TV: Killer Net & Lie to Me
Jul. 26th, 2009 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseI managed to miss Killer Net when it was on Channel 4 years ago but on my lieutenant’s recommendation I managed to pick up the DVD which cut all four episodes together into one long one. The evening I started watching the DVD I was waiting for the first episode to end and didn’t realise that the episode length was looking a little suspicious until I was about half way through.
Killer Net involves a realistic murdering game on the PC. The player needs to stalk their chosen victim, gather the correct tools to both kill them with and then dispose of the body, execute the act and then pass a finally police interrogation section. The game setup strikes me as being pretty close to that of games like Dark Seed or even more closely Dracula Unleashed which required that the player execute actions in exactly the right way to continue, with the latter involving real video footage too. The twist in Killer Net comes in the form of the player being able to input the details of their own victim once they’d completed the successful kill at which point, suspiciously enough that person would genuinely be killed. There’s more to it than that of course but the basic setup runs thus.
Killer Net was quite enjoyable for incidental details as well as the main plot: things like early version online chatrooms, the advent of internet connections or the concept of overclocking. It took me a few minutes to realise that when one character stated that she needed to ‘get into the processor’ she was talking about overclocking. The series was aired in 1998 so that would have been four years after I’d fitted my first CD drive but still before I’d built my own PC. It was just prior to the release of Ultima IX which is probably the first Ultima game that I actually tried to pay through properly on my first go. Suffice to say Killer Net was worth the purchase both for its plot and its tech nostalgia value. In fact my only problem with the series was with the suspension of disbelief needed to rationalise the fact that one character didn’t realise from the outset that another was completely crazy. And even then it was more a case of having to remind myself that undergrads really can be that stupid due to being that young.
Incidentally, Killer Net still didn’t help me figure out exactly what it is that’s odd about Paul Bettany’s face or why he always seems to be playing characters who touch other men in a creepy fashion way too much.
I’d read an interview with Dr Paul Ekman about Lie to Me a little while ago then promptly forgot about it till the series was being advertised on TV. While I don’t know too much about Ekman’s actual research the artistic licence taken with the concept in Lie to Me certainly makes it sensational enough that the series is enjoyable to watch.
The idea of being able to identify physical indicators emotion isn’t a new one: there are plenty of bite-sized books that touch on the topic, Tracey Cox’s Superflirt immediately comes to mind, but the series handles it fairly well by focusing on ‘microexpressions’ that occur unconsciously rather than the usual body language clues that most people have heard of by now. Later on in the series they do fall into the trap of slowing down all said microexpressions for the viewer’s benefit which doesn’t help so much as make them look too easy to spot to the point where it gets a bit tedious to watch them. There’s also a lot of exaggeration which again detracts from the idea by simplifying it past the point of illustration and into the realm of stupidity.
Towards the end of the series especially the illustrations of clues get a bit excessive and feed into a sense that while the series did a lot of things right it also took steps backwards in sync with its progress. One particular area in which it took a firm step backwards was with the protégé character, who newly introduced to the firm specialising in reading people almost seems at points like a placeholder for the audience who are also being introduced to the concept. It’s one of those cases where it’s a collection of little things that cause problems with her character concept. She’s a POC, a Latina, and as such is feisty and not academically educated, she also comes from an abusive background and ends up dating a black cop. The black cop character does point out another character’s white privilege in respect to his girlfriend once but it’s done so quickly and indirectly that it doesn’t seem to make too much of a difference to anything; it’s also never touched upon again. Likewise the series seems quite content to allow attraction and relations between races but only so long as the individuals involved are all still POC. The one POC character, who is pale enough to begin with which involves a whole other set of issues, who displays an interest in white women is a convicted and wholly unrepentant rapist. The other character of a similar calibre, a convicted white paedophile, on the other hand self-medicate/chemically castrates himself because he’s repentant and ‘doesn’t want to hurt anyone again’. We even have the murder of a gay man dating a black rapper by said rapper’s cousin who is disgusted by the relationship.
In essence what the audience is given white individuals displaying noble characteristics and a whole raft of POC who display the opposite to balance that out. There are black cops who get angry and don’t understand what the lead white male is trying to achieve, an over-emotional Latina, an African activist who lies to raise awareness of the issues in her home country and so on. In fact with the last her book is pulled and that’s the last we hear of her where as a white character who lies about being raped to help bring another woman’s case to light is demonstrated to be a martyred hero for her cause. It’s not overt but then neither is most racism in the real world. And in this case it’s the thread of subtle bias that gets me. It reinforces and tries to justify those subtle racist ploys. Even the one character being called on his privilege is never dealt with and the rest of the time the viewer is greeted with negative POC stereotypes bolstered with ‘tone’ issues and ‘POC can be prejudiced to each other’ excuses.
All of which is before I address the last episode which for a minute I thought would actually surmount the ‘all Muslims are a threat to the US’ idea. It almost did with the rogue FBI agent who bugged a mosque being decried and the slight mention of people being American Muslims in the same way that people can be American Christians or American Jews and so on. It almost got there and then the ending fell back on ‘all Muslims elsewhere are extremists’. I understand that it’s about extending boundaries and to do so you need to reinforce a new boundary that marks people out as other, so you go from ‘no Muslim can be a ‘true’ American’ to ‘non-American born Muslims are terrorists’ but it was so crudely done. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised considering the entire tone of the series really and of plenty of series like it. Othering is one of the things that plenty of series in need of cardboard cut-out villains does, its just like the obligatory and mostly irrelevant mention of Ireland in US series because someone somewhere fifty generations back in the scriptwriting team once had an ancestor who came from Ireland and they want the whole damn world to pat them on the back for it.
Suffice to say Lie to Me could make a reasonable enough watch and is actually quite fun at the start but it has race issues of the same calibre as Dollhouse’s sexism, and considering that Dollhouse featured a ‘rape of the week’ plotline that’s certainly saying something.
Killer Net involves a realistic murdering game on the PC. The player needs to stalk their chosen victim, gather the correct tools to both kill them with and then dispose of the body, execute the act and then pass a finally police interrogation section. The game setup strikes me as being pretty close to that of games like Dark Seed or even more closely Dracula Unleashed which required that the player execute actions in exactly the right way to continue, with the latter involving real video footage too. The twist in Killer Net comes in the form of the player being able to input the details of their own victim once they’d completed the successful kill at which point, suspiciously enough that person would genuinely be killed. There’s more to it than that of course but the basic setup runs thus.
Killer Net was quite enjoyable for incidental details as well as the main plot: things like early version online chatrooms, the advent of internet connections or the concept of overclocking. It took me a few minutes to realise that when one character stated that she needed to ‘get into the processor’ she was talking about overclocking. The series was aired in 1998 so that would have been four years after I’d fitted my first CD drive but still before I’d built my own PC. It was just prior to the release of Ultima IX which is probably the first Ultima game that I actually tried to pay through properly on my first go. Suffice to say Killer Net was worth the purchase both for its plot and its tech nostalgia value. In fact my only problem with the series was with the suspension of disbelief needed to rationalise the fact that one character didn’t realise from the outset that another was completely crazy. And even then it was more a case of having to remind myself that undergrads really can be that stupid due to being that young.
Incidentally, Killer Net still didn’t help me figure out exactly what it is that’s odd about Paul Bettany’s face or why he always seems to be playing characters who touch other men in a creepy fashion way too much.
I’d read an interview with Dr Paul Ekman about Lie to Me a little while ago then promptly forgot about it till the series was being advertised on TV. While I don’t know too much about Ekman’s actual research the artistic licence taken with the concept in Lie to Me certainly makes it sensational enough that the series is enjoyable to watch.
The idea of being able to identify physical indicators emotion isn’t a new one: there are plenty of bite-sized books that touch on the topic, Tracey Cox’s Superflirt immediately comes to mind, but the series handles it fairly well by focusing on ‘microexpressions’ that occur unconsciously rather than the usual body language clues that most people have heard of by now. Later on in the series they do fall into the trap of slowing down all said microexpressions for the viewer’s benefit which doesn’t help so much as make them look too easy to spot to the point where it gets a bit tedious to watch them. There’s also a lot of exaggeration which again detracts from the idea by simplifying it past the point of illustration and into the realm of stupidity.
Towards the end of the series especially the illustrations of clues get a bit excessive and feed into a sense that while the series did a lot of things right it also took steps backwards in sync with its progress. One particular area in which it took a firm step backwards was with the protégé character, who newly introduced to the firm specialising in reading people almost seems at points like a placeholder for the audience who are also being introduced to the concept. It’s one of those cases where it’s a collection of little things that cause problems with her character concept. She’s a POC, a Latina, and as such is feisty and not academically educated, she also comes from an abusive background and ends up dating a black cop. The black cop character does point out another character’s white privilege in respect to his girlfriend once but it’s done so quickly and indirectly that it doesn’t seem to make too much of a difference to anything; it’s also never touched upon again. Likewise the series seems quite content to allow attraction and relations between races but only so long as the individuals involved are all still POC. The one POC character, who is pale enough to begin with which involves a whole other set of issues, who displays an interest in white women is a convicted and wholly unrepentant rapist. The other character of a similar calibre, a convicted white paedophile, on the other hand self-medicate/chemically castrates himself because he’s repentant and ‘doesn’t want to hurt anyone again’. We even have the murder of a gay man dating a black rapper by said rapper’s cousin who is disgusted by the relationship.
In essence what the audience is given white individuals displaying noble characteristics and a whole raft of POC who display the opposite to balance that out. There are black cops who get angry and don’t understand what the lead white male is trying to achieve, an over-emotional Latina, an African activist who lies to raise awareness of the issues in her home country and so on. In fact with the last her book is pulled and that’s the last we hear of her where as a white character who lies about being raped to help bring another woman’s case to light is demonstrated to be a martyred hero for her cause. It’s not overt but then neither is most racism in the real world. And in this case it’s the thread of subtle bias that gets me. It reinforces and tries to justify those subtle racist ploys. Even the one character being called on his privilege is never dealt with and the rest of the time the viewer is greeted with negative POC stereotypes bolstered with ‘tone’ issues and ‘POC can be prejudiced to each other’ excuses.
All of which is before I address the last episode which for a minute I thought would actually surmount the ‘all Muslims are a threat to the US’ idea. It almost did with the rogue FBI agent who bugged a mosque being decried and the slight mention of people being American Muslims in the same way that people can be American Christians or American Jews and so on. It almost got there and then the ending fell back on ‘all Muslims elsewhere are extremists’. I understand that it’s about extending boundaries and to do so you need to reinforce a new boundary that marks people out as other, so you go from ‘no Muslim can be a ‘true’ American’ to ‘non-American born Muslims are terrorists’ but it was so crudely done. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised considering the entire tone of the series really and of plenty of series like it. Othering is one of the things that plenty of series in need of cardboard cut-out villains does, its just like the obligatory and mostly irrelevant mention of Ireland in US series because someone somewhere fifty generations back in the scriptwriting team once had an ancestor who came from Ireland and they want the whole damn world to pat them on the back for it.
Suffice to say Lie to Me could make a reasonable enough watch and is actually quite fun at the start but it has race issues of the same calibre as Dollhouse’s sexism, and considering that Dollhouse featured a ‘rape of the week’ plotline that’s certainly saying something.
