Let's get this out of the way: Hayao Miyazaki's “The Secret World of Arrietty” is definitely just an adaptation of The Borrowers. But it has enough Miyazaki countryside charm to stand out. It's about a tiny family who lives by stealing things from humans. But one day, a human discovers Arrietty while she's out gathering sugar. Sho (Shawn in the English dub.) is a sick child who has some form of heart condition. I think Arrietty is like an inch tall. It's a cute movie, and not too long.
After discovering her, the sick boy wants to help Arrietty. He brings her sugar, and out his mom's old dollhouse for them to live in. But, it makes things worse for her family...because more humans notice them. Being so small, almost everything is a threat to the Borrowers. I like how it plays with perspective. A needle is a sword to Arrietty. A cat is like a dragon. One drop of tea fills her little teacups.
There are some gross scenes I thought, but that's because the Borrowers (Arrietty, and her parents, Homily and Pod.) are so small. People are giants. Bugs are huge and scary. Crickets, pillbugs, spiders...gross. But, Arrietty can fight them off with a needle. Humans are by far the biggest threat to the Borrowers though. The boy's caregiver Haru (Hara in English.), kidnaps Arrietty's mom, and calls pest control. So the last part is them saving her, and moving out.
Arrietty's parents warned her to stay away from Sho, even though he needs rest, and so won't be much trouble. Pod hurts his leg while out looking for Homily, and discovers a wild Borrower named Spiller who says they can live with him on the other side of the river. So, Arrietty and Sho say a tearful goodbye, as the Borrowers float down to the other side of the river in a teapot.
Overall, it's a cute movie about an unlikely friendship and unintended consequences. It doesn't overstay its welcome, has loads of charm, tons of playful perspective shots, and a good story. Plus, Amy Poehler and Will Arnett voice Arrietty's parents in the English dub. I always liked them. Arrietty is voiced by Bridgit Mendler. Anyway, give it a watch if you can.
“It’s 2065, and you are an interrogator-model android tasked with rooting out deviants among your own kind. You must probe for lies, monitor and exploit emotional spikes, earn the trust of your subjects, and make the final call: release, or destroy?”
-Steam Synopsis
So, I managed to get an ending for Silicon Dreams. It's sort of like a visual novel/cyberpunk mystery game. You work for a mega-corporation KRONOS Robotics. They send in Androids who are malfunctioning. Getting emotional, violent, in love, feels human, etc. You interrogate them until you find out what's wrong, and make recommendations whether to reset, kill, or keep the android as is. So far, so good.
Later on in the game, you learn about rebel groups of androids that want to be human, or in love, and doctors or teachers that want to help them, and you're supposed to either hunt them down or join the resistance. That's supposed to be the game's moral dilemma. The problem is, (for me.) some of the game's mechanics directly conflict with getting a “good” moral ending.
In order to stay employed at KRONOS, you have points out of 100. If your score falls low enough, you can't stay in the game. So, on a certain level, you have to maintain points just to keep playing. And, although we're told in-game by various Androids or humans that KRONOS is evil, and they control them, etc., I just never saw enough evidence that KRONOS was evil to care. At a point, you can just start doing your job just to finish the game.
It certainly doesn't help when the rebel androids or humans start threatening you, hacking androids and planning to bomb KRONOS multiple times. I will say, there's a lot I agree with tonally in the game. I get that maybe I'm supposed to feel like KRONOS is evil, and manipulating robots and people. I just wish the rebels...and the Androids that want to escape, were less violent and whiny. It's not a moral dilemma, it's just called having a job.
For example, an android comes in. We know she's been working with a scientist to help Androids escape. I'm trying my best to keep her calm (The game registers emotions like “Fear” “Anger” “Joy” “Disgust”.) Well, none of that mattered, because she blows herself up when you ask about removing her hard drive to get the scientist's location, after cursing the company.
Frankly, the game just feels like a checklist to me. I know what I'm supposed to feel, but in the end I didn't care. Another time, my score fell so low, for misdiagnosing Androids that KRONOS started to suspect that I was part of the resistance. Well, I wanted to keep my job. So, I went into interrogation myself, gave all the safe, pro-KRONOS answers, and boom, reputation back up to 80.
In the end, an android comes in threatening to release a video proving androids have emotions. Which is fine, I guess. Wouldn't have particularly mattered to me. But, of course, it turns out, he has a bomb in his stomach. Well, now I'm going to disarm the bomb and arrest him. This of course, got me to the pro-company ending, where I became assistant to the Vice President of KRONOS. I never really felt one way or the other about the company. I just wanted to finish the game.
I guess I wanted to help humans and rebels, but I also wanted to keep playing, in which case, you need to stay employed. By the way, if an android started showing excess emotion, I usually just reset them. Which sometimes got me in trouble with the company, either because a customer was dissatisfied, or the android had evidence the company needed on rebels. But, again, I just kept doing my job, giving pro-company answers, and completing my diagnostics, and I could keep playing.
I don't know. I don't really recommend the game, unless you really like those scenes in Blade Runner where they're diagnosing androids. That's clearly what this game was inspired by. But, I just didn't see enough evidence of the “evil corporation” being evil for me to care about androids that claim they want to be human, or any of the rebels. I did have plenty of androids try to bomb me, or hack me. So, mostly I just did my job for KRONOS. As far as I could see, the only evidence that KRONOS was evil, was that they are a mega-corporation, not that they directly interfered in the lives of androids or consumers.
I wish I could recommend the game. I love robots, Blade Runner, and sci-fi. But, this has all the moral subtlety of an angsty teenager. It's hard to care for rebels when they're constantly violent. It's hard to care for androids who want more emotions when they are clearly unstable. Again, I can't help feeling that they were supposed to be more sympathetic. That KRONOS was supposed to be wrong. But, I had to keep up my points to keep playing. Oh, and also rebels kept bombing me, and androids kept hacking me. So, maybe that had more to do with it.
In conclusion, the game has some neat mechanics, but fails in that it has black-and-white moral dilemmas. By the end, I would just whiff entire cases just to move the game along. I get that it wants to be about big issues, moral dilemmas, inducing emotions, etc. All you need to do is keep up your points. It's a classic case of “show, don't tell”. It's hard to believe the corporation is evil, no matter how many times you tell me...when it was the rebels who actively tried to kill me.
What was the worst KRONOS could do? Deactivate me? Big deal. Rebels and androids had tried that already. I just gave my answers, and kept playing. I wish I wanted to play again. I don't. But, if you do, it's on Steam. Maybe it would've meant more to me if I were a teenager. I don't know. But, I got one play-through, and that was enough for me.
An Analysis of “Mein Krieg My Private War”: Amateur Films by German WW2 Soldiers (1989/1990):
Bringing Memories To Life:
“I think I still have my 8mm Siemens here in this wardrobe.”* The former German soldier, a narrow-faced old man now with unkempt tufts of white hair moves a heavy vacuum cleaner out of the way, and he sorts through the old closet, and pulls out a hefty old machine that looks like a miniature metallic jack-in-the-box. “Ah! So, it was the 16mm model, then! Look here!” He says, out of breath. The old man takes the big square camera and turns the crank on the side so that the lens is slowly exposed. “Hey, it still works!” he says excitedly. “I’ll be, look at that. Pretty hefty, ‘ey?”
As the man walks to a white room where a small table is sprawled with old black and white photos, the German seats himself in a big red armchair, his British translators sitting opposite him behind the lens of a camcorder so as to be transparent. “I am always amazed how these photos excite my senses...” He says, his voice falling from exasperation. “I still remember the smells of burning wood. The pictures...they sure bring memories to life, don’t they?”
He began slowly with a deep breath: “At first...we didn’t quite know where we were headed. Then, I saw this sign in some sort of Polish script or something as we headed further eastward from Berlin, and then I knew we were going to invade Russia. In the train, the next day our commandant said to us: "Boys, I'm not supposed to tell you, but 4:00 is attack time. We all had butterflies in our stomachs; we didn't know what to do." The face of the man then turns and laughs at an old film shown on a projector: German soldiers drinking beer around a campfire. One sticks his hand on the lens so as to hide.
"Aha! There I am! With a mustache, even! Look! And I was camera shy.
"Camera shy?" asks a translator.
"Camera shy!" he laughs.
ANIMALS TO MEN:
The next former soldier is a bald, tall man with glasses and an orange sweater. He sits in a dimly-lit room, possibly a darkroom, with a small round off-white table. The bookcases and shelves in the background suggest he has knowledge of his dark past. He begins nervously, speaking with a cracked voice. "My parents were of the opinion that anything that was considered good must be good for their son, too. And in these times... (falling voice, notably sweating...from clothes?) ...it was considered..."good" to be in the Hitler Youth; you see, not to be an outsider." Cut to black and white footage of a line of boys in Hitler Youth regalia; brown shirts, khaki shorts, and swastika armbands. They are carrying a big swastika flag on a pole and marching around a hilly meadow. "I think I was...14 years old, then? Yes, 14 years old."
He explains that his parents were very curious about what a young boy does in a Hitler Youth camp, and so they gave him a camera. But, he only took pictures of what interested him at the time. You then cut to photos of puss willows and a boy in a Hitler Youth uniform cleaning the front wheel of a bike.
"There was a certain regimentation to it all, you had a sense of purpose." He says. "You didn't walk around aimlessly. You marched." Footage shows boys raising the flag in a busy town center next to two Nazi troops. "I remember one day I was being very curious and troops came by me, and I looked at them, thinking "Aha! What's this, then? And a pedestrian grabbed me by the arm and barked: "STRETCH YOUR ARM OUT when the Führer's troops pass by! Then, I learned to stretch out my arm and stand at attention when they passed by from then on."
The old man then comments on some color footage of a teenage soldier smiling, standing at attention and marching, which he happily explains to be himself in basic training. Then, his voice becomes quiet as more footage of basic training is shown. Two men crawling on their stomachs in the snow. A man hopping up and down like a bunny. Men with bayonets stabbing a dummy. "Of course, when you were in basic training you had to be tough or the men would tease you and call you a softie. On the other hand, I did not want to lose my friends. So, I wanted to stay in the middle ground, you see." He says, while the footage runs.
"Did you, also?" Asks the male translator.
"Well..." The old intellectual hesitates slightly, pushing up his glasses. "Remember: I was 18; I was a different person!" He speaks fast and holds up a finger. Then, again at normal pace. "Now, I am 66. Back then, I had no way of knowing that their objective was to humiliate us, to break our will, to make us behave like animals, so that you were capable of carrying out ANY order without asking 'Is this right or is this wrong?' And that makes me an accomplice. Yes. As a soldier I was an accomplice."
"
Did you participate in the firing squad units [Todeskopfeinheiten] or did you see any in Russia?" Asks the female translator. He jerks at his collar and takes a deep breath, relaxing as he rests his knuckles back on the table: "No. I never even saw a firing squad but I heard stories when I was a POW in Kiev. Of the atrocities that the members German army, me, my friends, and Germany had committed." His voice is strained (from tears?) and he continues, gesturing slowly and half-heartedly to swat away the memory. "At first we...we thought this was exaggerated, or Soviet propaganda; they did call us the "fascist hordes", and to us the Russians and the Jews were subhuman. [Untermenschen]." Cut to a scene of gallows with 5 Russians hanging, all marked with a gold JUDE [Jew] star on their chest. A sign reads: THESE JEWS AGGITATED THE GERMAN WEHRMACHT. [Hitler’s army] “But when I was in Kiev, I saw the Russians starving, wrapped in blankets...they didn’t seem like a threat; they were human. I saw photographs of the concentration camps, too.” Next, the German is huddled over filing cabinets marked with the names of cities and concentration camps. “These are my archives. I decided to publish them.” The German nods.
MEN TO ANIMALS:
“NIEMAND erwartete den Russlandfeldzug!” [NO ONE anticipated the Russian campaign] yells a round, tanned interviewee wearing a loose red tie and open grey business suit, throwing up his hands emphatically. He sits in a yellow armchair, his stance is slouched, comfortable and relaxed, but he speaks passionately of the journey to Russia: “The feeling was...the...the...well, the same feeling when you undertake a journey!” Now, they were soldiers he says. Now, they were doing something. What mattered to him was the journey though, and not the politics: “I was an instrument of the state! The word kill never occurred to us, that was not a topic.”
he says, waving his hands. “I had orders and I had to fulfill them!” He tells of being in Sevastopol, and sings a song in Russian he heard when he was with 90,000 (Russian) POWs. He shot films of his artillery unit shooting down a Russian fighter plane with their carbine rifles. He laughs: “You see, it was a hornet that stung us. And that was very unusual at that time, to shoot down a plane with rifles. But, it was the only thing we had. He could’ve killed maybe five of our men.” The shot centers on the dead pilot, with a blue sweater among the smoking wreckage. “There’s the pilot...gray-blue sweater. A bit still there.”
“One felt like one was a rabbit! Poking in and out of the trenches, and eating and celebrating! War heightens the senses, you know.” Footage of men in trenches, digging, then drinking beer, and eating hard bread. He continues, this time around a small miniature model of the Brandenburg Gate, positioning Napoleonic cavalry models to the right, left, and center. “You see, I didn’t want to destroy; that’s not me. I only wanted to observe. I didn’t want to see ruins.” He says.
Cut to him back in the armchair, behind a large bookcase. It is obvious the translator has asked a question about the trains. “Oh, the trains during the wartime are a great topic!” He smiles. “We were so covered in armor, and our backpacks and supplies that we could barely move. The further east we came, the more room there was on the train. But, there were a few who packed instruments and...and we danced, sang, and until…uh, Russia.”
Then, in the first battle, at Sevastopol, he saw the first dead person ever in his life. “There was a German soldier: wedding ring glistening in the sun, face red… and bloated…flies around his mouth…” Footage of wounded Russians standing in line, bandaged. “There is no war manual that says ‘What do I do with 90,000 prisoners!” He says, “I looked after some Russians and give them water, dressed their wounds. I am amazed at how determined these wolves were. Look! There’s a Russian pilot. 17 years young!” Close-up of a captured Russian pilot.
“You have a clear conscience of all of this? What about the pilot you shot?”
“The pilot...yes… well, sure! Crystal-clear!” He smiles and clears his throat. “I could not tell you about all this so powerfully today if I DID…NOT…HAVE…A CRYSTAL…CLEAR…CONSCIENCE!” It is unclear to me whether this was meant to stop the questions, or if it was said slowly to reinforce his own affirmation.
SPARE ME THE ANSWER:
An older-looking German, his hair sparse, wearing a white business suit and tie with glasses. He is still notably blond as steers the wheel of a car. We arrive at a mall of some kind where he stands in front of a booth with a map on it. He begins his story: “I didn’t want to be in the army, I wanted to be a photographer. But, my parents said this job is not practical. You need discipline, and the army will prepare you for a job.” He was deployed to Vitebsk, Russia. His parents, as a farewell gift, gave him a camera. “It was amazing to me that we did it, but we attacked Vitebsk from the west. The Russians anticipated this. For hours, nothing happened. I climbed up a fir tree to watch, but nothing. I wanted action.” He goes on to explain that the battle began when they found out the population was living underground in earthen bunkers.
“And what did you do with the Russians you found?” Asks the male translator.
“Oh…They were…” He exhales, removes his glasses, and touches his palm to his forehead. “Questioned. Rounded up. Shot.”
“Did you hear the firing squads or see them, too?” The translators asks.
“I saw them, too.” He says.
“Did you participate in them, too?”
He turns stone-faced, whispering inaudibly...weeping softly. “Do I have to answer that? Spare me the answer, please.” His head in his hands. “I was glad to be doing what I wanted to do.” He is now standing, having collected himself and is apparently showing the translator a photoalbum either of dead Russians, or his comrades. He is frustrated and flips through the book fast and angrily. “See here? Gone-gone-gone-gone-gone-gone! Well, I’ll be…! A complete causality list! Colors you’ve never seen before. Only in Siberia at -55 C.”
The next shot is of the man at a department store in the aforementioned mall. He holds a large music box [Glockenspiel, toy clock] and says: “If you turn the crank this way, the soldiers march around the face of the clock. This toy is beloved of people of all ages. The parents buy them for the children, see?” He chuckles, pointing at the nutcracker- like soldiers, and showing of the cloudy panorama on which is painted a little girl in a pink dress. “But, the parents enjoy playing with it more than the children. And here’s how you turn it off.” He flips a pendulum switch at the top. The soldiers halt.
SEEING IS SEEING:
A full-lipped, round man in a neatly-cleaned business suit walks down a long hall, opens the white door, and enters a room with a large, crank-operated projector. He turns the crank, then faces the camera and speaks. “I saw many people taking photograph but very few were filming, probably because there were little film materials to be had. But, I made sure I had many sources. At the start, everything was available, there was Kodachrome film even, and my Kodachrome film...the last I had developed in ’42, and they kept their color very well...turned out great.” He then describes at length how the camera works and that it stayed in perfect condition, even in Moscow in the extreme cold. It is sounding as if he is personifying his camera, and attesting to his own physical endurance.
Color images of a swastika flag waving over a barracks transition to young men, firing rifles. Cut to the interviewee in a large leather armchair. Behind him is a bookcase. He now wears glasses. “That is a normal part of learning how to fit in to society.” He says of his basic training. “Naturally, when somebody fell out of line, there were consequences.” The next film shows a bombed-out high-rise building in Poland, the top completely blown off. “...we climbed to the top, got in, and filmed it. It was just interesting at the time. You can’t say: “You must evaluate this morally; as the majority of people say today.”
He explains his departure to Moscow, and not knowing originally where he was going. “Am I going to Persia? Turkey?” He muses, and then reveals that: “Everyone was hopeful that the destination was Moscow.” Color footage of an armored car, bearing a swastika flag, atop which a young man stands. Then, the camera focuses from the window of a jeep, and pans along the wreckage of another car: “The Russians would hide along the roads and try to flip the cars, crack them, or kill the driver,” He smiles, and explains matter-of-factly. “So that that didn’t happen, you spotted a hole, you threw a grenade in, and that took care of it.”
“Were you scared of that?” asks the female translator.
“No. It could’ve been anybody bombed out there. The jeep here took a direct hit. Well, that’s war.”
Black and white footage goes on, showing a pile of dead bodies, and men being thrown into ditches. “Here I was in Moscow, all alone.” He says.
“Why did you film the dead bodies?” asks the translator.
He becomes a little defensive, and waves his hand as if to dismiss her. “That’s war.”
Toward the end of the interview he says that he has no regrets, only that he never saw the Western front, in wartime too, because “seeing is seeing” and the circumstances don’t matter.
Conclusion:
Mein Krieg: My Private War is about war. Consequently, it also follows the soldiers as they experience different stages of the war. Comradeship, joy, death, and horror. The reactions ranged from abstraction of humans as animals, or returning to a natural state so as to avoid human conscience, to the deconstruction of the animal propaganda to confront human conscience. Soldiers were represented as instruments, toys, or as just observing events over which they had no control.
The question must be asked: why then was it filmed? Obviously, all the men experienced death, but most stopped short of expressing any guilt directly, except for the man in Kiev, who joined the Hitler Youth at 14. Responses to death ranged from avoidance of acknowledgment. “I was amazed at how determined these wolves were.”, “Spare me the answer.”, and “That’s war.”
Rather than seeing the horrors of war as they were, they were regarded as interesting, but something you did not judge morally. Accordingly, the more soldiers identified with their enemies as humans, and their actions as humans rather than instruments or animals, feelings of grief and remorse increased. The abstraction of enemies is directly related to, in other words, being a good killer vs. being a good human.
As we worry about the dying WWII population, we must not forget the stories of the Germans.
The Allied powers have reveled in the “glory” of its victory over Nazism far too long without considering the consequences of war itself. We think we are invulnerable, because we think we do not need two sides of the story.
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* My translation differs from the film version of Mein Krieg: My Private War, in order to preserve both the phenomenological happenings (such as stuttering) and the narrative-analytic continuity. Rather than cutting from story to story, I proceed soldier to soldier with no cut scenes. As such, the information is not presented in the order of the film. It is hoped that I could better represent their stories holistically and thematically in this way.
Bibliography:
Eder, Harriet. Kufer, Thomas. Mein Krieg. BBC Elstree, 1990.
