The Realism & Joy of Ready Player One

I haven’t yet seen the soon-to-be released movie Ready Player One, but I did spend the last few days reading Ernest Cline’s novel. Keeping in mind the last film theory essay that I summarized on this blog (read it here), I wanted to read the book so I could then compare it to the Spielberg-directed movie once it came to a theater near me and once I could scrape together the funds for the movie ticket and some popcorn. I’m sure the movie is going to be great—and since Cline himself co-wrote the screenplay, I’m sure it’ll try to stay as true as possible to the book—but I’m just as sure that because of the different mediums, no matter how true the story is to the book the movie is going to have huge differences.

This post is basically a Ready Player One appreciation post. I loved the book and I hope that the book itself doesn’t get overlooked by the movie.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline is a fascinating, fast-paced read. Set in the near-future, in 2044, the book follows teenage Wade Watts, a.k.a. Parzival, as he tries to find a hidden prize in the virtual reality world called OASIS. Although a great deal of the action happens in virtual reality, there are plenty of real-world consequences for Watts as he tries to get the prize—which includes billions of dollars and control over OASIS itself. What I loved most about the book was not just the tight plot or the plethora of pop culture references, but was also the fresh imagining of our future. Dystopian futures seem to be a dime a dozen at this point, and although Ready Player One is far from presenting a completely happy, utopian view of how our society will progress, the future presented in the book is one not without hope and human joy. New technology such as virtual reality is not evil, but is instead the avenue through which society and humanity will continue living and advancing. And, at the same time, the book argues that although virtual reality is not evil, it is also not reality—and, at its best, it pushes people back out into reality, into the joys and struggles of their actual lives.

The book also challenges the shaming that goes on over how people use their time with technology. There are hundreds of news stories citing doomsday statistics about tech addiction and how many hours people spend on their phones or social media or playing video games. There are sometimes stories about the craziness of people meeting online and falling in love in virtual realities. And there are hundreds if not thousands of memes shared online about the self-consciousness of people who spend a lot of time online.

At this point in our history, our culture does not value time spent online. Instead of focusing our energy on how to create a productive online atmosphere, so far we’ve been more interested in shaming people for spending time in the online realm which is, supposedly, “not real.”

But, as seen in Ready Player One, time spent in video games and the internet and in virtual realities IS life—or at least part of it. Online, people make friends, form connections, have typical life experiences, learn new things about themselves and the world, fall in love, etc. So why is that deemed “not real”? Feeling self-conscious and shamed about spending time in an online or virtual reality realm is as crazy as feeling self-conscious and shamed about spending time in any place on Earth different from where you actually live. Virtual reality worlds are really like any physical place—and going there is like going on any vacation. Stuff that happens on a vacation is completely real, completely important and meaningful.

And at the same time, no matter how meaningful, a vacation should re-energize you and push you back into your home, your actual reality.

As our society shapes and reshapes around the new technology and the Digital Revolution, we’re going to have to change some of our misconceptions about reality. I loved Ready Player One because—through detailed world-building that can only really be asserted through written text—it portrays a complex relationship with reality and technology that speaks just as much to our world today as how our world might be in 2044. These technologies aren’t going anywhere—so these types of subjects and complexities are stuff we need to be thinking and re-thinking about. So now I can’t wait to see the movie, even though I’ll probably be one of those people who read and loved the book annoyingly saying, “That’s not how it happened!” to everything in the film. Still, the story itself is worth the watch.

And I hope you’ve decided that the book is worth the read.

—CFH

Summary of “What Novels Can Do that Films Can’t (and Vice Versa)”

About the essay & author: Seymour Chatman (August 30, 1928-November 4, 2015) was an American film and literary critic, a giant figure in the study of narratives and Structuralism (see last summary on Screened for more info about Structuralism), and he was a professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkley. “What Novels Can Do” was published in Critical Inquiry in Autumn 1980.

Summary of the essay: The essay begins with a brief discussion of narratives and narratology. “Narratology” comes from the French term la narratologie and means the study of narratives. Narratology has taught us that narrative has its own independent structure no matter what medium is being used to convey the narrative. Chatman describes narrative as “a kind of text organization.”

“… narrative itself is a deep structure quite independent of its medium.”

Narratives have a “double time structuring.” That means that narratives always operate with and in two times—the time sequence of the plot (“story-time”) and the time when in the text those plot events are presented (“discourse-time”). No matter the medium, these two different times are independent in the text. (And “text” throughout the essay could mean written language, films, comics, etc.) The essay then goes into how narratives are adaptable—they can be translated into different mediums. For example, Cinderella has been used and reused in ballet, opera, film, comics, and so on. Although so far most narratology has focused on how narratives are the same despite the medium in which they are presented, this essay begins to discuss how each medium—especially the written word versus film—works differently when presenting the same narrative.

“… any narrative can be actualized by any medium which can communicate the two time orders.”

Chatman brings up description in novels and short stories—big chunks of written text in which “the time line of the story is interrupted and frozen.” He gives an example of Maupassant’s story “Une partie de campagne” and contrasts the written description with the same setting as presented in Renoir’s 1936 adaptation. In the written text, the number of details are limited, and the reader expands on these details through imagination. In the visual text, there are many more details—but the details are not asserted by a narrator. Since the details are not brought, in a limited way, to our attention, we only focus on them if they relate obviously to the plot and what might happen next. Chatman anticipates some counterpoints to his argument, such as the “camera eye style” of writing and close-ups and establishing shots in film, but says that the difference is still that in movies the sense of continuing action doesn’t stop. He also claims that in establishing shots story-time is not suspended like in written description, but rather that the story has not yet begun.

“… narrative films do not usually allow us time to dwell on plenteous details.”

Chatman returns to another Maupassant descriptive passage and brings up the point that written words can be evaluative as well as descriptive, such as with the adjective “pretty.” With these words, readers will bring their own notions to the written text, but will know that whatever is being presented is “pretty.” However, in film, the audience has to be in agreement with the filmmaker to reach the same evaluation. Everyone has different notions of what “pretty” means, and when asked to describe with words something or someone presented in a film, we might not all come up with the word “pretty” even if that was what the filmmaker intended.

“… film does not describe at all but merely presents.”

Another difference between the two mediums is how a narrator or speaker in a written text can reveal a lot about him or herself and larger society and setting by what he or she is saying. Chatman claims that the camera cannot invoke tone in the same way. In film, the visual point of view cannot be escaped, while in a written text the author has more freedom and flexibility. The filmmaker can invoke emotions and subtleties in the narrative visually, such as through camera placement—creating stagelike “planes of action” and giving us the emotional point of view of characters, making us identify with them—and “reaction editing” that can, without speaking or asserting, give us light commentary on what’s happening in the society onscreen.

“Once that illusory story-time is established in a film, even dead moments, moments when nothing moves, will be felt to be part of the temporal whole…”

Although film and written texts can convey the same narratives, with film the narrative’s underlying messages are more abstract while the plot is emphasized, and with written texts the plot can be paused and de-emphasized while things are described and commentary is asserted.

“So writer, filmmaker, comic strip artist, choreographer—each finds his or her own ways to evoke the sense of what the objects of the narrative look like.”

Why read this essay? I picked this essay to summarize because we have some big adaptations coming out right now in the movie world—A Wrinkle in Time and the soon to be released Ready Player One, for instance. Since movies began, filmmakers have been making films out of “proven” narratives that had previously been bestselling or classic novels or short stories. But despite how proven the narrative, some adaptations are better than others. This essay helps to understand some of the reasons why—and it makes you think about how narratives and different artistic mediums function.

Want to read this essay for yourself? Go here.

—CFH