During the scene in Ready Player One where Steven Spielberg leads his merry band of Goonies knock-off, ethnically diverse, video game addicts through The Overlook Hotel, I was doubled over in my seat trying to stifle my involuntary shrieks of pain and profanity.
Sweet weeping lil baby Jesus on the cross, I haven’t had a rush of panic and mixed emotions like that in a movie theater in a long time.
And if you did too, then you’ve come to the right place, if you didn’t, then allow me to submerge your mind in an ocean of full blown terror.
First of all, I feel like someone should have bloody well said something. I would have expected warning signs at the very least. You can’t just pull Kubrick out of his grave and twirl him around like a disco ball without calling your shots first.
More importantly, regardless of the legality of who owns the rights to The Shining (because obviously King Spielberg can do pretty much whatever he wants) I feel like there is an artistic violation going on here that has been overlooked and unaddressed.
Namely, nobody asked Stanley Kubrick if they could stampede this movie through his.
Irrespective of it’s legality, and without taking into account the artistic contribution of Ready Player One itself, this is unethical.
It’s like Nathan Fielder’s “Dumb Starbucks,” legal, funny, but we all know it’s a dick move. Nathan is a comedian though, and he was doing that to create satirical art.
Spielberg on the other hand, was just fanboying his way through the hotel without wiping his feet first and in the process subverted the original authorial intent of Kubrick’s creation. It’s a permanent smudge on the creative canvas Kubrick painted decades ago. I can’t put my finger on it, but I instinctively knew that something was wrong when I saw that scene as evidenced by the fact that I started hyper-ventilating and loudly swearing.
A related example of this is the now infamous “Fearless Girl” statue that was placed in front of “The Charging Bull” statue on Wall Street in New York City.
Feminist message and legal authority left aside, this piece of art achieves it’s meaning by permanently subverting the work of the artist who made “The Charging Bull.” And for whatever else may be said about it, there’s something unethical about this. I don’t need anyone to tell me, I know.
And this at last is the real reason why that scene in Ready Player One was so deeply disturbing to me.
Because now they can do that.
It’s precedent.
An entire generation of artists is being taught that it is perfectly acceptable, and even laudable, to create art that derives it’s meaning by ravaging the work of artists that came before them.
Now I’m not going to sit here and advocate some kind of weird censorship, or try to limit anyone’s free speech, or anything like that.
And maybe nothing is sacred, and all’s fair, etc. etc.
But the word that keeps coming into my mind is cannibalism.
Artistic cannibalism.
At this point dear reader the eye of your mind should be filling with the most exquisitely vivid nightmares bubbling out of the pop culture cauldron of Ready Player One and oozing like black tar acid blood through the most precious moments of all the movies you have ever seen.
You startin’ to see pictures, aint ya?
Here’s looking at you kid.
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