One-Player Game: Connection, Fantasy and Ready Player One
Steven Spielberg returns to the kind of film-making he made his name in and asks if movies are disconnecting us from the world
THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS. DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU HAVE SEEN READY PLAYER ONE.
What’s the point of a film? Actually, scratch that: what’s the point of any form of art? Film, literature, TV, music, comic books, or video games. What’s the point of any of them? A big question, I know, but one Steven Spielberg repeatedly asks us to think about in Ready Player One. What are these things meant to achieve, and what happens when our obsession with the minute details — of the art and the creators of the art — overshadows the overall message of the art? Does that art still have purpose — does it still speak of its creator and to its audience — or does it just become an empty shell, an artefact waiting to be referenced and gathering dust on someone’s shelf?
The question is particularly pertinent for Spielberg, whose early masterpieces created a subgenre that he’s become locked into, despite not working within it for decades. When we call something Spielbergian we tend not to be referencing the full range of his diverse career, but instead a very small handful of perennial favourites: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T. primarily. Spielbergian media is typically seen to be fantastical in nature and heartwarming in emotion. It focuses on kids in the throes of family difficulties, small suburban towns undergoing some extraordinary event and a persistent aura of magic and mystery that can both delight and destroy. Stranger Thingsis Spielbergian. Super 8 is Spielbergian. It is Spielbergian.
Is this really what Spielbergian is though? Those early masterpieces aren’t hailed as such because they tick certain generic boxes or have budget enough to provide eye-popping spectacle: indeed, E.T. was made on a budget of just $10.5 million and acted as an antidote to blockbusters. The fantasy isn’t the key thing here; it’s the heart that counts. E.T. is a film about loneliness, connection and the catharsis we enjoy when we let our emotions run free. Close Encounters is the same, as are the three 80s Indiana Jones films, with Indy undergoing great personal realisations and forming connections he didn’t previously have: with Marion in Raiders, the villagers in Temple of Doom and his father in Last Crusade.
This is the true essence of Spielbergian for Spielberg. Connection and communication are critical. Without that bond between characters, a film doesn’t work. More importantly, without that bond between characters and the audience, the film doesn’t have a purpose. It’s why Spielberg films so often prioritise the link with the audience, who he has described as “his bosses”. Sometimes this is done to build a direct connection (normally through The Spielberg Face), sometimes to intentionally subvert that connection (see, for example, Jurassic Park and Minority Report), but always to make a point about the way we connect.
It is, for him, what movie-going is all about. When we go to the cinema, we don’t just watch a movie, we share it, laughing at the funny parts, jumping at the scary parts, and crying at the sad parts. It’s no coincidence that Close Encounters and E.T. end with scenes in which throngs of people are gathered together in transcendent, emotional community. We’re watching people watch the thing that we’re watching. They reflect us and we reflect them. Everything blends together. And with fantasy offering the opportunity to extend reality beyond what we know, that genre makes this connection bigger and bolder: hyper-reality and hyper-emotion. “I want to make reality something fun to live with because that is what it is” he’s quoted as saying in Philip M. Taylor’s book ‘Steven Spielberg’. “I don’t want people to escape from reality — I want them to escape withreality.”
Since the heyday of the Spielbergian era, Spielberg has evolved his style and diversified his interests, delving into historical drama and being happier to let others take on the big blockbusters and Spielbergian film-making. The films that have done this have all been enjoyable and blended core Spielbergian tropes well, but they’ve not quite communicated the most important about thing about them: they’ve lacked that focus on connection. And so today, with superhero movies generating epic, high-stakes fantasies and the film-viewing experience increasingly happening outside of the communal arena of the cinema, Spielberg’s vision of fantasy and film as tools to enhance our real-world bonds seems more distant than ever. We’re all escaping from reality.
A CREATOR WHO HATES HIS CREATION
Enter Ready Player One. Based on Ernest Cline’s popular novel, the film is a self-reflexively Spielbergian adventure about characters who want to flee a ravaged world. They do this by entering into The Oasis, a sprawling virtual reality computer game where you can go anywhere and be anyone. Our hero Wade (Tye Sheridan) can adopt a different name (Parzival, a play on the Knight of the Round Table, Percival), alter his face and hair whenever he likes, drive the DeLorean from Back to the Future and even adopt the fashions of his favourite pop culture icons: from Buckaroo Banzai to the Michael Jackson of the Thriller video. Back in the real world, however, he’s isolated, living with his aunt and her abusive boyfriend, and trudging off alone to hook into his virtual, ‘better’ landscape.
The Oasis was created by another lost and lonely soul: James Halliday. Played by Mark Rylance, Halliday cuts a shy and tragic figure, his feather-soft delivery speaking of a man who really didn’t want the fame that his creation brought him. It’s with Halliday that Spielberg’s interest seems to lie (Rylance has become modern Spielberg’s cinematic avatar and his younger incarnation even has the unkept hair of 70s-era Spielberg). He’s a highly fêted visionary artist, and he has two defining works: The Oasis, and the Easter Egg Hunt he leaves behind after his death. This Hunt is comprised of three clues that lead to three keys that open three gates. The person who opens all the gates wins ownership of The Oasis, but the clues are cryptic and relate to an element of the reclusive Halliday’s life.
The difference in artistic value between the Oasis and the Hunt is critical to Ready Player One’s thematic core. In this virtual world, everyone is obsessed with the past. Nostalgia is an easy retreat, but a dangerous one that separates us from the present and distorts our understanding of what reality actually is. As he so often does, Spielberg communicates this through light and colour. Powered by Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography, everything in The Oasis is blinding white, murky blacks and greys, and washed out blues. Spielberg used a similar approach in Minority Report to show how far John Anderton was slipping from recognisable reality in his pursuit of atonement for his son’s disappearance. In Ready Player One, we’ve already slipped, and as a result, The Oasis is more dystopian than the idyllic title suggests.
Spielberg’s camerawork plays a significant role too as he uses the boundless possibilities of digital film-making to create extended shots that flow anywhere they like in his virtual sets. Long takes have always been a key part of his film-making, of course, and he typically uses them to help the audience breathe the world and characters in; in other words, to build a connection. Here though, they’re used to take in chaos. An early race sequence is captured through a series of eye-popping long takes and every single frame of celluloid is filled with visual noise. Alan Silvestri’s score is notably silent during this sequence as Spielberg ensures that every tyre screech, window smash and (yep!) T-Rex roar is heard in all its cacophonous chaos. “It’s so much slower here,” Wade tells love interest Samantha (Art3mis, within the Oasis) when they’re in the real world. Indeed it is, and Spielberg undoubtedly prefers it.
What Wade sees of Halliday within The Oasis is utterly disconnected from that reality, despite what he thinks he knows. Sure, he can spin off every random fact with obsessive rapidity and in minute detail, but it’s all just hero worship; an image, as Samantha tells him of herself when he awkwardly professes his love for her. These things don’t actually say much about who Halliday was and what he went through, just what he watched, listened to, read and ate. The art has become artefact because Wade, and all the other people consuming it, have rendered it so, memorising it but not understanding it. If a film, as Roger Ebert once said, is “a machine that generates empathy”, The Oasis is a machine that generates apathy.
The Hunt, Spielberg suggests, is Halliday’s true work of art. More than just a game, it’s a three-act narrative in which each part reveals a little more about Halliday’s true nature. By taking it on, players are actively engaging with him, his loves and his life; coming to understand his personality, motivations and sadness better with each turn. One clue tells of a “creator who hates his creation,” while the path to another reveals Halliday’s desire to flee the responsibility The Oasis lumbered him with and a decisive falling out with its co-creator Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg). Everything within The Hunt has a meaning that The Oasis itself lacks; it’s a story that makes sense of the details.
YOU’VE ALWAYS BEEN HERE
Halliday’s greatest trauma revolves around Kira, Morrow’s late wife who Halliday once loved and went on a disastrous date with. This forms the basis of The Hunt’s second clue and births one of the most remarkable scenes Spielberg has ever put together as Wade, Samantha and their group of friends (fellow hunters Atch, Daito and Shoto, collectively known as The High Five) enter the film Halliday took Kira to see on that date: The Shining. It’s an important and inspired choice that differs significantly from the source. In the novel, Cline had the characters enter War Games and live it out word for word to win the key. By changing the film to The Shining, Spielberg achieves a few different things. Firstly, he reaffirms The Oasis’s dystopian nature. The Shining, of course, is about mazes and characters getting stuck in a past they can’t escape. Everybody in Ready Player One is similarly stranded and struggling to break free.
Secondly, and most importantly, it establishes Halliday’s life as a nightmare that he can’t wake up from. Everything about him is contained within this second clue: a superhero origin story for a character whose avatar is a all-powerful being called Anorak. His shyness prevented him from showing his affection for Kira, and when she ultimately falls for Morrow, Halliday shuns the world and retreats into the safety of The Oasis. It’s why we see he and Kira in the same picture Jack Torrence is seen in at the end of The Shining. He’ll never escape this one moment because he never tried, happier instead to live in a comforting fantasy. So tragically, this brief glimpse of love and happiness has been twisted forever into a horror film. Halliday has always been here, and he always will be.
Before we start to feel too sorry for him though, Spielberg darkens his character. At the centre of this recreation is Kira herself. She’s in the Overlook Hotel’s bar, but instead of Lloyd cheerfully serving drinks, she’s surrounded by dancing green zombies: a reference to the first video game Halliday ever created. She seems lost and confused, and while the film doesn’t explicitly say it, it’s entirely possible that this isn’t just a reproduction of Kira, but a sentient being of some sort. Maybe even Kira herself brought back to life. Halliday’s undying love for her and paralysing fear of change, failure and pain have created something horribly warped: a guilt-ridden look at the past where Kira is forever the subject of his selfish love and refusal to evolve.
It’s telling that she’s freed by Samantha, who solves the puzzle and wins the key while Wade and the rest of the gang get sucked out onto the street. Just as Wade sees Halliday as an image and falls in love with Art3mis (Samantha’s image of herself), Halliday saw Kira as an image: a perfect vision for him to love and make him feel complete. Much more emotionally mature than Wade, Samantha understands connection and communication and has empathy enough to see through the position Kira’s been put in and help her escape it. Halliday never truly understood the art he worshipped and so couldn’t use their lessons to connect with Kira or anybody else in the real world. At this point, Wade is the same. He knows everything there is to know about Halliday, but Samantha is the one who knows what it actually means.
THANK YOU FOR PLAYING MY GAME
As the film moves towards the final key and the battle for the future of The Oasis, Wade begins to learn his lesson and forms a bond, not just with Samantha and the rest of the High Five, but everybody else in The Oasis too. Becoming the leader of a makeshift army, he implores his fellow Oasis citizens to descend on the final gate, which the villainous Nolan Sorrento has blocked off behind a forcefield, and they arrive in their droves to wage war. With battle commencing, Spielberg orchestrates one of the biggest action set pieces he’s ever shot. It’s stunning in its scope, but somewhat unusual for a director who tends to favour smaller, more intimate spectacle (the bike chase in E.T., the tank fight in Last Crusade). This, quite pointedly, is the domain of Man of Steel and Avengers: Age of Ultron.
Yet, he plays with our expectations and even subverts the Big Final Battle trope by regularly cutting between events in the Oasis and those in the real world. In doing so, he forces the High Five to reveal themselves to one another and brings them closer together as actual people, not virtual avatars. This is the true nature of Spielbergian film-making and it underlines that the real oasis and real connection lies beyond the digital Oasis and the references it holds. Wade may know everything there is to know about the fantasies he adores, but it’s only once he breaks free of virtual reality that he genuinely understand them and the importance they hold.
With the bond between characters established, Spielberg now comments on the bond between creator and audience. To complete the game, unlock Halliday’s secrets and win ownership of The Oasis, challengers need to play a video game. The identity of the game is a secret and even when Sorrento and his team work it out (Atari’s Adventure), there’s a twist in the tail: the point is not to win the game, but to find the Easter Egg hidden within it. The egg, it turns out, is nothing more than the name of its creator, Warren Robinett, and therein lies the point — of the egg, of the Hunt, of Ready Player One as a whole. By placing his name in his creation, the film suggests, Robinett formed a bond between himself and the player, letting them know it was he who built it. Playing, therefore, becomes a conversation, the game a starting point in a friendship: artist meet audience, audience meet artist.
In this sense, The Hunt is itself an Easter Egg and Wade’s prize for winning it is a trip to Halliday’s childhood bedroom and a meeting with the man himself. Like so many moments of comfort and success in Spielberg films, the room is bathed in a warm orange glow, but there’s a sense of darkness lining the edges. Halliday’s childhood self sits in the room playing a video game and, like Kira during The Shining sequence, he looks a little lost: is he trapped here against his will? Is he an empty representation or something sentient? Halliday hands over a golden egg and Wade asks what he really is: is he an avatar and if he isn’t, is Halliday actually dead? No answer is forthcoming. He simply thanks Wade for playing his game and leaves the room, never to be seen again.
So what is Halliday? The point isn’t so much that we don’t know, it’s that we have to make our own minds up. Wade has formed a bond with Halliday based on his pain: he has come to understand him not just as a list of facts and figures, dates and references, but his lost loves, his loneliness, his desire to be understood in a world that really didn’t understand him. As audience members, we must do the same, forming our own bond with the characters and ultimately drawing our own conclusions: on Halliday, on Ready Player One, on Spielberg, and on film directors and films as a whole. Once we’ve done that, we must use those conclusions to enrich our real lives, not get bogged down in a fantasy that separates us from them. Thank you for watching my films, Spielberg seems to be saying. Now go out and use what you’ve learned.
All of Spielberg’s recent films have been laced with a lingering anxiety: the boys vaulting suburban fences like defectors climbing the Berlin Wall in Bridge of Spies; the relentless trogglehumper reminding us of a mistake we can never atone for in The BFG; the Watergate coda of The Post, telling us to be vigilant of any threats to democracy, lest they lead to further, bigger ones. With Ready Player One‘s conclusion, he strikes the same cautious note, wondering if the communal experience of cinema can live on and if the desire to escape with reality has been replaced by a desire to escape from it. It’s a desperate plea of a movie, a plea to film-makers and film-goers alike to not just make and watch movies, but connect with them and share them in our flawed and frustrating reality.
“Come,” beckons The Oasis. “Stay,” is Spielberg’s determined response.
This essay was first posted on From Director Steven Spielberg
