Culture Blues

The Instant Movie Club: The King of Kong

Every week, your friends at Culture Blues get together to watch a movie from their Netflix Instant queue. Then, they discuss it over a few friendly games of Missile Command. This is The Instant Movie Club.

This week, we’ll be discussing The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a film documenting one man's quest to climb atop the Donkey Kong high score mountain. The below discussion contains heavy spoilers.

Next Week: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, John Krasinski steps behind (and in front) of the camera to tackle David Foster Wallace's unfilmable and disjointed collection of stories.

SPOILERS BELOW!

Jeremiah: The William S. Burroughs quote that opens The King of Kong asserts that we live in a universe of “war and games.” It seems a little grandiose at first. Of course, video games have ALWAYS been a competition. The high scores and the two player games are included for the purpose of competition and of boasting. Dating back to the 80s, however, the first decade of substantive gaming, people have been striving to prove superiority far beyond their block, their neighborhood, or even their region. Almost as far back as gaming goes, people have been striving to be the best in the world, long before the days of the internet, real-time leaderboards, and global gaming networks.

As a piece of entertainment, King of Kong is about as good as documentaries get. With clearly defined heroes and villains, a struggle against the establishment, legitimate tension and anxiety, and numerous memorable and perfectly scored montages (if Steve Wiebe’s “coming up short” montage set to Pictures of You doesn’t break your heart, then I’d have to imagine you’ve lived a life with no major regrets, with no missed opportunities), it plays out exactly as you would want a scripted drama to. In some ways, that is The King of Kong’s biggest fault; it feels manufactured. And, as with most documentaries, the more you learn, the more manufactured it seems.

This movie provides something far greater than its twists and conspiracies though, and it goes back to Wiebe’s “coming up short” montage. Wiebe is clearly a very talented man, who maybe could have been a great musician or athlete, two out of the three things that gain you the most respect, acclaim and admiration possible in our society (being an actor is the third). Whether it was bad luck, a defect of personality, or simply the fact that he wasn’t good enough, Steve Wiebe never made it, despite always being on the cusp. Eventually, he settled on video game greatness, something that couldn’t be less important to most people, including modern video game enthusiasts such as myself.

In painting what I found to be a heartbreaking and completely engrossing portrait of Wiebe, the film largely forgoes turning its villain, Billy Mitchell, into a real person. Director Seth Gordon claims that he actually portrayed Mitchell as less evil than he really is. Regardless, it’s tough for us to tell since we never meet his kids, we rarely see him in private moments and we only meet/hear from his (trophy) wife in the final act.

It’s worth it though, because I imagine Mitchell’s story of relentless self-promotion, glad-handing and (perhaps earnest) ambassadorship is far less interesting than Wiebe’s story of the teenage hero who never amounted to shit. Learning that Wiebe actually held the record for far longer than the film suggests, that Mitchell reclaimed it in 2007 (to celebrate the release of this film) and that both men have now been surpassed by a Queens plastic surgeon inspired by this film only adds another layer to this beautiful and bittersweet tale. It shows that Wiebe will never be as important to gaming (or as good) as the man who has crafted himself as the Gamer of the Century, and that in many ways he is just as pathetic and empty as Mitchell. Stating that the hero and villain are more similar than different is one trick that this crowd-pleasing movie is far too nice to pull, no matter how true it is.

Nerd Alert!

Jason: One of the things that I liked about The King of Kong was, as Jeremiah pointed out, the clearly defined heroes and villains (how apropos for a documentary on video gaming, by the way) and how we are basically following Steve Wiebe on his quest. When you look at it, the movie pretty much plays out like a video game. Weibe starts out with three lives (the three times he loses the record) and even has helpers along his journey. He's got his brother, the instigator (I waited the entire movie for that guy to just put out his cig and beat the shit out of Billy Mitchell- le sigh), his wife (who in the beginning seemed like more of a detractor, but really came through in the end for her man), and of course "Mr. Awesome."

Aside from the main characters, we get a fun glimpse into a few of the supporting players. The seriousness with which these nerds treat video gaming is both pathetic and endearing at the same time, personified respectively by Brian Kuh and Robert Mruczek. Kuh is one of Mitchell's henchmen and a total weasel. When he roamed Funspot telling everyone that Wiebe was on the cusp of a Donkey Kong "kill screen," I'm pretty sure he only wanted to make our hero nervous to the point of failure. Speaking of failure, how about Kuh's face as he laments not being the first to get a live "kill screen"? Seriously, the fucking nerve of this guy- he's not even that good. His high score was like 500,000 or something. That's baby stuff, holmes.

While the entire Twin Galaxies organization smacks of nepotism, we get the impression that Mruczek is the guy who quietly does his job with no agenda. His monologue about checking tapes for cheating or fraud is pretty noble, especially given his surroundings. HOWEVER- can someone please explain how Billy Mitchell's 1 million point tape gets accepted? There is clearly something shady going on there, and the speed with which TG founder Walter Day accepts the score (and changes the ever-so-important website) is reprehensible. With all the allusion to our hero being a loser (in the most literal sense) and having an affinity for crying, we finally see him actually lose and we finally see him break down and cry.

It was pretty obvious that Mitchell is a complete jackass and I don't doubt that Seth Gordon portrayed him as lightly as he could. As two quick examples, he's patronizing to the camera crew ("What tie was I wearing yesterday?") and we watch as he pushes other sauces aside to put his front and center on the grocery store shelf. I found the latter to be quite entertaining. Actually, they were both fantastic moments. Sweet ties, nerd.

In the end, The King of Kong lost major points for treating our hero's final victory (and Guinness World Record) as an aside. Maybe there is an explanation; I guess it could have happened post-production. I don't know... but it was wack. The movie is just about over when Gordon cuts to a screen with "BUT..." written in giant letters and proceeds to spend about 3 or 4 minutes chronicling Wiebe's record-breaking game of Donkey Kong. This left me totally underwhelmed. I want to know how our players felt. I doubt Mitchell would have given an interview, but what did Day think? Where was that piss ant Kuh? For Christ's sake, GIVE ME MORE MR. AWESOME!!

Anyway, I still thought it was a great flick. And having recently won a video game championship, this was perfect timing for me as I can fully relate to the range of emotions. Especially that of winning.

Jeff: To expand on something Jason said, pathetic and endearing is pretty much the perfect way to describe all the people in The King of Kong. We should really create some kind of graph – like Barney’s hot/crazy scale – to explore this further. Mitchell would be high on pathetic and low on endearing, and Wiebe would be somewhat less pathetic but break the curve on endearing. That’s why I disagree with Jeremiah when he suggests that Mitchell and Wiebe are more similar than the filmmakers would like to admit. Sure, they’re both nerds obsessed with a niche record for an antiquated video game, but their reasons for pursuing that record and the ways they go about it couldn’t be more different.

For the record, as a lifelong player of video games, I’ve never understood wanting to play games at this level. The same tactics (memorization, pattern recognition) that Mitchell and Wiebe use on Donkey Kong are still applied today by all the psycho shut-in kids that crowd the tops of the Modern Warfare leaderboard. Dissecting a game at that level removes the fun for me. I don’t want my games turned into math. That doesn’t make what Wiebe and Mitchell are able to do any less fascinating. Just super weird and ultimately pointless.

As intended by Seth Gordon (the filmmaker), Mitchell comes off like a bully and an asshole. As an alpha male he’s a total rarity in the video gaming community and that’s allowed him to conquer a shoebox empire. As much as he tries to paint himself as some kind of video game ambassador, Billy Mitchell only truly seems interested in Billy Mitchell or, perhaps more accurately, how other people view Billy Mitchell. He wants to be the nefarious kingpin dialing up his underlings for reports on the competition while he twirls his mustache back at headquarters. He’s a jerk, he’s deluded (“No matter what I say, it draws controversy. It's sort of like the abortion issue.”) and, depending on how you view his video taped submission, he’s a cheater.

Wiebe on the other hand doesn’t harbor any such delusions of grandeur. He’s a normal guy, one with some pretty severe OCD, but a normal guy nonetheless. I don’t see any desire in him to lord over the Kingdom of FunSpot. He’s just a chump (“don’t get chumpatized”) that got obsessed with breaking a record in order to make himself not feel like such a loser. On some level, I think Wiebe is aware of just how frivolous this all is. Case in point, the heart-wrenching scene with his son (“wipe my butt!”) or the absolutely brutal discussion with his daughter about the Guinness Book of World Records. He gets wrapped up in the chase for the record, but he never lets it turn him into the monster that Billy Mitchell is. Again, this might just be Gordon manipulating us, but Wiebe seems like a genuinely good person. I was rooting for him.

I really enjoyed The King of Kong. Like Jeremiah said, as documentaries go, it’s as entertaining as it gets. However, in reading up on the film post-viewing, it does seem like Gordon may have manipulated timelines and facts in order to make the story more compelling. I know there’s always some massaging that goes on in post-production, but in one interview I read, Gordon came off pretty creepy. A little bit like Billy Mitchell.

Have you seen The King of Kong? Are Wiebe and Mitchell at opposite ends of the spectrum or simply different sides of the same coin? And let's settle it once and for all: video game uber-nerds - pathetic or endearing?

Next week: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men