Most stories have an endoskeleton: a theme that lies inside them like a set of bones. Sometimes it’s the same bones as another story: remove the flesh of plot from Lord of the Rings or Star Wars and you’ll find the skeleton of Campbell’s Heroic Journey. Autopsy a random romance novel from the 70s or 80s and the skeleton will be the Three R’s (Rebellion, Ruin, Redemption). Some stories are thin, their thematic skeleton close to the skin, while others are fat: you have to delve deeply through the narrative’s flesh, muscle and organs before you find it.
But then you have stories that have exoskeletons: their bones are on the outside. The theme sits on top of everything else: there’s no need to autopsy such a body to discover its skeleton, it’s there in plain view, and often it’s the only thing you see.
Conan the Barbarian is an exoskeletal movie, virtually all theme and zero story. Every character is an archetype, every plot point is as predictable as the movement of the stars, and the symbolism is very blunt – a Freudian psychoanalysist would suffer coronary thrombosis comparing swords to phalluses in this movie. It’s a stirring and powerful experience. Every scowl, drawn blade, and bombastic orchestral sting exists in service of myth. Conan the Barbarian is held high by mighty iron pillars of theme.
In ancient Hyboria, a tribe of Cimmerians is massacred by cultists of a dark snake god, and a blacksmith’s son is taken captive and sold into slavery. He grows to adulthood chained to a mill, revolving in endless circles. Somehow, this turns him into a muscular titan. Real slaves are skinny, haggard, and old before their time. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body was clearly built by gym workouts, steroids and protein shakes. But that doesn’t matter, because the thematic through-line (“Conan has performed great labors and become mighty, that he might escape and seek vengeance against Thulsa Doom.”) vetoes logic and realism.
Conan the Barbarian is not faithful to any one Robert E Howard’s story (the Conan of this movie has more in common with Kull the Conqueror), but it’s faithful to Howard’s storytelling. It’s the sort of thing Howard would have written.
Howard, more so than the others of the “Weird Three” (Lovecraft and Smith) was indebted toward the lower side of pulp. He wrote action well, and his stories rely on energy and speed – they’re as streamlined as the mechanical rabbits that greyhounds chase. This also led to a certain carelessness. Lovecraft and Smith would carefully construct a setting: Howard threw up plywood constructs and then smashed them beneath stampeding Hyborian horses. Here’s what I mean:
Chunder Shan, entering his chamber, closed the door and went to his table. There he took the letter he had been writing and tore it to bits. Scarcely had he finished when he heard something drop softly onto the parapet adjacent to the window. He looked up to see a figure loom briefly against the stars, and then a man dropped lightly into the room. The light glinted on a long sheen of steel in his hand.
‘Shhhh!’ he warned. ‘Don’t make a noise, or I’ll send the devil a henchman!’
The governor checked his motion toward the sword on the table. He was within reach of the yard-long Zhaibar knife that glittered in the intruder’s fist, and he knew the desperate quickness of a hillman.
The invader was a tall man, at once strong and supple. He was dressed like a hillman, but his dark features and blazing blue eyes did not match his garb. Chunder Shan had never seen a man like him; he was not an Easterner, but some barbarian from the West. But his aspect was as untamed and formidable as any of the hairy tribesmen who haunt the hills of Ghulistan.
‘You come like a thief in the night,’ commented the governor, recovering some of his composure, although he remembered that there was no guard within call. Still, the hillman could not know that.
‘I climbed a bastion,’ snarled the intruder. ‘A guard thrust his head over the battlement in time for me to rap it with my knife-hilt.’
‘You are Conan?’
‘Who else? You sent word into the hills that you wished for me to come and parley with you. Well, by Crom, I’ve come! Keep away from that table or I’ll gut you.’
The setting is ancient, but the prose is modern. The dialog sounds like it’s from a hardboiled detective novel (you almost expect Chunder Shan to offer Conan $25 a day, plus expenses), and anachronisms like “the devil” and “parley” sit oddly in a tale of a vanished age.
For better or worse, this how the movie goes, too. Take away Conan’s mythic grandeur, and what’s left? “A rich man hires a tough to rescue his wayward daughter.” That’s a detective story. In fact, it’s the detective story. It’s the same basic plot as The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler and countless others. Everything beneath the exoskeleton is pure pulp.
Likewise, the movie captures Howard’s eclectic setting. Low-budget grindhouse films had a reputation for shooting with whatever props and costumes were available (leading to movies about roller-blading samurai, etc) and Howard’s stories have a similar feel. In The People of the Black Circle (quoted above) we get a weird amalgamation of real-world cultures, and Conan likewise throws together Mongols, Vikings, Indians, and everything in between. As Zack Stenz once pointed out, the movie owes quite a lot to 70s California beach culture. The story, written another way, could be phrased as “a Venice Beach bodybuilder and his hapa buddy do drugs, get laid, and fight a cult that exploits hippies.” Gerry Lopez (Subotai) was a surfer friend of director John Milius. Most of the remaining cast are athletes.
Some roles are oddly cast, but the most important one – that of Conan – is dead on. No role has ever suited Arnold more, except perhaps the Terminator. His overwhelming physicality sells him as a mightly-thewed barbarian, and his uncertain, rumbling, learning-to-talk diction adds verisimilitude. When you listen to Arnold speak, you don’t doubt that you’re hearing the beginnings of human language.
There are depths to Conan, but the surface is predictable. Its characters are so archetypal that they can’t do anything interesting or surprising. All of their motives are clearly spelled out, and the viewer is never in any doubt about what will happen – what must happen. Some movies are like taxis, slyly taking you on the scenic route through town if you’re not watching the meter. Conan is more like a train, pulling into the station, then leaving at a certain time on a fixed path. And since Conan is hardly the first film to adapt such mythic material, the train’s travelling down a route you’ve seen many times before.
But most people consider regularity in their form of transport to be virtue, not vice, and maybe the same is true for stories. For the rest of us, Conan the Barbarian’s the perfect movie to watch if you’re twelve, or want to remember being twelve.
If a radio began playing “We Built This City” I would stop performing CPR on my dying child to turn it off. It truly is the worst song in the world.
However, I have to defend it on something. A lot of people are confused by the line “Marconi plays the mamba, listen to the radio.”
“Who is Marconi? And what is the mamba?” asks Marks. […] “The mamba is the deadliest snake in the world, so he must have meant the mambo, but it sounds so much like ‘mamba’ that every lyric web site writes it that way. It makes sense neither way.”[1]“We built this city on detestable lyrics”. The Sydney Morning Herald. April 27, 2004. Via Internet Archive.
It’s definitely mamba. Snakes are associated with deception and trickery, and Marconi (the inventor of radio) is used here as a metonym for the music industry. The song is saying “the biz is full of snakes, and just listen to the radio if you want proof!”
I’ll allow that it’s an odd lyric. Why a mamba, specifically? I guess Bernie Taupin wanted alliteration with “Marconi”, so he found an encyclopedia of venomous snakes and went to the M section. But the Venn diagram of people who know who Guglielmo Marconi is, know what a mamba is, and are sufficiently suicidal to listen to “We Built This City” is probably quite small, and the word “play” next to “radio” throws your mind down the wrong path – you’re imagining a record playing, not Taupin’s intended sense of “playing a role”.
Believe it or not, it’s actually one of the less incomprehensible lines in the song!
It’s just another Sunday In a tired old street Police have got the choke hold (oh) Then we just lost the beat Who counts the money underneath the bar? Who writes the wrecking ball into our guitars? Don’t tell us you need us ’cause we’re just simple fools Looking for America, coming through your schools
In honor of “We Built This City”, I wrote a piece of music that turned out pretty bad.
It was supposed to be lo-fi hip hop, but I ended up turning it into a glistening cheeseball of a track with percussion that doesn’t fit.
Why did I try to write lo-fi hip-hop, a style I have no interest in? Well, because of a third bad piece of music.
In 1990, thrash metal band Sacred Reich released The American Way on Metal Blade Records. It’s a typically degenerate late 80s thrash metal effort without any punch or heaviness and vocals +6dBA louder than they should be. It’s not my thing. But the final track is called “31 Flavors”, and it’s an unabashed funk rock song with lyrics encouraging “metal dudes” to broaden their horizons.
I love the Chilis – Freaky, Uplift, Mother’s Milk Faith No More – Mike Patton’s voice is smooth as silk Metallica’s music makes me want to rage Sting’s lyrics have something to say Jimi Hendrix plays guitar like a no-one else Black Sabbath – Ozzy’s voice is sick as hell Prince, Fishbone, NWA These are the things that I like to play Mr. Bungle is so very cool So don’t be an ignorant fool There’s so much music for you to choose So don’t just be a metal dude it’s cool fool
Sacred Reich listeners (I doubt that the band has fans) probably thought the whole thing was a joke. But you know, lately I’ve come around to the “31 Flavors” side of things. It’s possible to go too deep into a scene, to the point where you miss out on things. And metal fans are doing a lot of missing out.
Here’s the moment I came to Jesus. Most people know what thrash metal is – old Metallica and the like. But to those in the know there’s lots of categories within thrash, such as tech thrash (Watchtower), blackened thrash (Skeletonwitch), and death thrash (Demolition Hammer). Subgenres become increasingly absurd, with dedicated fans splitting bands with increasingly finer combs.
The very bottom of metal’s phylogenetic pyramid? Pizza thrash.
It’s a style of modern thrash that imitates (and exaggerates) the aesthetics of the classic 80s Bay Area scene. Bright, comic-book cover art. Lyrics about partying. It often has a goofy, kid-friendly aesthetic, and abundant references to 80s/90s pop culture.
Pizza thrash is usually used as an insult. It means you’re a band of 20 year old posers trying to force your way into a scene that died long ago and wouldn’t want you anyway. Lately, we’re even getting ironic pizza thrash bands.
I think it was on my third message board argument about pizza thrash that I had a realization.
I should not know what this is.
There is a type of saying called an Umeshism, formulated as “if you never have $problem, you’re spending too much effort avoiding $problem”. For example, “if you have never missed a flight, you’re spending too much time waiting at airports.” The idea is to make you value your time more.
The mere fact that I know what pizza thrash is means that I listen to too much metal, and should get my head out of it. There is zero reason why such a minor, stupid classification should occupy real estate in my mind. It’s useless knowledge par excellence. The world’s bigger than you think. Time to get a grasp on a larger piece of it. Thanks, Sacred Reich.
Eversion is a short horror platform game I downloaded in 2010.
That last part – me downloading it – is very important. From a certain reference frame (mine), the game did not exist until I downloaded it. So you could say I created the game by downloading it. No, don’t thank me. It was no trouble.
Eversion is a Mario clone with a unique concept: you transport yourself between variations of the same stage that exist in different realities. Fluffy clouds in Dimension 1 might be weight-supporting platforms in Dimension 2, while a solid roof might be breakable tiles in Dimension 3.
In most games you move a character around a level. In Eversion you move a level around a character. Much of Eversion consists of toggling between various layers of reality, seeking the one that will allow you to advance. New dimensions become available as you progress deeper in the game, and sometimes the game forcibly dimension-shifts you no matter what you do.
It’s like the game exists in 3D space without having 3D graphics: you can traverse the game in four directions, plus go “inward” and “outward” into slightly-different universes. As you might have guessed, the dimensions become increasingly dark; the music scarier, the monsters replaced with nastier versions of themselves, and so on.
Eversion proves a fact that’s already proven to hell and back: less is more with horror. Many of the mid-tier realities are creepy, with their slightly-off color schemes and slightly-cracked music. In the lowest dimension you’re picking up skull items while VERY SCARY horror music shrills in the background, and the result is more comical than frightening.
The production qualities are reasonable for a one-man game originally developed for a contest. The pixel art is okay, the music is really good, and the mechanics feel solid. The game’s not long – after memorizing the puzzles I could run through Eversion in about 30 minutes – and it has two endings, a happy and a sad one (perhaps sad and happy?). The least fun parts are the tiny hotspots that often have you running all over a level, jumping infuriatingly at air, trying to trigger the magic pixel.
Super Mario Bros is such a cliche that even its ripoffs have cliches. You’ve got the super-hard game that sadistically kills you every 2 seconds (and then taunts you with a kill-counter), a’la Syobon Action/Cat Mario. Then you have the parody or subversion, such as Super Hornio Brothers (or arguably Nintendo’s own Wario).
Eversion has elements of the latter, but it’s also that rarest of birds: a SMB copy that conceptually evolves Super Mario Bros in an interesting way, and thus deserves existence. You wouldn’t think improving on a 1985 platform game would be an achievement, but I’ll be damned if 90% of indie games can manage it.
You play as a flower. I never noticed I was a flower until I re-read the game’s description on Steam today – it was a detail I’d totally overlooked despite it being the central part of the game and the one thing I should have seen. I assumed I was a weird furry character. But then, how familiar are you with the details of your own body? Without looking, could you draw (or describe) your toes in such a way that they’re distinguishable from other toes? How much σεαυτόν do we γνῶθι?
Eversion was released for Windows in 2008, and has since been ported to Mac OS, Linux, and real life. Why real life? Because when I watched a Youtube playthrough of it to refresh my memory in 2021, it was nothing like I remembered. It’s possible that the graphics and sound were spruced up in a later version, but I think you’ll agree it’s more likely the world really works like the one in Eversion and I travelled to another dimension without realizing it.
