i'm your man

let's post... while we talk

originally posted: 2016

Housekeeping: This is a condensed, updated version of an article originally in SPAG Magazine, crossposted from Letterboxd.

If you know me, I have either made you watch the film I'm Your Man or have heroically resisted the urge as long as I've known you. The thing is awful but deeply quotable ("I am dressed COMPLETELY WRONG" -- so relatable bestie!), and genuinely fascinating beyond so-bad-it's-good MSTing.

The film's blurb recommends it to anyone who likes Love Connection, Let's Make a Deal, and inexplicably, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I recommend it to those with fascinations with experimental multimedia, morbid curiosity, questionable senses of humor, friends with both, and no aversion to the seller slipping up and sending a Leonard Cohen DVD instead. And I am all of those things.

Don't want to buy the DVD? The whole thing is online via a port by Molleindustria; I recommend watching it there. If you need to know what you're getting into and why, here's a video of the opening scenes.

1995 was a dubious time in interactive entertainment. A lot of things were converging: the mainstreaming of the World Wide Web, the sudden feasibility of sophisticated graphics and video on everyday PCs, the now-quaint lack of irony regarding anything futuristic. Interactivity was the new hotness, and everyone wanted it.

And I do mean everyone. CD-ROMs, which had already popped off in the hobbyist shareware scene, were now big-budget experiences with huge amounts of money poured in. Historical sites could be “explored” via recreations that invariably resembled Doom WADs. Musicians yoked all sorts of PC-based frippery to their albums; among the auteurs who bit were Prince, David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel. Some of these were crass, some of them actually good, most of them are utterly fascinating, and all of them became ephemera.

But interactive movies remained the most elusive and became the most ephemeral of all, not for lack of trying. Interactive film had been attempted as early as 1967, with the Czechoslovak World’s Fair entry Kinoautomat. 1985’s play The Mystery of Edwin Drood, based on an unfinished Dickens novel, allowed the audience to vote for the desired murderer, romantic pairings and secret identities (a conceit oddly reminiscent of that year’s adaptation of Clue).

All of those were comparatively well-received. So what went wrong in the '90s? Intra-corporate bickering, perhaps. A failure to recall history. An obsession with short-lived “immersive” gimmicks like Emergo, Percepto, Illusion-O, Smell-O-Vision, etc. An even stronger obsession with pandering to the male Gen-X youth demographic. None of these were unique to the '90s, but it sure was a banner decade for them.

Combine all those factors and you get robot grossout-revenge flick Mr. Payback, which Roger Ebert -- perhaps foreshadowing his later stance on games being art -- called the worst film of 1995. The movie has the dubious distinction of being not just metaphorically but literally unwatchable, since it relied on proprietary, brick-and-mortar robo-sadism installations. Its counterparts were equally questionable and equally hard to find: Adam West vehicle Ride for Your Life and blow-shit-up excuse Bombmeister.

I'm Your Man, though, remains findable, albeit in warped form. Interfilm Technologies signed a deal with Sony to outfit more than 40 theaters with a proprietary joystick rig that allowed audiences to vote for where they wanted the plot to go. For those who couldn't make it to the crowd screenings, it was released on DVD -- seizing upon the technicality that while it couldn't be marketed as the first interactive movie, it could be marketed as the first interactive DVD!

The most striking thing about I'm Your Man is the creators' improbable yet total lack of cynicism. The making-of video is stunningly earnest; everyone except the composer, who cheerfully admits doing mediocre work-for-hire, talks about the film in the breathless, uncontained voice of the true believer. The creators fantasized about the film shown on satellite. Someone who almost certainly is director Bob Bejan even posted an Amazon review that is equal parts apology ("watch it for the flaws") and defense:

"Interactive narrative is HARD … As stupid as it looks, we spent A LOT of time thinking about it. To be totally honest, a bunch of us who were there are still thinking about it. … There is little question that we were ahead of the curve." - Amazon review by "bbejan"

“Ahead of the curve” may be a little generous. Video games have aspired to cinema since the technology advanced enough to make such aspirations feasible. Modern blockbuster cinema arguably aspires in the other direction. Each field tends to think the other is easier than it is, and critics from those fields are quick to seize on perceived blowhard syndrome or interloping. (“This experience is not like watching a real movie … it is more like rooting for a basketball team,” wrote Caryn James of The New York Times.)

The plot is a standard love quadrilateral between the villain, the MacGuffin, the woman and the flirt. Jack (the flirt) is a would-be audience stand-in whose main personality trait is having negative rizz; thanks to Kevin Seal’s VJ background, he evokes a wry Carson Daly. Leslie, the actual audience stand-in, is Elaine Benes in all but name. Richard is played by The Master from Buffy; no further explanation needed.

There is action of sorts, but mostly quick gags or questionably filmed, somewhat appropriative fight scenes. There is cosmopolitan urbanity, via a self-consciously pretentious gallery opening; there is humor via one-liner yuks. There is sexual tension, if you're generous. But mostly there's goofy and unsuccessful skirt-chasing or amazingly self-serious seductions like "let’s dance…... while we talk." All this is played for laughs, but in a plausibly deniable, "haha unless" kind of way.

But interactive narrative, indeed, is HARD. The more your plot branches, the more its complexity shoots up the exponential scale, which means the amount of work you have to do shoots up the exponential scale at another order of magnitude. If you're making a whole film, that adds yet another order of magnitude.

Little surprise, then, that I’m Your Man branches in name only. (In narrative design terms, the film is a "friendly gauntlet, with no instant deaths or irrevocably consequential, story-changing decisions.) The entire branching structure fits on the back cover of the DVD (seen above). Most of the primary plot events are fixed; the only choice is whether to show them on screen or relegate them to exposition. This produces something of a Rashomon narrative: the story happens, and you just follow someone through it.

If only Rashomon wasn't such a fucking bro. Coincidentally or not, the friendly gauntlet structure dovetails a bit too well with the wish fulfillment of narratives aimed at 18-to-34-year-old guys. Everything propels you forward thanks to the awesome capabilities and virility of the protagonist (and by extension, you). Consequences don't matter and don't last. You never have to make a decision that cuts you off from other possibilities forever.

So in I'm Your Man almost every choice results in an improbable victory: sudden feats of pepper spraying, out-of-nowhere ninja moves. As mentioned, Jack is a black hole of rizzlessness -- as a would-be flirtation, he boasts about how fast he can, uh, get the job done -- but he'll probably end up with Leslie anyway, as it's harder to choose a path where she doesn't. There is no “bad ending”; no matter what, at least one character will triumph (usually via deus ex machina twist).

Arguably the film got the bad ending. Arguably you got the bad ending, for choosing to watch it. But the bad endings in games are always the fun ones, right? I'm Your Man may not have a compelling story, or good acting, or good execution. But it does have a villain who breaks the fourth wall to inform the audience that, if they don’t make their choice fast, their seats will dissolve into ACID!!! If you've read this far, I assume that's enough.

footnotes

1. alternatively, you're my buddy Brendan, who introduced it to me 🔼
2. Maybe they were holding out for midnight screenings? They did eventually score some screenings, just decades later. 🔼
3. The history of musicians making PC interactives could be (and probably eventually will be) a whole post in itself. The Thompson Twins Adventure, which is precisely and gloriously what you think it is, and Samantha Fox Strip Poker, which is precisely and... uh, precisely what you think of it. 🔼
4. which had the spectacularly bad timing to be released the same year as the Oklahoma City bombings 🔼
5. slogan: "At Interfilm, you don't just sit there." 🔼
6. he gives an email address that starts with "bbejan," and also like, who would impersonate someone for something this niche 🔼
7. also deeply quotable 🔼
8. This might just be a games thing in general, but many negative reviews of interactive films have a curious, near-phallic fixation on the joysticks their audiences use. 🔼