“They’re called tropes in games or something like that?”
— Brad Wardell, Game developer and Anita Sarkeesian expert
The Sarkeesian Effect, which premiered as a $3.99 “on demand” video on Vimeo yesterday, and which I forced myself to watch all two and a half hours of, is not so much a “documentary” as an object lesson in why it’s never a good idea to hand over tens of thousands of dollars to hateful, incompetent ideologues barely capable of making mediocre YouTube videos and expect them to produce a documentary that looks even vaguely professional.
I’ve seen homemade cat videos with better production values. I’m not talking about videos featuring cats. I’m talking about videos filmed by cats.
It’s clear from the start of Jordan Owen’s The Sarkeesian Effect — he and his filmmaking buddy Davis Aurini split some months ago amid mutual accusations of incompetence and con artistry — that he’s never made a documentary before. Indeed, his filmmaking missteps are so numerous and so flagrant it’s not clear he’s even seen a documentary before.
Nonetheless, I think his video might prove instructive to aspiring filmmakers, in that it so clearly demonstrates some of the many ways a documentary can go terribly, terribly wrong.
I wouldn’t suggest to any would-be filmmakers (or to anyone else) that they actually watch The Sarkeesian Effect, even when (as seems inevitable) it comes to YouTube for free; life is far too short and precious for that.
Instead, just take a look at these 17 completely wrong things about filmmaking I learned from The Sarkeesian Effect.
1) When you’re choosing who to interview for your documentary about a controversial critic of video games, make sure that most of those you talk to have no connection to video games and only a passing knowledge of the controversies in question.
In fact, it’s best if you let them demonstrate their lack of familiarity with the issues on camera, by, for example, stumbling over the name of Anita Sarkeesian’s longtime video collaborator, Jonathon McIntosh, before offering opinions about him. Or getting the name of her video series wrong.
2) If you’re interviewing women for your documentary, make sure that in addition to having no expertise on video games, most of them have some sort of connection to sex work and/or pornography.
The four women interviewed at the greatest length in this “documentary?” A sex worker, a porn star, an “erotic photographer,” and a former author of smutty fiction. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but none of the men interviewed for the documentary are sex workers or porn stars.
It’s almost as though Jordan Owen, as obsessed with porn as he is with Anita Sarkeesian, used the documentary as an excuse to talk to women involved in porn and sex work (none of whom seem to know much of anything about Anita Sarkeesian or video games), much as his ex-filmmaking-buddy used it as an excuse to interview right-wing ideologues (none of whom seem to know much of anything about Anita Sarkeesian or video games),
3) Make sure that the people you interview, who don’t actually know anything about the subject at hand, deliver their completely uninformed opinions with the smuggest looks on their faces as possible.
4) Make sure your interview subjects expose as much of their cleavage as possible.
5) If you’re interviewing a disbarred lawyer best known for his relentless attacks on video games, in order to show that even the notorious Jack Thompson “gets” how evil Anita Sarkeesian is, make sure to include the portion of the interview in which, while attempting to undermine Sarkeesian’s credibility, he compares the gaming industry to the Third Reich.
In the “documentary,” Thompson compares the Game Developers Choice Ambassador Award Sarkeesian received last year to the award Charles Lindbergh once got from literally Hitler. Then, realizing that he’s just Godwinned himself, Thompson suggests that “when you start receiving awards” — any awards at all, apparently — “you undercut your credibility as a critic.”
6) When you’re setting up shots of your interviewees, make sure to liven things up by including interesting things in the background. Like wires. And the occasional pizza box.
Yes, that’s right: THE PIZZA BOX MADE IT INTO THE FINAL CUT!
7) Put a little bit of yourself into each interview. Literally, in the form of your hands and/or feet poking out from the corner of the screen.
And if you’re afraid people might not notice your hands in the shot, wiggle them around a little.
https://twitter.com/betsyinferno/status/643502360367603715
8) If the sound for your interviews is kind of crappy, cover it up with music so loud it threatens to drown out the person talking.
And make sure that the mood of the music has no real connection to anything going on onscreen.
9) When interviewing a notorious far-right racist with no connection to video games for your film about video games, make sure to include his thoughts about “communists and homosexuals.”
“When I was a kid, if you were a communist or a homosexual, then you’d lose your career,” Jim Goad explains, while sitting on a park bench. “Now communists and homosexuals are in power, and re seeking to destroy the career of anyone who’s not down with their agenda.”
10) If the tagline to your film is “there’s two sides to every story,” demonstrate your commitment to telling both of these sides by declaring the subject of your film to be “a bully like none [the game industry] had ever encountered before.”
Then declare other women who’ve been harassed by online mobs to be
maniacal, mean-spirited, malicious thugs that attacked their chosen targets without mercy then switched on their victim persona when it suited them.
Also, after allowing your interview subjects to describe at length their versions of events involving women peripherally referenced in your documentary, make no effort whatsoever to discover whether or not any of what they’ve said is actually true.
11) Defend GamerGate from charges that it is a giant hate mob by declaring it to be “a passionate, vicious and unabashedly hostile pushback against Anita Sarkeesian” driven by “the unending fountain of rage from which we draw strength.”
12) When complaining about “professional victims,” make sure that most of your examples are women who have not in fact sought to profit in any way from their victimhood, including one woman who was fired from her job after posting a picture of two men who made crude sexual jokes at a tech conference.
13) Follow up your attack on professional victims who are not in fact professional victims with selections from an interview with a YouTuber who literally collects $3,305 from his Patreon supporters every time he makes a video, including those in which he attacks Sarkeesian (and there have been a lot of those).
In other words, he’s a professional victimizer, and a decently paid one at that. (For more, see “Sargon of Akkad and Thunderf00t: #Gamergate’s Well-Paid Talking Heads” by Daily Kos blogger idlediletante (Margaret Pless).)
14) When you run out of mean things to say about the subject of your documentary, make fun of the fact that she sometimes wears glasses.
Except instead of calling her a “bespectacled malcontent,’ call her a “bespeckled malcontent.’
“Bespeckled,” Google tells us, means to be covered “with a large number of small spots or patches of color.”
15) If you’re worried that your 2 1/2 hour-long “documentary” isn’t long enough, include a rambling, barely coherent Ayn Randian monologue about creators and “parasites.”
And start it off with this declaration:
All organic life possesses to some degree the concept of virtue which is the very act by which it is able to live.
No, really.
https://twitter.com/betsyinferno/status/643517431093325825
16) After kicking the subject of your documentary around for well over two hours, offer her perhaps the most ironic life advice ever given to anyone by an actual human being.
That is, if Paul Elam, notorious Men’s Rights garbage person, even counts as an actual human being.
Staring earnestly into the camera, Elam tells Sarkeesian
that you really do deserve and need to get some help. Whatever is driving you to push people and to harm people, whatever drives you to provoke people and take their reaction and raise money off of it is sociopathic behavior.
On Sunday, you may recall, Elam released a video in which, drunkenly slurring his words, he yelled out crude insults about the alleged foul odor of one feminist writer’s vagina. And went on at length about another feminist writer and her complete lack of interest in giving him and his colleagues blow jobs. It’s a little hard to explain.
You should probably just go watch the video, if you haven’t already. It’s much more entertaining than The Sarkeesian Effect, and only two minutes long.
17) And finally, when making a documentary criticizing journalists for alleged ethics violations, make sure not to mention that one of your interview subjects is married to a paid consultant on the film — the mysterious mediator who attempted to keep Owen and Aurini working together long enough to finish the project.
ETHICS!
EDIT: Removed a photo to make my joke about cleavage clearer. And added a bit more of an explanation to my point about Owen’s interviews of women involved in sex work and porn.
*On
Off topic:
So, was it known before that Joshua Goldberg* was the “mastermind” behind The Philosophy of Rape, or is that something that just came out?
*Whom I have seen referred to as Keyser Tröllse and ‘the Forrest Gump of trolls’.
So how does he explain the 2h36 that *did* make the final cut?
This means that somewhere, he has an uninterrupted dashcam recording of the entire drive to the post office, accompanied by a monologue that’s frequently drowned out by car noises. DVD extras for the loyal backers, no doubt.
The Sarkeesian Effect: Inside the Living Rooms of People Who Dislike Social Justice Warriors
WRT the women connected with the sex industry, I took away from it that this was just an observation David made: that the majority of the women were, with no explained reason, mainly sex workers or adjacent despite that having no connection with the film’s ostensible subject.
I agree it could be worded better, but it is something that would stick out, like if Jiro Dreams of Sushi had featured three shock jocks talking about that one time they ate sushi.
The “not that there’s anything wrong with that” disclaimer seems out of place, given that it is so often used by people who do think there’s something wrong with that and are implying as much, but want to be insulated from criticism.
Does anyone know if Jordan actually completed a degree at Berklee College of Music?
Newt: I now have a terrible image of the Kickstarter extended reward being a film of the entire film being made in real-time. Coming soon on only 6,457 DVDs!
It came up in the latest “Open Thread for non-personal stuff”:
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/09/11/open-thread-for-non-personal-stuff-sept-2015-amazing-cat-box-edition/comment-page-1/#comment-807568
Provided free, of course, to backers, except for a very small S&H charge, strictly to cover postage and the cost of the DVDs, of $10,000 per copy.
@ShakeB – Wow, I completely skipped over that bit. I just saw the article, skimmed it, and thought the associated links would be interesting (or at least funny).
What a hack job on the part of the summary writer.
The Sarkeesian Effect: Inside the Living Rooms & Bathtubs of People Who Dislike Social Justice Warriors
My point re sex workers/porn stars: If they had any expertise in the subject matter, that would be one thing. But they don’t. Granted, most of the men interviewed for the doc don’t either, but, huh, none of them are sex workers or porn stars.
Basically it looks like Owen used the doc as an excuse to talk to sex workers and porn stars, so much so that MOST of the screen time devoted to women interview subjects is given to these women. He’s been obsessed with porn for years.
Meanwhile, Aurini used the doc as an excuse to talk to assorted far-right ideologues (Jim Goad, for example). But we don’t see as many of them in the doc because Owen cut some of them out.
The cleavage bit was mainly intended as an excuse to post that pic of Elam.
@David:
It does seem to come across the opposite way, though, now that maghavan’s brought it up… as if you were using the pic of Elam to justify/excuse the cleavage joke.
Oh, and I’ll do a post on Joshua Goldberg, it’s just such a weird and complicated story I haven’t got it figured out yet. He trolled a LOT of people and his motivations for it all (beyond LULZ) aren’t clear. I think saying “gamergate supporter arrested for terrorism” is too simplistic.
Hmm. I’ll fiddle with the post.
@David Futrelle
Hurrah for fiddling!
In regards to Mercedes Carrera being in the film… her presence makes sense! Hear me out people 8p
Mercedes Carrera is one of Gamergate’s most useful PR personnel that serves multiple purposes –
1. They like using her to speak out against their critics. In the bizarre understanding of Gators, any criticism that people have about her statements and arguments is then viewed as being ‘sexist’. She is a master of the sea-lioning technique so it helps to justify the Gators’ frustration especially if the person debating/interviewing her gets (understandably) wounded up. I’m not the least surprised that she shows up as she is one of their spokespeople even though her expertise is incredibly dubious in regards to ‘journalistic ethics in gaming’ or Anita Sarkeesian.
2. She is ‘proof’ that Gamergate is not sexist (which of course is flat out wrong). She is the living version of #notyourshield because she represents a minority who is discriminated against that is more than willing to speak up on their behalf.
3. She dresses like this pretty much for all her public appearances so I do doubt if this is due to Jordan or Aurini. They may have taken advantage of the angle to highlight her physical qualities but that is speculation. I do agree with some of commentators that the remark could be modified to clarify the context – she is used as a PR trap more than anything and we should steer clear of that.
In my personal opinion, I doubt that she genuinely cares about Gamergate or its ’cause’. Like Milo and CHS, I think she is using this movement to be her own PR machine (she was unheard of till she came out as pro-GG) which of course makes her even more despicable if true. She most probably understands the demographic of GG better than any of us 8p.
She is also one of the best counter-points to #notyourshield ironically since they do literally use her to deflect criticism of Gamergate.
Ninja’d by OP! Good fiddling BTW David.
@History Nerd
I did some digging and I found his LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/jordan-owen/20/649/8b8
It says he attended from 02 to 06.
Apparently, according to a Berklee Atlanta Alumni website he was in a band called Incarceri 9.
https://www.berklee.edu/bt/211/atl.html
In a youtube video from 2011 he reveals he got kicked out. It’s on his channel.
Edit: kicked out from Incarceri 9 that is.
The post is much clearer now, thanks David.
I took the reference to sex workers and porn stars to be more of a reflection on Owen rather than a stab at the morals of people working in the sex industry–eg. that Owen might have them in his ‘documentary’ to attract some male viewers (to get least SOME people to sit through the full thing in all it’s unedited and idiotic glory). Thanks for the clarification as well. At least we can all be assured we aren’t witnessing the budding of the next Errol Morris or similar documentarians. 🙂
And I would like some scientific proof that Elam actually blinks. In every photo I see of him, his eyes are popping out of his head.
The edits re: sex workers makes the piece much better now David, thanks!
“the unending fountain of rage from which we draw strength.”—And when did having an unending fountain of rage become something to brag about? Mature people don’t operate and go about their daily lives from the view of unending fountains of rage.