“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.
Brain bleach for everyone who watched the horrible film you earned it you beautiful, brave heroes/heroines and I just want to post these because of the lack of brain bleach.
http://youtu.be/0UT6rmrr9a4
http://youtu.be/TO52ecsXrwA
http://youtu.be/TOZnDVrfwm8
http://youtu.be/CE-JlvmnRtY
So, did they ever say what the Sarkeesian Effect… Effect is? Is it an appreciable effect? Statistically significant? Beneficial or harmful?
You mean those homsexual and communists who were fired because they weren’t following the previous agenda will fire you because you aren’t following theirs?
What goes around comes around.
It’s a pretentious word salad based on a mashup of Ayn Rand, Catholicism, and Aristotle.
If you search for a dictionary definition of “virtue,” you’ll see that it can mean either “behavior showing high moral standards,” or “a good or useful quality of a thing.” Natural Law argument tear them as the same thing. Ignore the word “concept” that snuck in somehow, and they are saying that all life, even bacteria, has good or useful qualities because without those qualities it could not survive.
good advice!
What about the big sting, where Owen reveals that FemFreq’s address is a fancy PO Box? Did that make the final cut?
“There’s two sides to every story…but we’re going to demonize one of ’em anyway!”
I’m not sure why I just watched that 8 1/2 minute video of GoPro wearing cats, but after a few more beers I could probably talk at length about the Rashomon style aspect of it, and the arc of the black twist-tie.
/still a better doc than Sarkeesian Effect.
Policy of Madness: I asked, but nobody I can see has yet mentioned it 🙂 Either it isn’t there because he realized it was stupid, or the rest of the film is so mindbogglingly appalling that it pales in comparison to all the other moments and isn’t worth mentioning.
Man, I’m not even a big watcher of documentaries but I feel like the thing to do is to put your subject in front of a neutral background and have them speak facing slightly to the side of the camera and never have the interviewer visible or audible ever.
I definitely don’t remember seeing any documentaries of 3 people sitting next to each other craning their necks awkwardly while one of them talks and the interviewer’s feet are waggling off the side of the frame.
I mean, you’d think with this amount of money they’d try thinking about what they were doing and how they would do it?
@ deniseeliza
It only really makes sense to me, personally, if I think of it as cognitive dissonance in action. Owen and Aurini invested so much of themselves in the belief that Sarkeesian was just throwing together the videos and rolling in the piles of leftover money that they appear to have tried doing the same themselves and using the universal, intuitive know-how of their manhood to cut more corners that they thought Sarkeesian was, leaving them even more money to roll around in!
Only it didn’t work, because making professional videos is hard, even if you have a thesis to present beyond blind hate for a vague grouping of people with whom you disagree.
If you have an Amazon Prime membership, you can watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi for free. It is fantastic. No neutral backgrounds there.
18.
Release the film behind a pay wall before giving a even figuring out how to give the project backers the free copy you promised them
https://twitter.com/jordanowen42/status/643879695616880641
Well, it’s sure proven Anita Sarkeesian’s opinions are lies.
Opinions – a personal view or judgment. Lies – an intentionally false statement.
Triangle in square wat. I still don’t understand enough to even begin to assess this.
Thank you, David.
Ha, yeah, there’s tons of documentaries with more action in them like Jiro Dreams of Sushi (its been a long time since I saw it but I recall it was largely the follow-someone-around type of documentary). But I feel like if you’re going to have the sit-around-and-talk-about-stuff type of documentary, you want to frame it so that the subject looks good and you aren’t distracted by the terrible crap in the background. I’m thinking of the documentary I watched most recently, The Imposter, which does have a lot of re-enactments to spice things up, but the interviews are all your standard look just off to the side of the camera and talk to the invisible omnipresent interviewer we never see or hear, and the backgrounds are either neutral or a very clean living room with nobody else in it and nothing distracting.
The Imposter is great, btw.
Unrelated, but has been referenced too many times in articles about MGTOWs and in various comment sections not to share:
http://m.newser.com/story/212901/campaign-launches-to-stop-rise-of-sex-robots.html
Following up on PoM’s suggestion: A warning that “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” will make you shed a single tear over scrambled eggs.
Not an exaggeration.
Somehow, this tells me all I needed to know about these guys, and what they see as women’s whole and sole function in the world. (Except maybe the Honey Badgers, whose sole purpose is to be the
useful idiots of the “movement”MRA women’s auxiliary. And who will be ejected from the treehouse as soon as one of them looks at Paulie cross-eyed. Or rebuffs his advances, should it come to that.)Also:
Even the bacteria that cause gas gangrene? Even the Ebola virus? Even you guys? (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Now it all makes sense! The actual “Sarkeesian Effect” isn’t anything she did, it’s just what they THINK she did…and what they themselves did, in a vain effort to prove that she’s some kind of man-hating scam artist!
In other words: This film doesn’t need a silver screen upon which to be projected; it IS a projection, all unto itself.
Number 2 was kind of unnecessary, I don’t see what their profession have to do with anything. Even if the porn/sex work industry have a lot of problems with sexism it doesn’t mean being a porn star or a sex worker makes you a sexist, hell I have seen a lot of feminist sex workers around the internet even. I assume it wasn’t intentional but it did come off a bit as slutshaming/wh*rephobia so might wanna reword that a bit
The best documentary I’ve seen recently is Girl Model. It’s on Netflix. The American version of Netflix at least. I know it varies by country. It made me really sad and really angry at the same time. It’s about how the fashion industry exploits young girls from economically depressed regions. It focuses on a 13 year old girl from Siberia and a former model turned agent from the US who went from the exploited to the exploiter. I can’t recommend it enough.
What the actual fuck?
nightmarelyre – I didn’t see that as slutshaming/ whorephobic (disclosure – previous sex worker) – I am too tired to explain why, but i found it OK, I found the sex industry to not be a pro feminist place.
WWTH – I saw that docu a few months ago. It did not surprise me in the least that the girls are often groomed into prostitution, and that that is a lucrative ‘sideline’. The veracity of it has been hotly disputed, with the key subject herself denying much of what was portrayed, but I cannot help feeling that that was simply a face saving exercise:
“Nadya Vall, now 17, at the center of it all, who has never even seen the film. She’s still working as a model and her agency is furious with the way she’s been portrayed in the film. Vall told us over email that she is confused and frustrated to learn, via letters and the internet, that she’s been depicted as a victim.”
Note that it is the agency who are ‘furious’!
Does anybody involved in this have any connection to gaming aside from Wardell and Thompson?
And speaking of Thompson, his inclusion really is hilarious. Please, tell me more about how GamerGate isn’t a bunch of reactionary shites using games journalism as a flimsy excuse to bash feminists.