The Tragedy of David Cage

So I took a week and a half off. Had some personal stuff going on and things weren't exactly easy but I'm back and ready to recommit to this blog. So what movies are out that I should go see... oh wait that checking account number is looking a bit low... hmmm... I'll stay in and find something to talk about: Heavy Rain just got a PC port, that's kinda a movie. The game's writer and director David Cage clearly has some affection for cinema. Interaction throughout the games he makes is minimized to timed button presses, light adventure game mechanics (not puzzles mechanics), and dialogue options, and he tells his stories using the same tools cinema uses: dialogue, cinematography, music, action etc...
It's just a shame he isn't very good at it. I've played only 2 of his games to completion myself, but I've followed David Cage's company. Quantic Dream for quite a while now since Heavy Rain caught my attention back in 2010. I went and played the PC version of their second game, Fahrenheit, and enjoyed it immensely due in no small part to David Cage's complete and utter lack of understanding of videogames, and cinema, and storytelling in general. I titled this piece "The Tragedy of David Cage" because it really is a tragedy. There's a place in the world of storytelling for cinematic experiences with minimal interactivity, and David Cage is one of the few in either the games or movie industry that recognizes this, but he just doesn't seem to understand how to make his stories work and is incredibly pretentious as a result. To be clear I am using the term pretentious very carefully and specifically to mean pretending to have greater meaning or significance than what is actually communicated.

It is typical of both the game and movie industries to have a kind of obsession with technology. We see it in James Cameron's push toward 3D films, and Peter Jackson's 48fps Hobbit trilogy. The videogame industry is perhaps more justified due to the medium's need to function on up to date hardware. Metropolis (1927) and La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928) can still be enjoyed today on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital distribution with minimal effort from the distributes, but good luck getting some PC games from even 10 years ago working on modern hardware. David Cage, however, takes this obsession with technology to a whole new level that demonstrates his complete lack of understanding of movies and games as artistic mediums in a talk he gave at a 2013 Sony Press Conference. First off what really grinds my gears is his suggestion silent films were limited by technical constraints to tell simpler stories. This is flat out wrong see my prior example of Metropolis (1927) a silent film that explores class struggle in a distopic future city with a long complex narrative. It's more intricate and detailed than most modern films of it's genre. Even more ignorantly David Cage suggests that filmmaking technologies of the silent film era were incapable of emotional subtly through facial expression or action. He clearly has not seen and is entirely unaware of Renée Jeanne Falconetti's performance in La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. An emotionally heartrending performance ENTIRELY communicated through subtle action and facial expressions.

But how does this lack of understanding lead to pretentiousness? Well this obsession with technology over technique is endemic of the way David Cage approaches storytelling. The stories of Fahrenheit and Heavy Rain follow a similar pattern of a series of highly emotional set pieces strung together with a paper thin narrative. There are brilliant sequences like the claustrophobic police investigator combing through the cramped records room in the basement of the police station in Fahrenheit, and Ethan Mars struggling with the deciding if he's willing to kill someone to save his kidnapped child in Heavy Rain. However, all the emotional set pieces in the world are meaningless if the people involved with them don't feel real. The meaning from emotional set pieces comes from the player/viewer's investment in the characters, and David Cage... doesn't understand characters or building investment. All the characters in Heavy Rain are flat archetypes with the only slightest gesture toward unique character traits being psychological and physiological afflictions (agoraphobia, insomnia, asthma, and chemical dependancy), which David Cage may be mistaking for character flaws in a rather ablest interpretation of the term "character flaw". Fahrenheit fares only slightly better in this respect but still every character is a cliched archetype from the bland everyman chosen one to the (stereotypical) sassy black cop (who comes with his own funk-inspired theme music because of course).

It's not like David Cage is completely incompetent. Granted he seems rather incompetent if you judge his games as inherently fun games, but looking at his games from a cinematic perspective there is some real quality going on. His games' cinematography is consistently creative and dramatic. He regularly uses multiple panels to show simultaneous events. He places the game's camera in unique places to photograph the action in interesting ways, and uses thematically appropriate colors and visuals liberally. However, as good as his technique can be it only furthers his work's pretentiousness by being applied haphazardly with no real meaning, or being applied too thickly becoming painfully obvious. Take for example Heavy Rain's opening shot. Here we have six different views of the main character Ethan Mars waking up in the morning... WHY? What does seeing him from 6 different angles mean? What is it communicating that couldn't be communicated by cutting between those angles? Nothing. It draws attention to itself and then has nothing to say. This isn't to say that paneling is always pretentious. David Cage employs it later in the game to great effect to build tension without crosscutting and breaking the player's interaction in a sequence where Ethan has to escape the police with the help of photographer, Madison Paige. The astute viewer may notice the difference in color pallet between these two scenes. The first is bright, and colorful, whereas the second is desaturated, and slathered in a muddy brown. This is David Cage's fumbling attempt at utilizing color pallet to communicate emotion. At the end of the bright and colorful beginning portion of the game Ethan loses his son in a car accident and the rest of the game is a dark muddy brown with constant "heavy rain". This would be a solidly good idea but by being so proud of his idea to change the color pallet and weather to respond the Ethan's mental state David Cage goes entirely too far and weakens the effect of this technique by spreading across the entire runtime of the game and highlighting the flat dower tone of his game. The technique, like the haphazard use of paneling at the beginning, draws attention to itself only to say nothing unique.

I personally love experiencing David Cage's work his poor grasp of storytelling and cinematic technique lend itself to an adorable silliness that has a kind of camp value all it's own, and there are flashes, brief though they may be, of brilliance in storytelling. And this is why David Cage is himself a tragedy. He is very close to making the dramatic, emotionally effective, and entertaining experience he strives to make, but he seems to act and talk like he is already there and is unwilling to improve, making the same storytelling mistakes game after game.