Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

'Some Years from this Exact Moment': Neoliberal Governance in Neveldine/Taylor's Gamer

2010; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

1556-5068

Steven Shaviro,

Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor’s Gamer (2009) is brilliant in the way that only a sleazy exploitation movie could be. It is fast, cheap and out of control – the product of directors who cheerfully describe themselves as “pretty A.D.D.” (Quigley 2009). Neveldine/Taylor’s earlier Crank films already pushed the motifs of the action genre beyond all boundaries of taste and plausibility. But Gamer ups the ante considerably, in terms of both choreographed violence and conceptual edge. It’s an audacious movie; and one that, in the service of this audacity, isn’t afraid to risk seeming ridiculous or stupid. Gamer may well be, as Jeanette Catsoulis of The New York Times rather snarkily put it, “a futuristic vomitorium of bosoms and bullets” (2009). But this description needs to be read as praise rather than opprobrium. For Gamer is one of those rare films that truly dares to be “as radical as reality itself.” Precisely because of its exaggerations and funhouse distortions, it says more about the world we actually live in today than nearly any other recent American film that I have seen. Gamer remains a few steps ahead of any possible critical reflection that one might try to apply to it – including, of course, my own.