Here's an idea.
Super Mario Bros is the world's greatest piece
of surrealist art.
[THEME MUSIC]
MARIO: Let's go.
It's probably a fair guess that most people who
watch "Idea Channel" are familiar with Mario
and the longstanding video game franchise starring him.
Given that familiarity, Mario might not
seem that weird to you.
He and his games are a huge part of our culture.
But let's say that you had to explain this guy and his antics
to someone who had never heard of him before.
He's a plumber who needs to rescue a princess from a turtle
dinosaur, sometimes with the help of another dinosaur who
eats living creatures to produce eggs used as weapons.
Standing in your way on the princess quest
are sentient mushrooms, turtles that
drop other spikier turtles from clouds
or who throw hammers at you, also ghosts,
robed mask-wearers, and caterpillars with a temper,
just to name a few.
You collect coins by smashing your head into bricks.
And you travel around the world through pipes.
OK.
Actually, that last one sort of makes sense.
But otherwise, completely bonkers.
I might as well be saying things like we're in the desert
and the clocks are melting.
It's raining, but businessmen.
There are elephants and they have tubas for trunks.
I guess actually that one sort of makes sense too.
Either way, it's easy to look at Mario, not just
the character and not just a single game,
but the whole 30-year franchise and all
of its wildly varied elements, and then look at surrealist art
and draw some parallels.
In comparison to many, if not most,
longrunning influential video series,
the elements that comprise any given Mario game can seem
picked from a floppy red hat.
And the combination of unexpected elements
in surrealist artworks can seem likewise just as non sequitur.
In both situations, by putting unexpected things together
one arrives by definition at surprising, sometimes even
hilarious results.
Ergo, Mario is surrealism.
Let's Tanooki Suit outta here.
But hold your tailspins for just a moment, because there's
a warp pipe here.
If we wanted to, we could go deeper.
It may be that Mario games and surrealist painting
have cosmetic similarities.
But we could also ask if that relationship persists
at more fundamental levels.
Like do Mario games and surrealist visual art
have related historical contexts?
Does each have similar results or impacts?
So to start, let's talk for a melting tick
about what surrealism is.
So Andre Breton was a leading French surrealist writer
and anti-Fascist-- a thing that I promise is going to be
important soon enough--
who wrote his "Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1924.
In it, Breton gripes that people had,
in effect, lost their imagination.
Distracted and sated by materialism,
Breton charges that lots of folks
had become stuck in what he calls the realistic attitude,
a dull view of the world, which bases reason primarily
on familiarity and therefore comfort and practicality.
He criticizes mankind, saying people seek reassurance
rather than the excitement or salvation
of expansive originality.
And he said that this happens at great cost.
"The realistic attitude," he wrote
"clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or
moral advancement.
I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate and dull
conceit."
"Forbidden, he later writes, "is any kind of search for truth
which is not in conformance with accepted practices."
Surrealism, he felt, could be an antidote
to how boring, repetitive, and sensical everything had become,
and as such, an antidote to even greater and more pressing
troubles.
Drawing heavily from Freud, Breton
describes how in dreams one can find
something akin to the true operations of thought.
In dreams, the surprising combination of elements,
like your dad is a lawnmower and your house is made of cheese
and you go back in time to visit George Washington,
for some reason, it all kind of makes sense.
The goal of surrealism would be to seize
upon this pre-rational, purposefully unreasonable
cognition and in so doing, escape
the structures of moral and aesthetic comfort
holding everyone back.
If you could visually represent the bizarreness of thought
and show its surreality, then perhaps others
would realize that the rationality holding them back
isn't the only game in town.
The weird semi-nonsense that comprises surrealist art
then isn't the end goal of the movement,
but one effect of an overarching philosophy described by Breton.
In order to progress, in order to rescue humanity,
one must confront and sometimes court the unexpected.
But OK.
What, you might ask, did Breton and the surrealists
think humanity needed rescuing from?
Well, many things, all very grand and important-sounding.
But perhaps most importantly and pressingly, Fascism.
In 1924, the year of Breton's "Manifesto,"
Mussolini was elected prime minister of Italy.
And it would be Italy's last free election for 22 years.
Breton and the other surrealists,
witnessing the rise of authoritarian nationalism,
saw surrealism as one way to challenge
the regime, along with other, more compliant art forms
and media outlets.
To be clear, Fascism did not inspire surrealism,
or singlehandedly bring it into being.
But it did provide an impetus to some
of its most famous practitioners,
except Dali, who didn't get along with Breton
and who was actually a Fascist.
Yeah.
It's surprising, I know.
Fascism also provides a fulcrum, albeit admittedly
a slightly awkward one, which pivots us back to Mario.
I don't know that I can say for sure what
inspired Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, not
Fascism, if I had to guess.
He's talked of technological restrictions guiding the design
of Mario's hat and mustache.
With only so many pixels available,
one shape was easier than another.
This inspired him to think of Mario as a plumber.
So hey, why not make him from New York?
Bowser was originally supposed to be an ox inspired by the Ox
King from "Alakazam the Great," but became more of a turtle
after the design of the Koopa Troopas was finalized.
And he is named after a Korean dish.
So the creative decisions which give us Mario and his pals
seem to be a combination of restriction, inspiration,
iteration, and whim.
Maybe there is a Breton-like Miyamoto Mario
manifesto out there and I just haven't found it.
If someone has a link, post it in the comments.
But until then, we're going to get a little bigger and talk
about how the grand design of Mario and his various worlds,
from Super Mario Bros to the New Donk Odyssey is reflective
of a particular flavor of not quite surreality,
specifically post-World-War-II Japanese culture.
So post-war Japan has a reputation for being weird,
at least by Western standards.
Japanese media, advertising, and television especially
can seem frenetic or chaotic, with numerous characters,
mascots, slogans, and signs overlapping one another
and vying for attention, a media landscape which
echoes much of the Japanese urban landscape, densely
packed and often dizzyingly heterogenous,
a look which [INAUDIBLE] has pointed out
contributes to the hypercapitalist East
Asian stereotypes found in genre works like "Blade Runner"
or vapor wave, actually.
While the collected Mario universe
doesn't traffic in the bleak, crowded commercialism of dank
cyberpunk landscapes, it does possess
a similar, albeit significantly more colorful, frenetic,
character-driven, sign-dense quality.
The Mario universe has a huge character
roster and endless worlds, lands, enemies, and abilities,
perhaps a reflection of the landscape from which Miyamoto
hails, which is to say that the philosophies that define
Miyamoto et al's designs may not be as easily stated as Breton's
surrealism, as they may not comprise
some resistance to a dominant political form,
but rather exist as a contiguous part of the culture
they're in and from.
But this doesn't mean that those philosophies don't share
some traits with surrealism.
In his book "Otaku, Japanese Database Animals," Hiroki Azuma
makes the case that Japan's frenetic sign-dense culture
results significantly from the struggles of rebuilding
the country, both culturally and literally, after World War II,
specifically, the shame of defeat
after an embrace of Fascism as an Axis power,
and the destruction of the landscape itself
around Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Azuma points out that this destruction provides
a disconnect from the traditional culture of Japan,
which continues to loom large, sure,
but after which a definitive chapter break was placed.
Having to confront defeat and to rebuild
means that Japan skipped modernity as
experienced by other world powers in the mid-20th century.
Japan went straight from traditionalism
to postmodernity, and as a result, Azuma writes,
would emerge as a leading nation, boasting
a fully matured consumer society and technological prowess,
suggesting that unhindered by the past,
unconcerned with the comfort of familiarity,
uninterested in realistic attitudes,
Japan is free as a culture to progress.
And the surrealist-seeming endless recombination
of surprising elements, from a cat dressed
as a young girl, a sad egg, and mega-tanned street fashion
to cute girls who are also powerful magic users
or deadly killers is a defining feature
of Japanese commercial culture.
The evolution of Mario specifically,
a plumber who fights turtles through various games
and often unexpected universes involving warp pipes,
embiggening mushrooms, flying raccoon dog
suits, angry bullets, and a cat that definitely doesn't possess
things, so don't get any ideas, it all
feels similarly iterative and recombinantory,
similar to Japanese commercial culture as a whole
and similar to surrealism's embrace of the unexpected.
Of course, a cosmetic similarity doesn't
mean Japan's postmodernity and Breton's conception
of surrealism are identical, far from it.
Less of a ward against Fascism, Japan's commercial culture,
as Azuma seems to suggest, is a result of it,
maybe even penance for it.
However, though the inspirations may be at odds,
one could argue that the results are comparable.
"To be Japanese," Azuma writes, "is thus
to be standing at the forefront of history."
Breton, by comparison, writes, "amid the bad taste of my time,
I strive to go further than anyone else."
Two sides of the same coin, perhaps?
To the degree you consider a push for progress a defining
feature of surrealism, which would largely be determined
by how much you side with Breton,
this is another way that we could choose
to view Mario as a surrealist masterpiece,
or as a masterpiece born of a surrealist context.
We may also ask if Mario games challenge
our realistic attitudes.
Or try as Miyamoto might, after 30 plus years of pipe warping,
fireball spitting, and sentient turnip harvesting,
has Mario become the comfort that we seek in place
of expansive originality?
Breton's surrealism and Azuma's postmodern Japan
may not be twin ideas, but perhaps they're
cousins, or simply unexpected elements
I've put in proximity with Mario in the hopes
of spurring your imagination, disrupting your comfort,
or challenging some regime.
What do you all think?
Is Mario a masterpiece of surrealism?
Let us know in the comments.
Keep it PG.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding sleep.
If you want to watch that one, you
can find a link in the doobly-do or wait for the end card
to show up.
Also, a little bit of business before we get too much further.
Now is where the "Idea Channel" is ending.
Schedule starts to get a little bit weird,
so I just want to be clear about what you can expect.
Next week we are not going to be releasing a scripted video.
We're going to be releasing the comment responses
for this week's video, for the Mario video,
and also a little bit more of the Q&A stuff
that we did from a couple of weeks ago,
so just some questions that we thought
were fun that didn't make it into the final cut of that
from a couple weeks ago.
After next week, we're going to be
taking two weeks off, where you won't see us upload anything.
And then four weeks from this week, on the week of the 14th,
we're going to be uploading our next scripted episode.
And that will be the first of the three final "Idea Channel"
episodes.
So the week of the 14th is when we're in the homestretch.
A lot of people have also been asking
about when we are going to be doing
the final like "Idea Channel" goodbye party here in New York.
And I still don't have it firmed up.
We're trying to find the best possible place.
Keep an eye on the Twitter, the Facebook, the subreddit.
I will announce literally as soon as I possibly can,
I promise.
I want to make sure that you have enough time
to put it in your calendars, set some time aside.
Yeah.
We'd love to see you.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit,
links in the doobly-do.
You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram,
and my podcast "Reasonably Sound"
also on Twitter, Instagram, and SoundCloud.
And last but certainly not least,
this week's episode would not have been possible or good
without the very hard work of these koopa-lings.
[THEME MUSIC]