The reasons why sci-fi films are going to be the only interesting films left

Blade Runner (1982) shows you perfectly how deeply, and how quickly, our views about future changed. If they're really going to release a second episode, I guess we'll see a totally different ensemble of futuristic elements, including, hopefully, monitors with a better resolution.

I already know you'll disagree. Many of you are just thinking that several genres still have a lot of things to show in terms of style and innovation, that you were so moved or so amused by that comedy or that tragic story, that it depends on one's taste and perspective, that that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio made you cry, that you felt your bowels twisting with rage during all the bloody tortures in 12 years a slave etc. etc.
 

So, first of all: what does "interesting" mean in this post? It means realistic. And what do I mean when I say realistic? I mean weighty, rich and problematic in terms of study of reality, of scientific analysis; this doesn't have anything to do with amusement, special effects, emotion, actors' skills, Michael Fassbender's coolness and so on. Depicting reality is the very essence of art, and an artist is not necessarily an entertainer, and vice-versa. Moreover, art is not just emotion. In the aristotelian sense, art is imitation of life, and the fact our view of life is always limited and keeps changing through the history doesn’t mean art can afford to stop analyzing it.

Eva Green played in Womb (2010), and this is the main reason why you must watch it, regardless of anything else. Apart from this, I really loved this "sci-fi" film (more precisely: a dramatic film with one single important futuristic element) because of its minimalist frames, its essential soundtrack, its wonderful script. No exaggeration, no pathos, no standard Hollywood stuff (this film is German/French/Hungarian: phew): a ravishing dramatic picture where photography and dialogues are perfectly balanced. It is one of the best movies I know about genetics. I think you should watch it because it faces a matter which is growing more and more present in human life: clonation; namely, the possibility to live again after life. As claimed by the director himself, Benedek Fliegauf, this work tries also to explain that "free will", in our time, is a great deal overrated in comparison with the inheritance of genes. Why do people always feel free?... Anyway, Eva Green.

Example: I LOVE Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), really; I mean, I could say it was epic, majestic, awe-inspiring etc., BUT it was not problematic: it didn't tell me anything about my reality, my world, the modern human's philosophical point of view etc. Reality keeps changing, and works of art show us the flowing of changing. 

Second example: The Revenant (2015), the revelation, greatest film of that year, DiCaprio's best etc: personally, I couldn't stand that film, since, well, watching an almost three hours long picture with a man suffering, starving, stumbling, falling from mortal heights and miraculously rising up again, surviving just with his mind steadiness instead of (logically) dying for septicaemia and persuading a virtual bear not to kill him even after shooting it is not a very fulfilling experience (no, I'm sorry: the fact it was semi-autobiographical does NOT make it more special, and stop with the “woow, a true story” effect); BUT: this doesn't mean I cannot admire the actor's skill, the special effects, the soundtrack, the make up and all the technical elements which made this film a "nice thing to watch spending few hours of your life", but NOT what I call a work of art.

Mad Max: Fury Road: probably the coolest film of 2015. But coolness is not everything, right?

So. Why sci-fi? Of course this genre changed a lot since its origins, and as you know genres grow more and more difficult to define: sometimes sci-fi means metal, hard silvery surfaces, laserguns, white aseptic rooms, but sometimes it just means a dramatic plot developing around one single futuristic element (The Astronaut's Wife [1999], Womb [2010]). Aliens are not that scaring anymore, and abductions are, at most, a cheesy horror happening (have you ever seen Extraterrestrial [2014]?) or a curious linguistic exchange (Arrival [2016]). 

We cannot imagine things, obviously, by using the same fantasy as once: maybe you forgot, but Blade Runner (1982) was set in 2019; 2019, got it? Basically, according to Scott's cult masterwork, we are already using both perfect humanoid robots and monitors with a very bad resolution. Nowadays, instead, we (well, most of us) cannot even imagine what's going to be invented in the next two years, and our predictions about future society cannot be but murky (and often worrying).

And all of this notwithstanding, the chief philosophical and social problems of our time (starting from 2000, more or less) are faced and depicted especially by sci-fi; I very rarely found the same “weight” in other cases (and of course I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy any other films at all): sci-fi is pretty much the only genre which still “dares”, from time to time. I think this also happens because we said basically everything about all the rest, and cinema (as already happened to literature long time ago) is growing old.   

“Late capitalism”, as someone defined this era, should be portrayed by expressing its decayment, but it’s quite easy to notice that most of the recently released films are just… pathos-oriented. Everything is pathos, and people comment like this: "Oh nice... but a little sad!" So, when I say sci-fi, I mean, in general, films with at least one sci-fi element: the film itself can be either a romantic story, or a post-apocalypse story, or a space journey, etc. It's impossible to be more precise.

Cosmopolis (2012) is one of the rare not-exactly-sci-fi films dealing with decay of capitalism. Cronenberg's last film, Maps to the stars (2014), is another beautiful portrait of the "tiredness" of the rich class, stuck in its contradictions, and the relationship between the entertainment industry and the Western society. Cronenberg, where are you? We need your disturbing talent!

The fact is that sci-fi still shows us aspects of reality which are worthy of a deep discussion - namely, which are problematic. They lead us to some kind of reflection about the development of human society, our main fears, our uncertain and scared perspective about the weakness of global economy, and they do so way more effectively than other genres. I believe that these films (beware: I'm not talking about ALL the films with this tag) may be the only films left which make us think, not just feel. There are very few exceptions lately.

In particular, our relationship with technology, space exploration and artificial intelligence still generates works which I wouldn't define just entertainment, regardless of their actors' popularity, their budget etc. Our way to imagine the future, of course, keeps changing, but since the human race seems to be particularly tired in this period, I'd say that sci-fi tries to imagine all the possibilities (and the complications) that humans could pass through this decay by becoming something more than human.

British The Machine is an interesting sci-fi work about the possibility of recreating someone's appearance by means of engineering reconstruction, but also, and most of all, about the superiority of a robot mind which can absorb and quickly assimilate, once come to life, any kind of information, exactly like a child. The ending lets you understand this curious, innocent female android will be the first individual of the new (hopefully) peaceful race ruling the Earth.

Probably, we're still not ready to transcend our physical form; we still have too many problems to fix: first of all, I guess, the death of our planet. But everything in our habits shows us that we cannot just be happy to focus on a career and keep saving money until death; not anymore. We can be many things, many people, in many places. Our synapses expand in all directions. We strive for a virtual life, because ours looks more and more narrow. We grew up in a technology-based society, and we must deal with it; art must deal with it. 

I’m a little tired of hearing art being defined as “feelings”, honestly. Genetic augmentations, artificial intelligence, supercomputers are for sure more "interesting" (I won't use inverted commas anymore) than tear-jerking musicals set in a modern Los Angeles or battles against orcs for the reign of Azeroth (although battles against orcs are one of the thing I'm eager to watch after a standard working day).

I won't talk about Gattaca (1997), a sci-fi masterpiece about future of eugenetics in a competition-based society, for two reasons only: first, I'm trying to focus on more recent works; second, it would be too difficult to me to stop writing, and I'd probably need an entire new post. But please watch it. You must.

I want to make some examples of recent films that impressed me in terms of realism - according to the meaning I explained above. Let's begin from the best one: Ex Machina (2015). Finally, a beautiful dialectic fresco about the deep contrast between free will and predestination, humanity and machines, reasons and feelings. Apart from its brilliant visual effects, personally I don't know any better film about problems and doubts raised by modern conceptions about androids. Basically, you cannot guess, until the end, whether that beautiful female android has got human feelings or not; the spectator is led to think, not just to feel, and this is the main reason, of course, why this film is on the list. 

I think this film definitely deserves a place in the list of the best pictures about robots ever made; you must wait until the end in order to get what is the difference between human and artificial intelligence; which is dialectically explained. Art itself, painting in particular, is mentioned in the film, connecting spontaneity and artificial program in an exquisite dialogue.

Ex machina speculates through and through, as well, about the idea of spontaneity, which is the root of human unpredictability and of human art too. Just because we think about a painting to create by means of a mathematical construction, we’ll never be able to create an original painting; machines cannot create, just calculate, but their calculus may disguise itself terribly well as spontaneity (Chappie [2015] is a similar philosophical attempt, but it hideously degenerates into banal gunfire battles and cheesy humour). The astonishing ending is an eerie, unsettling outlook on the countless possibilities of future robots’ will, both in terms of appearance and attitudes.

Another recent nice (and tasting nostalgically “old-fashioned”, also in the soundtrack) film about robots is The Machine (2013). Well, it is not as deep as the one above, because there are way too many bullets, but I think it is worth a look, because the love story is gradually (fortunately) blended by the birth of the unequalled superiority of the mechanical “race”.

Her (2013) is about (romantic) relationships with machines, too. It is dreamy, sometimes unreal, suspended on many questions about our blurred-by-routine identity and desires, and it makes you feel like you just resurfaced from a long apnoea. I know, it is kind of a love story, but deals with a not yet existing technology, so… sci-fi, somehow. Actually, having sex with androids will be much easier than discussing about anything with an AI, I guess, because programming such a complex robot mind is still a dream. 

Ok, I confess: Her moved me to tears. This doesn't mean I wasn't intellectually stimulated... However, an other important element of this film is the solitude and affective isolation caused by a working-based lifestyle. Well, the Western one. Isn't this the reason why we always feel like messaging someone?...

But this film shows you how deeply human feelings are affected by the temptation of an “abstract” relationship - namely, the ones we pass through without touching nor seeing anyone. Technology already created long-distance love stories, and they will grow probably more and more important in our life, since the mind of modern human beings cannot really remain in the same place for long time. We can love many people or virtual people, in many ways, from many places, and I think this film shows you exactly how difficult is going to be for us to feel just humans with bodily limits - and the worst of these limits, probably, is the need of being considered unique. Watch it; don’t worry,  it’s not just romance.

Of course I must not omit Transcendence (2014), and I guess it pretty much explains why by itself. I should add that yes, maybe some aspects of the technology shown in the film are a little exaggerate, but the idea (the art) focuses on the fact that the essence of humanity, at the end of the day, is establishing strong ties with other people. The protagonist achieved the (maybe) last stage of intelligence, that is a spiritual/digital flux of data influencing reality without any bodily restrictions, and, by doing so, nothing was left to him but the interaction with the woman who knew him the best. 

Transcendence, of course, is much more than a man vs. machine film. The protagonist, by transfering his personality to a digital system, becomes not just immortal, but almighty, managing to control, heal, improve every living being he's interested in with advanced nanomachines. Basically, he can enhance other people's humanity... and still love, wow!

The very core of the film is showing us, of course, what are the perspectives of science about death. Again, the personality backup which allows the protagonist’s life not to end (well, to end just physically) is still a dream; I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to reconstruct someone’s personality by using megabytes, but this film, for sure, depicts majestically our yearning for a more and more abstract existence - because our future is abstraction, deal with it.

Something similar had been shown by, among many others, eXistenZ (1999), Cronenberg’s famous masterwork which focused more, anyway,  on the sublimation of humanity by games and virtual achievements, and about which I could write for hours. So, I’d better stop now.

I must absolutely add The Congress (2013), an Israeli animation/sci-fi story with a hint of delicious retro design style. This film is an amazing journey in a dystopian world (well, just a large area of a world) where people use a special drug in order to evade reality, suppress sorrow and create their own personal crazed perception. Yes, I know: Huxley - although in this moment I’m also recollecting, while talking about recent stuff, We happy few (2016), a fascinating, dystopian video game; but the difference is that The Congress people can do and become anything by affecting their brain like that, from riding a raging bull to turn into Jessica Rabbit.

The artwork of The Congress, directed by Ari Folman (don't miss his previous animated war film Waltz With Bashir [2008]), is breathtaking. Many of the fancy buildings decorating the landscapes of the animated zone are inspired by H. Bosch's paintings; its inhabitants decided to appear like famous actors, comic characters, mythological heroes etc., so that in their enhanced reality nothing can really make the difference. Oh, Enhanced Reality is also the name of one of Fear Factory's songs.

The protagonist, Robin Wright, playing as herself, not able to keep working since cinema industry can use digitally, and at will, the actors’ appearance, chooses to try this drug in order to find her lost son, who suffers for a syndrome destroying his senses; this lets the animation part begin, putting an end to the “real” Wright's performance. Thanks to the special substance provided by a huge corporation, nobody in the animated zone remembers about the “normal” perceivable reality, which is slowly decaying. Tastes, colors, bodies, smells, everything is an artificial stimulus, with no limits to variations.

This film is delicate and unsettling, extremely creative, aesthetically crazy, with long silent moments, and focuses on the uniqueness and rarity of strong feelings saving human life from boredom and nothingness. Where everyone looks like someone else, only people loving you remember who you are. More than that (and here is the core), The Congress tells us our reality is more and more made of cerebral stimulus and less and less of material objects. Appearance and personal experience will be just a matter of fantasy. We are our brain, and science keeps trying influencing its electric activity in order to gain an enhanced reality. We will be able to live, basically, without moving. Of course you may think about Brazil (1985), Matrix (1999), Wall-E (2008), Surrogates (2009), and many other deep works, all of them converging to the same fear/attraction towards cerebral life. In general, The Congress is one of the best animation movies I’ve ever seen.

Zero Theorem (2013) is disturbing, grotesque, melancholic: of course, because it is directed by Terry Gilliam (Brazil [1985], 12 Monkeys [1995], The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus [2009]). I have to confess I'm not crazy about Gilliam's morbidity, but I found this film tremendously "interesting", since the protagonist, stuck on a chair, working relentlessly with his computer and recollecting some sweet memories from time to time, struggles desperately against the impending Nothing. Doesn't this depict our actual condition? Doesn't this concern all of us?... Yes, that's art.

Obviously I could make some more (not many) examples. There are, and there will always be, many ways to talk about the human condition by means of cinema; but, as already said, I think nowadays sci-fi is the best instrument to achieve this goal - and that’s nobody’s fault, it's just a fact. Apart from the reasons I mentioned above, I think this is also due to the fact that society changes faster and faster, and that technological/scientific settings are the only ones which can keep pace with this frantic development. 

Many of these settings, obviously, are quite banal or not very detailed (In time [2011], Elysium [2013], Divergent [2014]... way too many others), and of course I didn’t say sci-fi proved to be immune to degeneration, commonplaces etc. But I think (I hope) that the films I mentioned have good possibilities to become classics - at least, to live for long in our memories as good examples to cite while we'll be talking about art in the early 2000s'.

The reasons why Graham Sutherland is awesome

Graham Sutherland (1903-1980)

Death, development and rebirth are the cores of this visionary painter's artistic research. Whereas Francis Bacon innovated English art by disfiguring living (often human) shapes in the cage of the I, Sutherland's main result, through the horror of war he strove to depict, was probably the germinating of a portrait of an everlasting life which, even under a bombing sky, manages to keep his power of changing.

Nothing stops growing up, even in destruction, and the great quantity of vertical figures in Sutherland's pictures is the very evidence of his yearning for life and ascension to organic fulfillment. From this Londoner artist's point of view, life is an obscure, often monstrous energy animating the things/creatures, indifferently; however, in my opinion, considering his artworks as an inhuman, alien self-developing creature whose man is not but an asymmetric organ would be a great mistake.

Horned forms (1944)

Actually, in Sutherland's artworks man is always present. The eerie, sometimes horrific fusion of animal and vegetal elements (thorns, in particular, start growing up in his pictures of the 40s) is not but the symbol, I may say an icon, of human fear. Something "iconic" or even religious fidgets, relentlessly, in his shapeless, non human mixtures, since, by borrowing an expressionist struggle against matter, he uses nature to depict, indirectly, universal human feelings. His solemn, majestic figures may remind us De Chirico's metaphysics, but these two artists get to opposite sides: De Chirico never puts life in his silent landscapes, Sutherland always does. 

Thorn tree (1954)

War, which Sutherland studied by a very close distance during his work as a "war artist", reduces life to some kind of "blob", to a chaotic mass of unpredictable evolution. His Heads series testifies his tendence to omit the human figure in order to speak about human life itself; as in his later religious subjects he painted for several churches (the figure of Jesus is both a quivering portrait of secular uncertainty and a powerful warning about universal sorrow), the tall, huge twisted columns of Three standing forms in a Garden, or, even more, of the majestic The origins of the land show us a world where human presence is an accidental, destructive as well, element of the vital evolution: differently from Bacon, who's obsessed with closed, narrow spaces, Sutherland prefers using large, open, empty landscapes, like settings of an imaginary prehistory, a churning universal birth where life is still a shapeless womb or, maybe, of an apocalyptic post-war planet where man trascended his fragile and dangerous form.

The origins of the land (1951)

Three standing forms in the garden (1952)

Sutherland is a fascinating scenario of regeneration and, in the meantime, a scaring suggestion of unpredictability of organic matter, and, consequently, of history. He wrote the poem of rebirth from the ashes, bestowing upon life, as well, an awe-inspiring dignity, regardless of the type of creature containing it. In his eyes, life is a whirlwind, an overwhelming tempest of colour which man cannot withstand: in his late works, you can notice colours turning deeper, shades more numerous, tones more soul-destroying; starting from the 50s, you can see his attention for psyche in his portraits and his unsettling animal-shaped figures, less plant-like, more tragic.

Head III (1954)

Crucifixion painted for the Church of Saint Aiden, Acton (1961)

At the end of his reasearch, maybe, we must see matter going back into the inside, in the tormented mind universe Bacon found in a cage: in the astonishing Sitting Animal we see, once again, mankind, the human loneliness, the monster-like condition of a self-devouring society, and this crouching posture, as a return into the Self, maybe meant, from Sutherland's point of view, the end of any compromise between reason and psyche.

Portrait of Edward Sackville-West (1953-54)

Sitting animal (1964)

Pictures are contained in: Sutherland, from the series I Maestri del colore, Fratelli Fabbri Editori, Milan, 1966.

The reasons why we should stop repeating that books can save the world

Everything dies, all of us know that; but, to be more precise, since nothing alive is the same in two different moments and the whole universe relentlessly evolves and goes (mostly unexpectedly) through mutations and changes of directions, focusing either on death or birth of individual things is not particularly clever. From an organic matter organic shapes and phenomena are generated, namely, everything that lives won't be the same forever, but is already doomed to turn into something else, no matter how alien to its original seed. We say modern or even (quite funnily) post-modern because we think many technical achievements around us show we're the "ripest" age at all; actually, they're not but consequences of our lack of meanings.

Oswald Spengler, in his monumental essay The decline of the West (1918 vol. 1, 1922 vol. 2) depicts the history of a Culture (he says there have been several cultures on earth, and he calls his own "Faustian", begun about Xth century with the birth of an "aerial" religious architecture and declined with the tragic notes of Goethe's Faust) as a slow passage form a fertile period, where the spirit of peoples and art are totally and organically in tune with each other in order to create spontaneous and various forms (the majestic symbol of the beginning of the Faustian culture is the cathedral), to a civilization, the type of society he, and we as well, lives in, characterized by the supremacy of huge multiethnic cities, the end of the country settlements and costumes and the repetition and mixture of past esthetical expressions. Of course we're not the first civilization, nor the first one which will fall.

Oswald Spengler (1880 - 1936)

Spengler, of course, already knew he lived in the exhausted shell of an old Culture, NOT in a Culture, and his majestic knowledge was absolutely aware of the impossibility to reach the heights of his main teachers, Nietzsche and Goethe: the age of the most meaningful spiritual discoveries of the Faustian Culture (each of them coloured with the essence of this Culture in particular) was already ended, and civilization couldn't but collapse on itself in a struggle to survive to the meaninglessness of its existence. Spengler died just three years before the beginning of the Second World War.

That's why I'm a little tired of all this complaining about the "death" of art, of culture, of books, of things we deem important just according to commonplaces; but I also understand what it's due to. There's no "death". Everyone talks about culture because there's no culture to talk about, just re-elaboration of past things. Apparently, we turned totally unable to understand that knowledge can be built privately, between wise people, with good threads about various aspects of life; in this sense, and in this sense only, culture cannot die. We are totally free to gain any information, and, if we focus just on what we like, there's not danger for "culture" at all.

The fact we name "culture" something belonging exclusively to the past, coming from an hypothetical good age, or rather, something we never really struggled to build, is the clearest evidence that our world is turning less and less organic; and this started several decades ago, more or less when we started realizing art was depleting its abstract repertoire of forms. Everywhere is the same generic metropolis, the same global (globalized) hive. Although we have nothing but fragments of past forms we try to call beauty, we pretend to believe museums and theatres can save humanity from collapse. Spengler had exactly the same feelings about the "men of culture" of his age.

We use categories, definitions, comfortable but sterile borders to keep the living matter in a dead monotonous land, and we claim culture is fundamental, art is everything, history is necessary, ignorance is dangerous, without really knowing the meaning of these words, and we say many other things we learned from the intellectuals monitors teem with. Suggestions about a good mantainance of mankind are everywhere: basically, we step on them without even noticing, during the few minutes our hectic routine allows us.

The Librarian (1566), by the Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldi (1526/27 - 1593). Books have been the main source of information for centuries. Of course there's plenty of alternative instruments now, but the number of words known by young people grows smaller and smaller, several studies warn.

The more we talk about a topic, the less we know about it: this is universally true. Sometimes this happens because we're deeply attracted by very little known things (how many people wrote about God or Greek tragedy?); sometimes, instead, because we grow opinionated thanks to the fact someone keeps repeating us an unorganic definition of something wich is supposed to be organic in and of itself. 

Everyone claims books are important because nobody really knows what culture is for, and wants to feel "in safe" thanks to novels and good feelings. Everyone thinks that books can defeat ignorance, instead of understanding ignorance can be built in universities as well, with the illusion of a world change, and that ignorance sometimes means not knowing what is to be known. Without a Culture, books are useless, and Culture cannot be built again, nor imagined. Books are useless without wise readers.

Culture is predestined, including its unorganic parts, its sad old ages, when fantasy turns into the monotonous establishment of repeated forms; as inhabitants of an old civilization, we cannot but claim "culture" is important, since we prefer living in the past, in the nostalgic wave of a determined shape, in the pages of famous works which inspired the cinema, instead of accepting a difficult, modern (someone said "post-modern") standpoint that simply understands the fertile age of the Western civilization has come to an end, and that culture cannot save anyone nor anything. We're nothing. 

Babel (2001), by Cildo Meireles. This artwork, in my opinion one of the most astonishing of London TATE Gallery, is a tower of radios of many types and age piled on each other; the radios are all on, and the resulting noise, buzzing and continuous, is somehow disturbing. It is a beautiful momument to the various and nonuniform culture of modern age, made of a patchwork of voices which doesn't help you to have a cultural over all view about reality.

The most coherent (namely, scientific) artists of the 20th century created artworks which don't look for coherence, don't celebrate the importance of abstract ideals; just few examples, very different from each other, but all related to a sense of decline: Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) is a deep glance into the metropolitan paranoic frenzy;  Musil's The man without qualities (1930-1943) puts an end to the tradition of big systematic novels, showing the deepest skepticism towards any type of "cultural" association; Fellini's Orchestra Rehearsal (1978) shows the impossibility of facing a balanced thread (and a democracy) when everyone wants to shout their own opinion; Fight Club (1996)  highlights the consequences of a job-based alienating society where a generation grew up with no purpose but collecting money for the future, waiting for the crisis. In any civilization, money is the ultimate fuel of every spiritual activity.

All these disenchanted masterpieces notwithstanding, we grow less and less scientific; we keep pretending there's a proper value, a proper art or form. Polite progressist TV talk shows try to tell us we still can live in a ravishing Renaissance, if only we have enough money for bookshops and the thousandth art exhibition about Impressionism. Everything is about pretending, because people need to believe culture is about something specific and easily recognizable, like recycling, like cooking. 

Integration (2013) by Piero Tonin. Among the many rethorical, misused, misunderstood culture-related words, multiculturality is one of the most common. Trying to conceal the prevalent role of consumerism in Western society, we act as various cultures cohabited in our metropolises, although we perfectly know the presence of many different languages, clothes and ethnicities does not change the fact we don't share but one only culture, the culture of money.This word, actually, like a huge sponge absorbing whatever it leans on, taught to children and waved by politicians, defines an effective strategy used by "integrators" in order to turn everyone in a standard Western consumer. Reversally, racism, which is a much worse reaction for sure, mostly represents an anachronistic struggle to "protect" a culture racists themselves have a vague idea of.

Books are everywhere; writers are everywhere. Everyone wants to write about everything, but nobody feels up to an overview, a total judgment; nobody looks the whole picture from far. Everyone repeats reading is a defence against ignorance, but nobody explains us what type of books we're supposed to read: the important is they're made of words. Reading is usually deemed a generic remedy to a disease (ignorance) which is supposed to threaten our freedom to think, but nobody seems noticing that the quantity of things people read and remember doesn't mean they can actually speculate about reality (and this includes the ability of understanding reality grew too difficult to be defined).

Books, once they turn into an abstract symbol of salvation, are a cunning expedient to keep people at bay; books are the symbol through which capitalism can expand a market (culture is a market) by convincing people they are actually free. In the aftermath of the modern "chaotic" development of the Faustian Culture, Western population should have already stopped - I'm not saying reading - but at least giving to books such an absolute, romantic importance. We're not able to stop idealizing culture because we're not coherent, we're not scientific towards the features of our civilization. 

The only possible culture of our age is a culture of no culture; namely, the awareness that culture isn't made but for the pleasure of the few people who authentically can get some pleasure out of it. There's no reality but pleasure. All the rest is just words.

The reasons why Dungeons & Dragons is absolutely NOT a "nerd" game

Everyone knows nerd people love fantasy stuff. Much more at ease among elves and spells than in a mall (exactly like me), these shy, very casual-wearing creatures often live in fantastic worlds where they can be super-cool heroes with no glasses nor fat. Someone call them geek, and this word is often related to people with a flair for informatic knowledge as well - since virtual worlds and videogames are usually the two halves of the same need to escape. In general, they need a lot of time to get used to standard relationships between human beings, and that's why the role play games (RPGs), whose the most famous one is obviously Dungeons & Dragons (fantasy stuff), are often cherished by these artists of imaginary life. 

Maybe you don't play D&D just because you haven't got a social life, but because you've got a serious one. Source: funnyjunk.com

BUT: let's explain why Dungeons & Dragons, which is basically the only RPG I played (seamlessly) for many years (and I've been a wonderful Dungeon Master for most of the time - cough cough -), it's NOT a game for nerds; to be more precise: you must NOT be a nerd to live totally the real, difficult pleasure this great game can provide to a group of people being in good vibes with each other, insofar as it is played with the proper means and spirit. The feeling of achievement and satisfaction such a game can provide has NOT to be related to your nerdoid skills. I'm talking about D&D just because it is the game I know the most, but I guess I'd express a similar opinion about other simulative RPGs I'm a little acquainted with, like Vampires: The Masquerade or Warhammer: Dark Heresy.

First of all: there are many types of nerds, but here, whenever I'll type nerd, I'll mean someone who always interprets reality in terms of data, bonuses, technical names, numbers, tactics. Someone obsessed with the technical aspect of any games (Magic is one of the most common field teeming with nerd minds). "Burnt brains" are the kinds of people I'm dealing with here, and they're usually the ones using games to avoid life's convolutions. This type of nerds is often not very confrontational. 

When a fantasy setting is displayed, a creative mind thinks about the mistery and the history of its magic environment; the nerd thinks about standard terms like tank, buffer, party, dodging, loot, feats etc., words which, given their technical meaning, remained exactly the same in other languages (sometimes with very funny adaptations). The "burnt one" doesn't realize the pleasure of living in another world with some friends, but yearns for victory and lots of EXP points; therefore, a D&D campaign led by nerd people is an odd mess made of battles and numbers and cunning cheats to get stronger and stronger.

Being a DM means living a second life. No: it means living many. Source: nerdsourced.com

Now: What I think is that when you play this game your fighting/destruction/I-must-win-and-conquer ability is not what really matters. Come on, you're an entirely different person in a totally different world; you have special powers, you're from another race, you can travel throughout beautiful lands: would you really think just about your gold coins and your next spell levels? The fact is: if you really care about the beauty of this game and the huge expensive tomes it is described in, you already know you CANNOT really win here, nor lose. You can just run a good or a bad game. You won't be necessarily a VIP, and your character won't be necessarily interested in becoming a VIP.

The typical crash the door, kill the monsters, take the loot, buy more powerful stuff, enjoy your EXP points method is a really nice entertainment in many videogames, either from the D&D saga or not. There's plenty of virtual RPGs where you do this all the time (I'll never get how some people fell in love with Diablo), alone or with many companions, and many players, as I said above, play D&D exactly that way, since they expect to see their characters's skills grow up as quickly as possible. Waiting for the "level up excitement", a lot of burnt-minded people just struggle to kill enemies without building a multi-shaded personality. 

The core of what I'm saying is that in order to enjoy completely his/her job a DM needs not only a particular type of playing characters (PC), but a particular type of people, someone who can keep the metagame to the minimum level. Metagame means the ensemble of terms and attitudes which debunk the fiction of the game unrevealing its technical, mathematical frame. Example: if, during a battle against a hydra, you say something like "Buff me mate, I'm going to tank" you're doing metagame: in such a situation, you are supposed to think about the simplest way to save your and your companions' life. The very beauty of this game is that it is not supposed to be considered a game all the time, exactly in the same way an actor/actress is not supposed to remind the audience he/she's acting.

Having some fights is absolutely necessary to build any party's identity. Source: tribality.com

In certain occasions, jokes are a nice way to break the ice or make the atmosphere more relaxed; but it is quite frustrating when the players don't really care about the details of the ancient elven city they're in, or the terrible story of the cursed swamp, or the solemn words of the worried major. Players are supposed to shut up most of the time, because if they lived these situations for real, they would do so. Striving for "the game" can make many people forget about the fact everything in D&D, even the simplest dialogue, is part of the game, exactly like in real life, where many kinds of things, even the most boring ones, define what we are. 

Let's tell the truth: the real nerd is often a little opinionated, and they're rarely quiet while recollecting a quotation from The Lord of the Rings or Twin Peaks; if their character is a warrior, they'll be a super warrior, if wizard, a super wizard; they'll never dare to create a warrior who's got a flair for cooking, or a wizard affected by aracnophobia; they need stock super-cool feats, not personalities.

D&D is the game of life, because its system is a perfect mixture of natural abilities and casual events, exactly like in real life. I think no RPG can be more realistic. Life is not like Skyrim or Lineage: your D&D character is limited by conditions of birth, wealth, nature, and cannot just wander and fight because it's fun; he or she is risking their life, and needs a proper reason to do that. "Becoming stronger" is a good reason only if the character really considers strenght important because of their background. For the same reason, a character is not supposed to have giant horns or claws, neither a red or scaled skin, just because these things are cool.

By allowing the players to create any kind of character a DM builds a helter-skelter campaign where anything, with no reason, is possible; namely, absolutely not like in real life. Fun will not last for long, because when everything is possible you have no reason to struggle. Limits must be put, restrictions must be told: you cannot decide many things about your life, that's why D&D must not allow you to decide anything; if you're looking for total freedom, play a videogame, which, having no restrictions, allows you to be totally disconnected by the rest of the world while venting your frustration in front of a screen; this is much simpler, of course. D&D is a social game, because you have to interact properly with other people, not using just standard answers. Using fantasy is much harder than using numeracy, and that's why this game requires creative individuals.

Should all of us be PCs created in another dimension, how boring this game would be. Source: pinterest

 
So: next time you feel like laughing at this game, just think about the meaning of the word nerd and the peculiarity of D&D. If you asked me if I've ever felt ridiculous while playing in an imaginary world with imaginary characters, I'd answer yes; but I could also ask an actor/actress the same question, or an energy drink promoter. Only someone living intensely can play this game intensely, without being in a hurry, without talking too much or too rarely. I have no reason to feel "nerder" than an actor/actress or a Softair sniper, since fiction makes our life richer and more beautiful, especially if we live it together with some friends. 

So life goes: there are variables, there are costants; accidents, catastrophes. We don't know anything, we cannot be sure about anything. And the reason I love this game is that it reproduces life, without denying it. It's not just about fighting, but also about why you fight. Every single action you're meant to do is translated in a die; you cannot be sure about the aftermath, you just know your probabilities. And whereas some of your actions are completely up to you, many aspects of your story are just decided by your destiny; this is something difficult to explain to a modern age videogamer. There are too many pictures, especially because of videogames, surrounding us and reminding us the difference between this and a fantasy world; but around a D&D table, most of the details you love thinking about are up to your personal imagination, namely, the depth of your feelings.

According to this standpoint, D&D is more than a game, and that's why a "standard" nerd, namely a person who just looks for games, cannot really embrace its beauty: to appreciate a proper D&D experience, you don't have to be a gamer nor an actor, but a gaming actor, an acting gamer - and isn't this exactly the funniest method to play life? So many times we've got the feeling everything is determined by some celestial dice, and so many times we suppose everything is up to us; the only problem with real life is we cannot complain with any DM.

A map of Faerun, the most famous D&D campaign setting: lots of novels and videogames have been set here, and you cannot even imagine how big it is... Source: forgottenrealms.wikia.com

The reasons why Italy definitely deserves Bello Figo's songs

A very very old kind of ignorance, you know, makes many people blame immigrants about everything. Among the reasons a country may have a racist behaviour, we can number its history, its welfare, its education system, and, obviously, its politicians. 

Italy is (has always been) a suspicious, sometimes a little scared country towards other cultures. Since I’m from Italy but live in London, I’m very well acquainted with that particular curiosity of the Italian citizen who wonders all the time: “What does the rest of the world think about us, about our accent, about our government?...”  And this is really good, insofar as it helps a country to import the best aspects and ideas from other places; but, most of the times, this curiosity just shows the fact Italy doesn’t feel part of an international, multicultural system. Officially, beyond the Alpes and Sicily, there’s a strange, exotic, huge region which tries all the time to weaken Italian economy and integrity; there are threats everywhere: both EU and immigrants make Italy terribly poor.

Immigration from Libya, from Syria, from many African countries etc. is one of the main Italian problems; which means, immigrates themselves are not the problem, but the way they are to be admitted and treated in Italy. Should you ignore this, lots of them die during their (very expensive) journey throughout the Mediterranean. Many of them are exploited for very hard and underpaid harvesting jobs in Southern plantations, which also led to some riots by black immigrants against the caporali (the unofficial “masters” of many poor day labourers). 

One of the most efficient methods thanks to which some politicians gain votes and support is blaming people from different cultures, with a different skin. They steal our jobs, they rape our women, they don’t pay taxes, they stink, they drink, and obviously the reason of their actions is always easily recognizable. The last legend about immigrants, especially the black ones, is that, as soon as they reach the Italian soil, they earn money daily (thanks to Italians’ taxes!) without any job, they get a house, and, in many cases, they can live in luxury hotels without any extra costs. 

This legend was steadfastly told by politicians during the catastrophic earthquake of August 2017 which damaged several towns of central Italy: making people think about all the honest Italians who lost their houses in comparison with all the unemployed immigrants living serenely in a five stars hotel and eating pasta all the time was a very smart strategy which racist parties could shake Italians’ basic instincts with. When a country is in dire straits, what’s better than channelling fools’ rage against imaginary problems?

But a sassy champion suddenly came, the chosen one who could laugh at such a legend in order to spread the truth; a black hero wearing horrible, shiny clothes who sang to Italian people their own shallow, narrow-minded opinions: his name is Bello Figo (something like: handsome cool guy). This young superslim Ghanian guy with a Hello Kitty tattoo on his chest, this rapper-like singer whose music videos nowadays count millions of views, made many (not musically brilliant, that’s true) songs about all the main Italian stupid commonplaces. He lives in Parma, but he didn’t emigrate to Italy on a boat, like many of his compatriots; he sings in Italian, and his strong African accent makes some Italian words particularly funny.

Source: https://www.dailybest.it/musica/bello-figo-referendum-costituzionale/

This artist of trolling, this juggler of bad words mocked basically all the topics you could find in a typical conversation between Italian dumbasses: from the enviable richness of Berlusconi the Great to the legendary strenght of Juventus, from the famous evergreen charm of Benito Mussolini, the unforgettable, efficient, still very sympathized with dictator of the 40s, to the immortal beauty of famous actors; not to talk about the compelling wish of sexual pleasure (let the epic line be told: I’ll bed you ten times, and after that I’ll block you on WhatsApp), or the rampaging fear of the IS group.The expensive smartphone, the branded belt, the gossip tv shows: any of the most common Italian topics have been told in his songs which won him fame and money.

But most of Bello Figo’s art is expressed in his songs about all the morons’ certainties about immigrants. He sang all of them, as an open-hearted street performer: I love raping the Italian girls, I steal bicycles as soon as I can, I live with the government’s benefits, I hate working, Italian president allowed me to pass your borders and eat your food etc. Bello Figo’s technique is a refined provoking scream towards all the natural born white patriots. “I beat my son”, he sings in his darkest song, Sono bello come profugo, despite of the fact he definitely has no children; namely, hate me because I’m a black violent person.

"They give our houses to immigrants, and the refugee boasts about that: I don't pay rent".
 Source: http://www.supereva.it/bello-figo-alessandra-mussolini-lite-diretta-tv-immigrazione-26262

How Italian average donkeys reacted to his fame, that’s not difficult to imagine: they took Bello Figo very very seriously, to the point he was invited by some tv shows in order to be scolded and insulted by politicians and crowds of poor Italians worried about their wallets and their dignity. The rage of the Member of the European Parliament Alessandra Mussolini (yes, she’s his granddaughter), and her scream: “Go back to your country!” are probably the best proof that Bello Figo won against everything and everyone. He can already afford to be insulted by very important people, which means his style got exactly what it was meant to get. He played a role for long time, and obviously only few were smart enough to notice that it was just a role.

Bello Figo is not just a cunning youtubber; he’s a symbol, an outcome of chrisis of values (more than economical chrisis), the most perfect reaction to the great xenophobic trend which seems to affect more and more the Western countries. I’m not saying I’m sure he’s conscious to be a symbol: probably someone behind him expressly created his style and his lyrics, in order to make him a funny rich icon of our times. But this doesn’t really matter. Everyone knows you need some intelligence to appreciate irony: during a very hard time for Italy, it looks like most of Italians prefer to blame Bello Figo instead of politicians, since (oh my God!), he’s taunting all the spotless homeland-loving taxpayers, getting a living out his bad jokes about immigrants’ life of leisure. 

Even a very popular Italian tv show, Striscia la notizia, which always claimed to be the “voice of justice”, accused Bello Figo of “peopleism” (gentismo), since he got a lot of money out of honest people’s indignation (angry people are probably most of the viewers of his videos). “Maybe people who fight against crisis and high cost of living don’t feel like listening to your irony, don’t you think?” the justice-maker journalist asked the Ghanian artist, who now, apparently, is finally ready to exit the Youtube box and make concerts throughout Italy. Thank you, Italian sense of humour, you made him great, although your xenophobic mien is undoubtedly stronger than everything: just few hours ago (it’s January 20^th) I read that Bello Figo’s scheduled jig at Supersonic Music Club in Foligno (Perugia) has been cancelled  because of the countless amount of racist insults he got. And this is not the first time.

Source: http://www.supereva.it/bello-figo-striscia-mi-mantengono-italiani-non-sono-profugo-27944

The fact is: he’s not but singing all the bad jokes and myths created by media and politicians, who got money and power out of people’s silliness and vulgar instincts; the same silliness and instincts, I’d like to say, which took UK away from Europe. I want to ask you: since hordes of dumbasses get more and more angry when he shows (on purpose) an irksome behaviour, and given the fact he becomes more popular thanks to this indignation, why shouldn’t he be irksome? “Do you know we’re paying your rent with our money?” a sulking honest citizen asked Bello Figo during the above-mentioned show hosting Mussolini; he smiled with amusement, and his answer definitely deserves to be written in history books: “That’s okay the same to me”, which, of course, made all people surrounding him screaming more and more with shame and anger. That’s exactly the point: how can people not see the art of trolling, even when it clearly attacks people’s credulity?...


Bello Figo's most famous song, No pago affitto (I don’t pay rent), whose lyrics has been subbed in English in one of the Youtube videos, is probably the best summary of Italian prejudices. Featuring his (obviously black) friend The GynoZz, this song is vocal in declaring that immigrants don’t need to pay rent, nor to be worried about a house, a car, a job. “I won’t be a worker” Bello Figo proudly wrote in the lyrics, “I came here with my friends, and as soon as we arrive we get money, car, pussies.” What the shame! How can a black guy insult the honest Italian worker struggling to survive, and instigate young people to violence against women? “We want a salary and a broadband... I won’t soil my hands, because I’m already black.”

By mentioning the former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who doesn’t have anything to do with the immigrants' "absolute freedom", in this song Bello Figo managed to talk basically about every aspect of Italian narrow mentality in just one song; since the average citizen blames politicians about any problem, not being mature enough to take care about their own needs and questions, Bello Figo did exactly the same in No pago affitto, depicting the materialist laziness which lets people writing thousands of derogatory posts against the government without any cautious criteria.

Bello Figo is a sociologic, worthy of attention phenomenon. He sang (as I said before, maybe unconsciously or fulfilling someone else’s marketing plan) the decay of Western society, morbidly attached to money and banal commonplaces, by showing that people are always ready to hate but never ready for irony, or at least self irony; they’re too immature to laugh at their own silliness. He’s the mirror of the average wishes: sex, money, fame; more than that, he’s the mirror of leaders’ petty, xenophobic lies. Apart from his terrible pronunciation, his monotonous rhythm, his parodic clothes and accessories, this lucky artist gave us a lesson of seriousness; you need to be serious to be able to laugh.

If a coloured-hair guy singing jokes about prejudice is so frown upon that his jigs are cancelled, how should we feel about politicians spreading that prejudice? I think Italy, and not Italy only, cannot realize its priorities, and that Bello Figo definitely deserves all the money he got.

Source: http://www.repubblica.it/spettacoli/musica/2016/12/14/news/bello_figo-154103642/