#and you could get creative with expressing each of their themes without directly replicating their show looks

[redladydeath]

random opinion: hazbin hotel s1 would’ve been better as a stage show

[classyfoxdestiny]

Nik Dodani, Sujata Day, Kiran Deol on the evolving space for Indian-origin creatives in western cinema

Nik Dodani, Sujata Day, Kiran Deol on the evolving space for Indian-origin creatives in western cinema

Where once, being brown brought with it stereotypes and typecasting, now a new generation of creatives of Indian origin, including Sujata Day, Kiran Deol, Nik Dodani and Avantika Vandanapu, is effecting change in western cinema — with diaspora narratives and creating their own support structures

“The producers actually asked if I’m ‘100% Indian’,” recalls Sujata Day about an unfortunate audition experience for a major sitcom in 2018. The actor-filmmaker, along with four other Indian-American actors, was vying for the role of the fiancée of one of the show’s lead characters. “In response to the producers’ query as to whether or not I was ‘100% Indian’, I said, ‘My parents are from Kolkata and I speak fluent Bengali, so yes.’ But the fact that I had to defend my Indianness was very strange. I know I didn’t book the role because I clearly didn’t look ‘Indian enough’ to them.”

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Day, during a video call with The Hindu Weekend, shakes her head as she talks about the then-and-now of South Asian representation in western film spaces. But the 37-year-old is not alone in her views of a culturally-stagnant cinema industry in the West. The industry boxed its South Asian actors and filmmakers into what they deemed acceptable. But in the past five years, creatives have continually expressed their dissent, announcing on social media, as well as during roundtables, protests and even stand-up routines that they are tired of the ‘identikit Indian’ roles.

More South Asian-origin actors, such as Dev Patel, Janina Gavankar, Rahul Kohli, Geraldine Viswanathan, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Kuhoo Verma, and Anya Chalotra, are shunning reductive roles in favour of fully-rounded characters that had long been reserved for only a few actors of colour.

For example, in Hulu’s Plan B, Kuhoo Verma’s portrayal as a sexually-curious teen who has to come to terms with the reproductive rights in her conservative state of South Dakota as she tries to purchase Plan B (morning-after pill) resonated with many women of colour. Prior to this, Indian girls were the one-dimensional personification of purity culture across western cinema. More recently, Dev Patel’s casting as the historically assumed-white Sir Gawain in The Green Knight turned the tables on the scope of open ethnicities.

Still of Sunny (Kuhoo Verma) and Lupe (Natalie Moroles) in Hulu comedy-drama ‘Plan B’ (2021)   | Photo Credit: Hulu

The identity struggle is never easily reconciled. Take that episode of The Mindy Project where Mindy (Mindy Kaling) goes on a date with the ‘ideal Indian man’ but he, unimpressed by her lack of knowledge about India, says he “could never date a coconut — brown on the outside, white on the inside”. This lights a flare to the tough dichotomy the diaspora tackles every day while forging their identity; embracing their surrounding culture and holding onto tradition.

Some address this by not taking on the ‘Indian-origin’ tag. Verma identifies as a woman of colour, as her family moved to the United States from South India but, without dismissing her heritage entirely, prefers to be known as ‘just an actor’ in the industry.

Nik Dodani attends The World Premiere of ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ presented by Universal Pictures at the Opening Night of The Toronto International Film Festival on September 09, 2021 in Toronto, Ontario.   | Photo Credit: RYAN EMBERLEY/AFP

Meanwhile, actors and filmmakers including Nik Dodani, Day and Kiran Deol are also taking matters into their own hands — by either creating their own support structures for South Asian actors or producing their own films and taking them to international stages such as the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

Festivals matter

Festivals have become a cornerstone for Indian filmmakers and actors. It is not just a networking opportunity but a platform for visibility. In mid-September, actor-filmmaker Deol’s short I Would Never premiered at TIFF as well as Dodani’s Dear Evan Hansen.

“Massive festivals like TIFF really help to legitimise a filmmaker and their support really helps to bring up international talent,” says Deol, who has received support from Sundance and TIFF in the past to get her short film made. “I hope that these festivals continue to be as inclusive. Big film festivals like Cannes and TIFF have been some of the places where I’ve discovered some of my favourite filmmakers, so it’s no small thing.”

Read More | Kiran Deol on ‘I Would Never’, a film for the #MeToo ages

A still from the 2020 short film ‘I Would Never’ starring and directed by Kiran Deol   | Photo Credit: Kiran Deol

Meanwhile, Dodani, a deep admirer of Day’s “hustle” through the contentious industry, shares the festival circuit this year certainly feels different as well. “We are seeing more incredible filmmakers of colour; it’s a reflection of the power of our communities to get our stuff made and insert them into the conversation. The indie world has always been exciting because that’s where the films that push the boundaries exist, so we’re finally starting to see the financing start to follow the Black and Brown creators.”

Creating a community

The changes, however, are slow and not simultaneous; some generations of creatives will reap the rewards of those who have toiled for years in the murky industry. Things now could be looking up for casting as well as attention to details in South Asian roles and script. Avantika Vandanapu plays a young Gujarati high school student who is an ace coder and who, through a happenstance crush on a boy at school, discovers and nurtures talent for DJing.

Avantika Vandanapu as Rhea, in Disney Channel movie ‘Spin’   | Photo Credit: Kharen Hill / Disney

Vandanapu’s Telugu roots have seen her appear in 2015’s Brahmotsavam alongside Mahesh Babu and 2016’s Premam with Naga Chaitanya and Shruti Haasan.

The 16-year-old says her auditioning process for Spin was a far cry from the horror stories minority actors have experienced, and she owes it all to their resistance and perseverance over the years. “From the moment I saw the script, I was so glad Disney had not generalised the Indian ethnicity, but had narrowed on the specificities of the Gujarati culture,” she says. “Seeing an Indian girl written as someone who is comfortable in her identity rather than having an identity crisis was exciting.”

Of course, Vandanapu understands identity conflicts are a prevalent matter, but she hopes it is not the only narrative for people of the Indian diaspora.

Speaking on what catalysed change across the industry changing, he says, “This industry is white-dominated, and the Black and Latinx communities in Hollywood have organised and supported each other in ways that are so inspiring; we hope to replicate that. The conversation around inclusion and equity has been changing for a few years now, but has accelerated immensely after last summer. The Black Lives Movement is directly responsible for that; every community of colour in the US is benefiting from the work the activists have done over the years. The real test, if the industry starts walking the walk, is in the next five to ten years.”

Still of Evan (Ben Platt) and Jared (Nik Dodani) in Universal Pictures’ ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ (2021)   | Photo Credit: Universal Pictures

On their own terms

One of the happy results of this movement is The Salon, co-founded in 2019 by Atypical and Escape Room actor Dodani, along with Bash Naran and Vinny Chhibber. “It started out as an informal way for us to connect,” says the 27-year-old. “Vinny, Bash and I were chatting and we found we all knew different folks in the South Asian film industry but not everyone knew everyone. For the first year, our goal was to just get people in the same room, to have the most basic form of community. Our vision is to help the next generation of South Asian talent.”

Read More | Nik Dodani on his cultural identity, and working on ‘Escape Room’ and ‘Atypical’

Day is not blind to the industry’s flaws either, one of the most prominent being its unwillingness to change. “Green-lighters in the film community were, and still are, slow, but now we are giving ourselves the green light,” she says.

So, the filmmaker pooled her money and directed, wrote and starred in comedy-drama Definition Please, which has been a favourite on the festival circuit in the US, having won ‘Outstanding Directorial Debut for a Feature Film’ at the South Asian Film Festival in America, and Best Narrative Feature at CAAMFest.

Told through the Indian female gaze, the indie film follows an Indian-origin woman who is living in the past glory of her spelling bee champion days while trying to move forward and dealing with her grief-stricken family. The film, which also stars Ritesh Rajan, succinctly explores themes of female friendships, familial pressures, mental health, and toxic masculinity in the Indian community.

Read More | Sujata Day on pushing through Hollywood bureaucracy and making ‘Definition Please’

Day was inspired by her long-time Awkward Black Girl and Insecure collaborator Issa Rae, explaining, “Very few people know of her first two web series; everyone thinks Awkward Black Girl was her first. But she never gave up and never let the system stop her from creating. And neither should we!”

The OTT problem

Day is currently in chats with streamers and distributors worldwide for Definition Please, and she confides with a laugh, “They feel that if they have Bollywood movies on their platform, they don’t need diaspora films. They think we are being represented already, which is wild to me because as much as I love the stars, that’s not our lives in the diaspora. We have very specific and interesting stories to tell.

During Asian-American Heritage Month (May) in the US, she noticed that streaming companies were putting out lists of Asian content on special servers and many were subtitled and foreign, but not a lot were content out of the US (or the UK). “They are handling Asian inclusion in a global sense that doesn’t make sense to folks in the diaspora. We should be able to hold them accountable and we bring these grievances up in meetings and they’re hearing us. Hopefully, they make some changes to shift their thinking.”

Money talks

Having travelled to many film festivals when it came out in 2017, Day’s eight-minute short, Cowboy and Indian (a drama-thriller about a Bengali bride who collapses in the street and is rescued by a cowboy) is now being made into a television series — made possible by a South Asian film executive reaching out to her. “It absolutely matters who’s also buying stories for production. We need representation there too!” she says.

Agreeing with her, actor-filmmaker Deol elaborates, “I feel like funding for filmmakers is always the 21-million-dollar question. This is true for folks of any colour trying to get their projects made.”

A growing space that is increasingly getting more funding is book-to-screen adaptations. Diksha Basu’s Destination Wedding, which was shortlisted for the Wodehouse Prize, is currently being adapted to a series. Meanwhile, Rakesh Satyal and Dodani have long been working on an adaptation of Satyal’s 2009 bestseller Blue Boy, which tells the story of a young gay Indian-American boy who is bullied through his school years. Dodani, who found the book to be a “full body experience” when he first read it, turns screenwriter for the film. “We’re trying to find the right home and financing for it. We want to make sure it’s done right and gets the right budget and talent,” he says.

So, while many creatives are more than happy to bid goodbye to ‘brownface’, casting appropriation and tokenism — as Deol sees it, this farewell is rather fresh — there is still a lot to look forward to and to demand in terms of inclusion.

“The changes showcase for me both how far we have come, and how far we have to go,” Deol sums up, adding, “I’d love to get to a place in representation where we have the room to tell extremely specific stories that don’t have to speak for the entire diaspora because there is enough variety in the shows and movies that get airtime, that there is a multiplicity of voices and points of view to choose from.”

It will be a frustrating wait for this level of change and some unfortunate barriers are inevitable. But as more creatives of colour vocalise their needs and rights, and also hold studios and casting agencies accountable, things are bound to change.

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[arcadeidea]

The Magnavox Odyssey [1971] + Pong [1972]

The most famous Magnavox Odyssey game is Table Tennis. It was the direct inspiration for Pong, and there is an infamous lawsuit decided in Magnavox's favor to that effect, which became famously the first of decades of copyright trolling putting up a hundreds-of-millions tollbooth on the mere concept of video games at home. If we take gaming as a legitimate art form, which is the essential premise of this blog, then it's the equivalent of copyrighting the concept of canvas. Despicable! If we are to take gaming as a legitimate art form, though... It behooves me to mention its business legacy, and move on briskly.

Table Tennis might look for all the world like Pong, (I'm not going to pretend like we can talk about one without the other,) but the way each handles is worlds apart. The elements of Table Tennis are the two pawns, the ball, and the line separating one side of the screen from the other. The pawns are controlled with both a horizontal and vertical dial, much like the horizontal and vertical alignment control dials familiar from period televisions. This direct inversion of The Outer Limits' famous promise is telling of its conceptualization as a "TV Game," designed by a television manufacturer. It's a peek at TV from the technician's perspective, or perhaps the television's itself, all light and no content. The ball always travels at a constant horizontal rate, changing direction when it hits something solid, but its vertical position can be directly manipulated by the last player to touch it with an "English" knob, which fictionalizes it as the spin you give the ball... but that's a lie. Spin, in real life, is applied at the moment and thereafter set. If the ball goes off-screen The line exists, but is, in Table Tennis, intangible and powerless. Players can cross the pawns across the line freely or eliminate it or change its location.

This marks a distinct change from the inherently hostile gameworlds we've seen up until now. Here, the players are in nigh-absolute control of the game. It inherits something of the designer Ralph Baer's experience, the sheer delight of drawing light on the CRT. Basic components like the size of the squares or width of the net or speed of the ball can be customized by the player. The TV screen has become a playground. For example, the players could theoretically completely ignore intended play to create a state of equilibrium and adjust the distance between the pawns for use as a metronome, or at incredibly-close distances, granular sound synthesis. This freedom isn't really the players', though. They could exercise it, but they're not encouraged to. It's the designer's. To freestyle with your square of light would be "play", but it would be the play you do with a toy, not with a game. A game has rules, constaints. The Magnavox Odyssey can have a lot of rules, they're just not enforced by hardware. Thus far, paratext like genre or history has informed how we fictionalize the mechanics of a game, now the rules themselves bare their artificiality and voluntary nature as they leap out of the screen and onto the page. Literally, you are given transparent overlays to superimpose on your screen and circumscribe yourself. Lots of the games come with further extensions like board games and cards.

The games of the Magnavox Odyssey beg to be considered as a whole, like the games of a WarioWare or other minigame compilation, seeing as they all came bundled together with the unit. They are all variations on a theme, which is to say all the other games are based on Table Tennis. It reminds me of the old "creativity test" where you have to write down as many things as you can think of to do with a paperclip. These people, who as far as they know are the innovators of the video game, sit at the dawn of the medium and are really roaring to take it for a spin and see what can be done with three squares and a line. Some games, like Cat And Mouse, want you to move on a grid. Some games, like Handball, make the line solid. Some games, like Invasion, use the "RESET" button that returns the ball when it leaves the screen instead as a "fire" button. Some games, like Fun Zoo or University Of The Solar System which are quizzes to challenge children, or Ski in which you trace a dotted line, could be adequately replaced with two tokens or better yet flashlights to shine on the board to indicate player position. Some games, especially the ones that attempt to emulate team sports with only two pawns like Baseball or Football, spiral into arcane knots that run on for pages and are approximately as complex as... let's say Settlers Of Catan [1995].

The Magnavox Odyssey also has lightgun games, bringing us 3 for 3 on games being a medium where perhaps the most significant direct interaction you can have with the world is shooting it with a gun. It makes you question if there's something fundamental about video games that makes them well-suited for shooting and/or violence. I think there is, but moreover that it's not driven into existence by a rotten, violent culture. Less cynically: It's a way of conceptualizing space and extending player agency beyond the immediate vicinity, nigh-instantaneously and in immediately apprehendable and intuitive ways, same as the ball off the pawn in either Table Tennis or Pong. And death is easy to program, a moving object becomes a non-moving object or even stops existing.

The visual impact of the two square pawns, not to mention the way they explore rules and rely heavily on external text and for the most part familiarity with external referent to function as legible, reminds me of nothing so much as The Marriage [2006], a flashpoint for discussion of the expressive potential of rules as art and a bold stride of minimalism, which almost could have been on the Odyssey save for the gendering colors. I'd like to take a closer look at the alphabetically-first Magnavox Odyssey game: Analogic.

In Analogic, the players begin at opposite corners of the board and the goal is to get to the other corner. Whoever is first wins, but motion is confined to a grid labelled with arbitrary numbers, and moreover, each player can only move to adjacent squares that would make the sum of the number they're moving to and the sum of the number their opponent is currently on either even or odd (depending on starting position.) On top of this strategic level that could again be replicated with tokens or flashlights, the players must maintain a constant volley of the ball. Keep in mind, the players will be positioned diagonally at the start, and possibly for the entire run of the game, while the ball without constant player input automatically moves horizontally. Once again, even with the OdySim emulator I am bereft of the experience of actually being able to get hands-on and play the damn thing, not only because of the lack of a player 2, but because of the fundamental difference between a keyboard press that will move me at a constant rate and the dial that will let me zip the ball or creep along, so I'm really mostly analyzing the manual here — but I can only imagine that this experience is tense and taxing, even if you know your addition front and back. Also, the players are nominally in competition by virtue of the win condition, but in every other aspect they are inexorably, fascinatingly mutually parasitic. Not only must a connection between players constantly maintained with effort, but the very rules of movement are constructed only collaboratively. This doesn't "mean" anything, like The Marriage is explained to... but it could, easily, with a simple twist of the mind, a recontextualization. There's just as much here as there about the balancing act of pursuing your own goals while maintaining the fraught interpersonal bonds that keep us healthy. It goes to show there's still gold in the 1-Bit Singular Activity Game hills, that works of art don't truly get superseded, be it Table Tennis by Pong or Pong by Ultra Pong [1977]. Art lives in the eternal now.

Pong still largely retains the sheen of the "first video game" in popular culture, even though it's since been outmoded many times over on that count, and part of that is the business savvy of Atari — such as pioneering video game microtransactions by charging 25 cents a taste, instead of $100 upfront (equivalent to $611 in 2019 dollars) for something almost nobody on Earth knew what was yet — turning Pong into something actually popular with the mass public, but part of it is also that, in its stripped-back constrained style, it really does look and feel like the ur-game. Even a short survey of game history up to this point (like of Galaxy Game [1971]) shows that the technology at Atari's disposal could have been pushed much further towards representation and sophistication than they were. No, the primitivism of Pong shouldn't be understood as economic or technological limitations, but as aesthetic ones. Pong is minimalist, honed to a sterile knife's edge.

It was Atari's second time up to bat with the arcade-game model, the first being Computer Space [1971], which was their take on Spacewar [1962], but changed up far more compared to the inspiration than Galaxy Game or Pong, with UFOs that moved in different patterns instead of a star or another player, and bullets curving under the influence of gravity. Their next game would have a punchier name, to match less convoluted gameplay. Pong was actually apparently designed as a telephone-game version of Table Tennis, the designer Allan Alcorn in ignorance of it, under orders to make a tennis game from Nolan Bushnell, who had seen the Table Tennis game. It kinda shows: There's none of the delight in the novelty of drawing on a CRT monitor that bled through into the open design of Table Tennis. For the first time on this blog, the quietly confident craftsmanship of a video game that knows what video games is. The instructions are three lines long, printed on the front of the machine.

The square screen enclosing the play is mostly empty space, but all that vertical space means is that you have more ground to cover and less time to react than on a more standard horizontal-rectangle display. Points (an Atari concept inherited from Computer Space) are the point, written out far bigger than anything else, parceled out one-by-one until victory. The paddles are small, the ball is smaller, and both are fast, in contrast not just to Table Tennis but also the downright stately and methodical Spacewar. The "English" mechanic is replaced with harsh zig-zag trajectories either randomly assigned from half-court or ricocheting wildly from encounter with the minutely different parts of the paddle, so there's no thought, nothing clever, just action. It's a raw reflex test: you can get to any point on the screen in no time flat, but can you operate the dial with both speed and precision? It's a closer approximation of a real white-knuckle sports experience than anything the Odyssey could provide. Such a frenzy entranced.

Magnavox Odyssey games may have pitted players 1 & 2 against each other, but given how the construct of the games only exist by a constant act of collaboration and good faith on both parts, or how it's pitched squarely at the hypothetical nuclear family unit, it makes more sense to conceive of the relationship between the players as nominally adversarial. Pong is much more the competition, and without the constant labor of just upholding rules, players can enter a flow state of conquering the challenges (or challengers) before them. Its location in public means that this is a game anyone with sight and a hand can pick up, even complete strangers, who will then have something to relate about. The advertising shows as a demographic, instead of rosy-faced children, hip 1970s young adults, or boast that its understated cabinet is suitable for "sophisticated locations," perhaps coyly alluding to the massive sexual tension of mingling over a game of Pong [1972] surrounded by ferns and wood paneling. (Atari’s first attempt at a wholly original title, Gotcha [1973], would be infamous for its purposefully boob-evoking controllers.) Video games wouldn't become widely solitary affairs like their cousin the pinball machine until taken back into the home for good with the rise of the Atari 2600 and the first personal computers instead of ARPANET-connected mainframes. I'll regrettably be skipping ahead past multiplayer games from here on out, and thus most of this 1-bit era I'm growing fond of. It's worth noting, though, that in doing so I could arguably be missing the entire point of the medium of games, those communal or outward-looking experiences that the titles covered so far have been purpose-built for.

Like Table Tennis was on the Odyssey, Pong was taken as prototype in the arcade, both by Atari and by what was now an industry of a new class of professional video game developers. Just look at this incomplete list of Pong variations and derivatives, which doesn't even count, like, Breakout [1976], sideways solo Pong. As much as that paints a bleak picture of an industry unwilling to explore the boundaries of what games were capable of like on the Odyssey in favor of chasing a quick buck, well, it's a very incomplete picture of what quickly became a pretty big industry: Pong, overnight, forever changes video games from a utopian proposition into a primarily commercial one.