Pixel Pirate 2 review

Soda_Jerk's Pixel Pirate 2: Directors Cut review by Mark Hobby

Elvis was a PIXEL to most...


...a bullet in the right place is no substitute for the real thing.
Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

Soda_Jerk's Pixel Pirates: Director's Cut is a pataphoric remix comedy that fashions the  copyright-piracy debate into a sci-fi/biblical/adventure tale. The plot is simple enough: an Elvis-Hulk-Jesus mash up is recruited by the freedom loving Pixel Pirates to liberate humanity from Copy-right Law, as set out by the DeMille inspired Moses-as-Heston. Whilst absurdist, the film has a serious intent, tackling the consequence on memory and idea when their transmission is mediated by the social relations governed by private ownership. Who owns, for example, the idea that the femur is a useful tool for social organisation? Kubrik's ape? Does Paramount own the very memory of the historical event the moment they create its simulacrum? When we think of Moses, do we not see Heston?

The film tackles these questions by subverting our celluloid and audio history: memory becomes disjointed, a bundle of nostalgia and subversive re-imaginings that results in one big quantum sneeze of colliding worlds. The viewer is left with the after-image of audio and visual worlds slightly remembered – sometimes cringingly so, given the haircuts – reconstituted into symbols both absurd but real as a collective mishmash of shared spliced experience. Drawing this together is the narrative trope of the hero's journey. The hero mash-up encompasses a holy trinity: Rock Star, Super Hero and Prophet, whose pastiche absurdity undermines the character's authority, while the darker, conservative conceit that sits at the heart of the celluloid hero is revealed when the good guy is set upon by an assortment of action heroes re-imagined as forces of repression.

The work reveals the uncomfortable truth that ideas are impermanent. Far from being the mark of superficiality, the pastiche of remixing and sampling reveals the higher, deeper meaning of plasticity that pervades, not only within the environment around us but also within us. If the cultural context was not so conservative when dealing with their icons, the Jesus displayed in the film would not be taken simply as the traditional neutered fetish of piety. Of course, this is where the film attains its power as parody, but an undercurrent is a reclamation of the Gnostic Jesus, that goes beyond banal Da Vinci Code inspired considerations of whether Jesus was frigging Mary Magdalene under the watchful eye of Our Father.

Impermanence is generally a dish served with Buddha, but the idea also has a deep significance for Gnosticism, often forgotten after the idea of the sword was fashioned from metal and used to impale heretics. According to this line of thinking, we are holographic projections bundled together into fictional selves (personalities) we regard as real and fixed. Given the plasticity of personality, this fixedness is our delusion and it is one that we have imparted upon our celluloid heroes. What we experience therefore is not Jesus, but his fictional double; just as we experience Elvis as 'the King', the actor, the singer. While both lay claim to historical specificity they are only 'real' in the sense of fiction and metaphor, our idea of them. The Hulk plays his part also, as the idea of perfected super (albeit, angry) humanity, despite being from the outset a fictional character. The remixed fiction, or idea, created in the film therefore becomes closer to the true nature of reality, that goes beyond the character's specific historicity or popularly created selves. It is this that the act of remixing reminds us; that this reality is fictional, pixel-driven in the context of the film, where the character's metaphoric function as rock star, superhero and prophet is transformed into gnostic pataphors that teach us that the basic elements of celluloid reality – image and audio – can be peeled off their original context and reused.  

Sampling therefore exposes the arrogance inherent within the concomitant codification of copy-right law as the ownership of ideas and the assertion that ideas can only exist within particular contexts, both in story and mode of transmission. The film frames the conflict in over-the-top satirical duelist terms: piracy is either a virus that will kill the host body, as the anti-pirates would have us believe, or force us to evolve into a higher plane of existence, as the Pixel Pirates assert. And naturally, in the film, a higher plane it is – with resurrection re-imagined as replication; idea transplanted onto medium, with as many copies produced as imagination allows. The medium of transmission is the video cassette – its outdated quality only lending a greater absurdity to the threat of 'video piracy'. Today, it is digital. Things have hit light speed. And there's no turning back. Not only story, but also the components: remade and remixed, each enchanted with new meaning.  Femur fashioned as face-smasher.

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