Weird Wednesdays: Avalon

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

The world of Avalon (2001) is gloomy and dark, a series of nearly monochromatic shots that extend into the depressed city beyond the titular video game-world. Directed by Mamoru Oshii, who is perhaps most well known for his anime adaptation of Ghost in the Shell (1995), Avalon feels very much like a live-action anime: Oshii flattens space and splices frames together, breaking live action’s premise of “reality” in favor of a stylistic flattening of the spaces his characters occupy. There’s the very obvious application of effects in the game-world of Avalon, as when players explode into 2-D flames constructed of pixels before fizzling out entirely upon their death, but even outside of the game, the world becomes no clearer, no more grounded in what feels “real”—space is lightly distorted, with blown out, soft focus highlights and deep, creeping shadows.

Since sleepily rolling out of the theater, I’ve been trying to put my finger exactly on how I feel about Avalon. Returning to my notes, I find this clue underneath a layer of overlapping scrawls about color and compositing frames: the problem is, i’m bored.

And past me wasn’t wrong: I was pretty bored. And I think it’s tempting to stop there, citing the movie’s pacing (a snail’s crawl at fastest), or the relentless misery of orange and green monochrome that informs both the in-game world of Avalon and the depressed city extending beyond it, or, if we’re being totally honest, the fact that I was up past my bedtime in the first place–but it feels cheap. Because even though I was, cannot state this enough, bored nearly to tears, I’ve been turning the damn thing over in my mind in the two weeks since, unable to fully write Avalon off. I sat down and watched Ghost in the Shell , undeniably Oshii’s most-known film, wondering if I’d find the answers there. And in a way I did, in that I also find Ghost in the Shell a little slow. (I know, I know, have me drawn and quartered—I do think it’s a masterpiece, just perhaps not for me.) But what actually finally clicked for me was a different anime connection—Kazunori Itō, the film’s screenwriter, who, yes, also wrote Ghost in the Shell, was the writer for the .hack multimedia series, and in particular, the anime .hack//SIGN, also centered on a video game world that people use to escape the mundane despair of their reality.

Before falling too deep down the comparison rabbit hole, let’s do a quick overview. Avalon takes place in a time, maybe future, maybe present, and in a European city, somewhere (it was shot in Poland and features Polish actors, but deliberately avoids naming anywhere except for the titular video game world.) In this gloomy, economically depressed city, many turn to the illegal and popular video game Avalon to escape. By strapping into a large headset inspired by the 1962 French sci-fi La Jetée, these desperate gamers are transported to what visually seems to be a series of endlessly repeating tactical military-style missions. There is a lot... of… shooting. And tanks. and helicopters. Just like, a lot of it. Anyway, if you’re good at the shooting, you can turn in your points and receive cash money, so some players are even good enough to make a living at it, like our protagonist, Ash. She’s a well-known and admired solo player, who struck out on her own after her party Team Wizard fell apart.

There’s something grim to me about the game so-dangerously-popular-its-illegal’s great escape being endless war-based violence, but then again, Call of Duty has been one of the most popular video game series for like what, 20 years?

I don’t know that Avalon offers the level of philosophical introspection that Oshii and Itō’s other work brings. Ash is led down a rabbit hole to reach a hidden level named Special A, which offers experience and rewards far greater than every other level but that does not allow players to “reset” or escape without being killed. Players who try to reach this level seem to end up catatonic, “Unreturned” from the game. When Ash does reach Special A, we’re greeted with, for the first time all movie, full color, the bustling streets of recognizable Warsaw active and alive. The overwhelmed Ash doesn’t let this stop her from her mission of tracking down and killing, at least in game, the former leader of her party, Murphy, in order to defeat the level. In their final showdown, Murphy reveals he prefers Special A—that is it is a better reality than their actual reality. And so, we’re asked, what defines reality? We know Special A isn’t real, that’s confirmed when Murphy characteristically explodes into pixels, but it certainly seems more appealing than the “real” world Ash comes from. There’s color here, for god’s sake! And beautiful music! Another note I left myself: Murphy’s right, this is way better.

Maybe I’m playing my hand here by admitting that I’d probably follow Murphy’s lead and pick the beautiful “fake” reality in Avalon over the miserable “real” world of Avalon. Ash’s stance is that Murphy is running away—but from what seems unclear. The closest community ties we see are the parties formed by players, and those seem tenuous at best, formed around a shared wish to Be Good At Game more than anything else. And this is why I think I find .hack//SIGN an useful interlocutor here, because Itō seems to be thinking through something similar. Like Avalon, .hack//SIGN revolves around a solo player slowly connecting with other players to achieve a goal while navigating the influence of the capricious game developers. Like Avalon, .hack//SIGN explores the meaning of reality through the players and their relationship to the game and to their lives outside of the game, touching on feelings of societal alienation and escapism through video games. Like Avalon, .hack//SIGN is…slow, and unlike Avalon, not particularly interested in any sort of cohesive storyline, which is actually a plus to me—I wish Avalon had leaned a little more into the abstract.

But that said, I’m not willing to dismiss Avalon. For my complaints about the video game world seeming as drab as the world the players want to escape from, that drabness is important. The line between the game Avalon and the real world is blurred from the beginning. There is a hue shift: the game world is largely sepia, reminiscent of vintage military footage, while the real world is largely grey and blue, but the palette stays tightly confined, and in places certain spots are drawn out in different colors, such as placing pink highlights in Ash’s eyes to draw our focus to them. When the Ghost, a little girl that appears under specific conditions as a portal to Special A, first appears, she appears in full color, her skin nearly translucent pink and her blue dress shocking after an hour of muddy, soft shapes. (Interestingly, Itō uses the figure of a little girl in .hack//SIGN as a symbol within the game-world. Just saying!!) Shots are frequently composited, especially within Avalon, so that elements interact in ways that mimic a real video game, never quite existing perfectly together. The result is a lingering unsettledness, a feeling that even the real world is being controlled and designed in the way the world of Avalon is. Here’s really where the philosophical questions about reality come to bear, even if the narrative never quite fully delivers on that premise. Kenji Kawai’s score also deserves a shout out—moody and haunting, his sound carries a lot of the dramatic impact and is well worth a listen on its own.

Is Avalon worth the watch? I’d say so. Though it’s not one I think I’ll return to, I’m glad I spent time with it. Even if I did have to stay up past my bedtime.

But. Also: Watch .hack//SIGN.