I’m thinking that it’s the shortcuts an artist takes that tend to date a work. I’ve had Smooth Criminal in my head for a litlte while. And it’s an excellent song, for what it is. It’s well-written — but the entirety of that album is cheap synthesizers, with MJ singing on top.
That song could have been properly orchestrated and performed. And you could trace what decade it came from, stylistically, but it wouldn’t sound “dated”, in the sense that it’s somehow… no longer as relevant? The synth is so cheap and tinny that it’s distracting. And again, the entire album is kind of like that. It was a way for Jackson to have complete control over what he was doing. Which is fine, but then he didn’t go back and flesh it out. The synth was “good enough”. So twenty years later, it sounds like a bit of a cop-out.
And I’m just projecting here, but it strikes me that many of the things that seem laughable or outdated in film or music or videogames are similarly cheap compromises. Some kind of a contemporary easy solution. Whereas the things that still seem relevant today, however you might trace them to a particular era stylistically, tend to find all their own custom solutions to their problems: The Maltese Falcon; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; a lot of the later-on Beatles stuff.
There are phases that a medium goes through, artistically. Pop trends in simple solutions. Videogames go through a lot of them. “Oh, here’s the proper way to deal with this.” Which is one of the things that bugs the hell out of me with that Ludology business.
Ludology is the academic study of videogames. Which is, you know… it generally tries to be very objective, in studying what videogames are, and how they work right now, and what has been done before, and how to hone that model. It’s proscriptive by implication of description. So what it tends to do is it objectifies videogames as an end unto themselves. As opposed to, you know, exploring how this tool set might be used to say something new or interesting. And it’s got that whole academic sniffiness about it, just to make it the more obnoxious.
An analytical breakdown is useful, but in context. In service to a greater goal. Videogames are about communication, as is all art. Though to a certain extent more overtly than most. Any analysis should be about exploring the mechancis and ramifications of that discussion. Rather than focused on What Videogames Are.
Anyway. I guess this kind of ties into the shortcut thing — the objective treatment of a work, using the standards of the day, tends to in the long run turn the work into a bit of an artifact. So. Basically, there’s something complex going on when you throw a band-aid on and say “yeah, this’ll work.” In a few years, the patchwork will become opaque, and it will begin to define your work.
And that’s also how genres get dumb, when people say “Oh, I like that — I’m going to do something just like it!” That’s the same thing. You’re taking someone else’s solution and applying it out of context. You’re taking a subjective goal and treating it objectively. Until the solutions begin to define what things are, rather than what they’re trying to solve.
What’s amazing about something like The Maltese Falcon — the Huston version — is that there are virtually no shortcuts. There’s pretty much never a sense that anyone involved just pulled something off the shelf and said “okay, this takes care of that. No one will notice.” Even though it’s the third version of the same movie to be made by the same studio, in under ten years. So you come at it now, and everything feels like they’re figuring it out for the first time, on their feet. Everything is custom-tailored to the situation. And it’s gripping and relevant and alive, every time you see it. And this is what makes a work timeless.
