movement in favor of a seizure of the experience where it would necessarily be accompanied by its trace, as evidenced by the dance scene. The succession-recomposition of forms consists as much in a grafting, redefining at will the links of causality between things, as in a facelift, that this revival is accomplished in the newly born form or in the simple void. No wonder then that the film contains moments where the uninterrupted sequence of forms is not plastically more bearable: in an explosion of particles, it must be ended, because too much absence has been thrown into the way so that the possibility of the end (of " game over ") is absolutely discarded.

Virtual Archives

It is also quite telling that the key of the film is nested in the exploration of archives: one of the main characters is an archivist, and the story is resolved at the price of a permanent return to memory traces. The movement of presence-absence finds a point of incandescence in the couple of creators of the OASIS, which literally defines the friendship, and especially its objectification in the program of virtual reality, less like the meeting of two presences than as the encounter between an archived (James Halliday), on the side of absence, and an archivist(Ogden Morrow), on the side of the present reorganization. Above all, the film has understood that the new technological media structurally upset the report to the archive, since the hierarchy nested at the foundation of any act of archiving is subsumed under a permanent test of the living present, where everything can potentially be archived. Archival dynamics (such as conservation, selection, interpretation of traces) will ultimately be thwarted by the position of a character deliberately erased from the archives: it will then open the way, in the very heart of archives, for the return of the archived repressed carried by this character. In other words, digital, as an integral archive, hypermnesic, seems not to be able to allow the intrication of the archive with the logic of arkhè , which is that of the authority of the archivist on the archive.

By appearing, under the features of James Halliday (Mark Rylance), a character who acts as if every moment archived was already interpreted, replayed, linked to an external power (here, the perspective of the contest), Spielberg act of essentially split nature temporal phenomenon as it unfolds numerically or virtually. Split, time is doubly: first, between that which announces itself as real or direct and its immediate and simultaneous interpretative recovery; then, between the dynamics of the pure, phenomenological presence, and the fact that these archive images seem literally animated by a dead person. This movement will be intensified by the end of the film, which consists in the organization of a meeting between the archive of the character and the dead but non-archived character, made present: two different incarnations of the absence which, together, will choose pure annihilation by disappearing behind a door. The extreme beauty of the scene consists precisely in the archiving of the non-archivable (pure death), and especially in the rupture itself, behind the door , with the logic of the archive. It is at this precise moment that Spielberg puts an end to the autonomy of the forms, in a definitive gesture which assimilates the rhythmic deployment of the OASIS with the almost mimetic capture of a creator imaginary innervated by the archives and turned towards the virtual one. because it finds the first structure of his temporal experience.

Power Of The Egg
But, disappearing, James Halliday bequeathed to Wade a bright yellow egg, an object that devotes in just a few plans the greatness of digital. Where, in the virtual world, the egg remains an object (in short: the egg as a thing of use, as a result of a conquest), in the real world it is simply given as a ray of light, illuminating all that surrounds. We know the importance of light in Spielberg, as a sign of the advent of the absolutely other, whose very thinning immediately implies the tearing away from oneself, from the world and from any pre-constituted meaning. . But what precisely is happening here? It's first a color, a yellowmade concrete, apprehendable appreciably, untied of any consideration that would make him a mere perceived quality. It is not surprising, in this respect, that the film has replayed the Shining scene, where the corridor is literally filled with blood: what it retains is less directly the emergence of an object (the blood, which one sees afterwards that it is red) that the way in which the red, through the medium of the blood , inhabits a space and invests it. Red becomes a substance that the body goes through to feel the touch.

But the color in the film also includes an understanding of the experience, entirely related to what had been described above as the intermingling of presence and absence. To seize it, it would be necessary to return to the dance scene: on a bottom of emptiness, two bodies approach and turn around, caress and bow, tracing with each advance of the colored lines which follow their step in the infinite space. It is that any experience, if it produces a trace, ends in a chromatic event which marks its past character: thus "Sixers", engaged by a competing company, for whom each defeat is accompanied by a red trace that overflows the white light of their virtual reality seats. Just think back to the figuration of dreams inThe Good Big Giant : colorful powers, abstract lines that keep the dream spent in jars lit by their chromatic subsistence. Because each experience is accompanied by a color that acts as a double temporality, Spielberg proceeds to this: when nothing can be left of the experience, erased as it is by the devouring autonomy of the forms, there is only color . That's why, when you move from the virtual world to the real world, what remains is the color (or rather, the quality of the light, the rhythmic animation of a halo), the yellow color of the egg or the color violet. halos produced by the hand of Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) on the torso of Wade.

In doing so, the yellow light that illuminates Wade's hand concentrates in the slight rustling of its rays the completion of the digital learning, which could be summarized as follows: the real, finally, relates to things like to forms and not to objects. There perhaps lies the ultimate transformation of Spielberg's cinema, beyond the transition from connection to melting and autonomy of forms: in this way of doing the other no longer a figure or an object (an extraterrestrial, a ship, a stranger) but, literally, a form information, a plastic event. The other, here, is, in this light that suddenly lights up, which lights up in its own light, the language of the digital, carrying the ethical horizon on the side of the never-ending (that is to say: never totalized) meeting of forms. As always, we do not come out unscathed from the meeting with the other (that we think of the last plan of the Bridge spies or the end of Encounters of the third type ): it will no longer be possible to think the real without digital.

THANKS FOR READING You can check out my previous review on Avengers : Infinity Wars