Bandersnatch
Capsule Film Review #35
This is the thirty-fifth in a series of short pieces (max. 250 words) about films. They appear weekly, in addition to my regular essays.
Watching Bandersnatch, my least favourite episode of one of my favourite TV shows, all I could think of was Larkin, writing about John Coltrane:
His solos bear the same relation to proper jazz solos as those drawings of running dogs, showing their legs in all positions so that they appear to have about fifty of them, have to real drawings […] the whole point of drawing is to choose the right line, not drawing fifty alternatives.
Many would think that Larkin missed the point of Coltrane, and perhaps I missed the point of Bandersnatch, which is not supposed to be an ordinary film: in effect, it’s a videogame, in which you choose what happens. Far be it from me to say that videogames aren’t Art: firstly because I don’t play them; secondly because I don’t assume that something deserves my attention just because it is Art.
I know clever people who think that videogames are obviously Art and deserve attention for that reason. After all, they say, we have no difficulty accepting that dialogue, acting, music, animation, and narrative are Art—and videogames contain all those things.
A good point, I guess—though it seems like saying that a game of chess can be Art because a chessboard can. After all, I can experience all those things without playing the game: if, for example, I watch you play it. Perhaps I should have watched Bandersnatch with somebody else and had them make the decisions. I might have enjoyed it more.
When one is notified (warned?) in advance that such-and-such is not an “ordinary” such-and-such, things are off to a bad start. I am neither a movie goer nor a gamer, so I have no opinion about “Bandersnatch,” but I find Larkin’s Coltrane review interesting and his analogy unconvincing. With a “drawing” you can show multiple possibilities simultaneously; you present not just the illusion, but the process by which the illusion is created. Among other things, this is what Cezanne and the Cubists, working in a spatial medium, demonstrate. (I wonder what Larkin must’ve made of Picasso’s many seven-nosed beauties?) Music, operating in time rather than space, does, as Larkin says, impose a choice, but it’s not a choice that visual artists have to make.
Larkin was very wrong about Coltrane but you are very right about Bandersnatch