Mind Your Own God Damn Business

As you know, I gave up video games for 2009.

Some of the things that I have done instead have been productive – I read more, I write more, and I get a lot of that weird, inconsequential minutia done in a day that I didn’t before. Crap like folding my laundry, making my bed and making sure that I put my keys somewhere that I can find them. It’s weird, because getting all of those things done in a day takes me thirty or forty minutes tops, usually less, so it’s not like I had to choose between shaving regularly and playing video games before I gave them up. I didn’t get that stuff done before though, and I do now. I think that it’s mainly because I now have a large part of my day where I’m trying to keep myself busy and distracted from the fact that I want to play some damn games.

As I’ve mentioned before, I do have less productive activities that I have filled the void with as well though, and one of those is dicking around on Hulu. One of the things that I’ve started watching on there is “Lie To Me”.

For those of you who don’t know, “Lie To Me” is a T.V. show about a guy and his quirky team of experts who are able to tell from facial expressions and speech patterns if somebody is lying. At first, I kind of liked the show. I think that facial expression stuff is interesting, and there’s some actual science to it that I find fascinating. It’s based off of a bunch of work that a guy named Paul Ekman has done (He’s actually an advisor for the show, I guess). Here is a link to his website, and here is a link to a Radiolab podcast featuring Ekman. Apparently, when you watch people who are lying in real life frame by frame, you can spot brief moments of the emotions that they’re trying to hide “leaking” onto their face. I was hoping that I could get some of that action from watching the show. I do, a little bit. The more I watch it, though, the more irritated I get.

I’m starting to catch onto their formula. As is the case in most television shows, the characters are all one-trick-ponies. In a way, it makes sense – if you have to make 15 or 20 episodes of a television show that’s familiar to the viewer and runs off of a standard formula, you need the characters to be consistent. It wears on me after a while, though.

Anyway, the lead character, the guy who is a trained expert on detecting deception, is basically the bitchy doctor from House. He’s the quirky asshole who does everything in dangerous, unconventional ways that no one else understands, but he gets undeniable results that can’t be ignored. After spending an hour being a shithead to everyone around him and solving the case using his risky unorthodox methods, he does something sensitive in the last five minutes so you know that under that hard, protective shell there’s a soft nougat center.This type of character seems to be really popular in T.V. right now, but they mostly just piss me off. People like this wouldn’t exist in real life, because after two weeks of getting a snarky insult every time anyone said anything, one of their colleagues would hit them in the face with an axe.

The other thing that irritates me about the show is that all of the “tells” that they put in the show to let you know the person is lying are so heavily exaggerated that only a severely (and I do mean severely) autistic person wouldn’t be able to identify the emotion that they’re showing. Nonetheless, they make it seem like the main character is some sort of genius for identifying the emotion correctly.

"Impossible to tell what this man is feeling, right? Wrong! Squinting eyes, a tensed neck and teeth bared -this man appears to be angry! I see your look of disbelief. Trust me. I'm an expert on this sort of thing. Did I just blow your mind?"

So here’s what happens in every episode: The main character is brought into some case requiring an expert on deception. They interview someone that they’re not sure is being truthful. They talk to them for a while, while the main character looks at the suspect thoughtfully. Then, the main character does something weird and stupid to throw off the person that they’re interviewing and see how they’ll react. In one episode, he starts hitting on the suspect. In another, he eats a sandwich while talking to them. In another, he fires a gun into the air. Then, everyone asks him “what the hell was that all about!? You’re dangerous and insane!!” and he explains that there’s a method to his madness, and that he HAD to shoot himself in the dick with a bolt thrower because he wanted to see the suspect’s reaction in order to determine if they were being truthful. They repeat this a few times during the show, until about fourty five minutes have passed and it’s time to wrap things up. At that point, they interview someone, the main character starts giving a dog a blow job in front of the suspect (Assuming they’re in Texas), the suspect makes a face like he’s mugging for the cover of a death metal album, the main character says something like “Ah hah! Furrowed eyebrows, downturned lips and flared nostrils – those are all classic signs of disgust! This man is guilty!” Then all of the apparently autistic people are incredibly impressed and the suspect is sent to jail for their crime.

As much as I bitch about those things, that’s not what actually irritates me about the show. The problem isn’t the characters, or the Mad-Libs plot style. I’ll probably will keep watching it despite those things. It’s kind of formulaic, but I enjoy the formula. What really breaks my heart about this show, and all shows like it, is that it’s ruining my childhood.

Let me explain.

Shows like Lie To Me* and House are about an eccentric guy who has to solve mysteries. He’s got an idea that everyone thinks is completely crazy, but he always turns out to be the right one.

Now, let me tell you about a young boy with stars in his eyes, who’s formative teenage years were in the mid to late 90′s. This boy rarely watched T.V., but he loved a show called “The X-Files”. In this show, an FBI team composed of a conspiracy theorist by the name of Fox Mulder and a scientist named Dana Scully were sent to solve crimes that seemed paranormal. Scully would always search for a logical explanation for whatever was happening, but Mulder always knew better and suspected the work of something unexplainable. Scully would fight him on it, vehemently insisting that Lamprey men weren’t real, or Ghosts weren’t real, or that the Golem was just Jewish folklore and not a real thing that was murdering people for violating the rules of a planned community (Yes, that was actually an episode. Shut up.)

But Mulder always stuck to his guns, and by the end of the show, it always became clear that Scully had been wrong again, and the guy that played Ray’s Dad on “Everybody Loves Raymond” really COULD predict the future (I’m still not making this up.)

The show was on the air for 9 years, and that shit never changed. For nine years, Mulder batted .1000, and nobody around him ever stopped rolling their eyes. Nobody ever said “You know, your idea that people in this arctic research facility are killing each other not because of cabin fever, but because an alien parasite that they accidentally dug up is screwing with their brain chemistry, well, it sounds a little far fetched. On the other hand, your ideas ALWAYS sound insane initially, but after roughly forty five minutes, they turn out to be exactly right, every time. You’ve never been wrong even once, ever. I think I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt on this.”

It was always just “That’s impossible, Mulder!”, “There’s no scientific explanation for that, Mulder!”, “Oh shit, I guess that you were right…again…like you always are, Mulder!”, and “Don’t think this means that I will listen to you next time, though, Mulder!”

Every week this happened, every week I watched it, and every week I lapped that shit up with a spoon. I’m pretty sure that high school actually kind of sucked relative to the rest of my life, but there are some things that trigger fond memories of it and convince me that despite the acne, awkwardness and self hatred, I was actually having a great time. Those triggers are 90′s arcade games (NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat 3, anything by Capcom), Sony Walkmans, Broncos superbowl victories, shitty 68k Macintosh games and The X-Files.

And so, once again, much like when I fire up a Playstation emulator and realize how unfun I find Final Fantasy 7, or boot up my old iMac and manage to slowly use it for six minutes before it crashes on me, I’m forced to confront the fact that something I thought was perfect as a child is actually pretty average viewed through my 29 year old eyes.

And so I will probably continue to watch Lie To Me, and I will probably continue to sort of enjoy it, but I will also be irritated by the formula, and then, after bitching about it, I will realize that it is almost exactly the same as a television show that I used to be convinced was basically perfect.

Relaxing after a long day, more than likely spent grinding corpses.

On a positive note, Cannibal Corpse has a new album out. Here’s what their bass player said about it:

“In Cannibal Corpse, our goal has always been to try and make each new album we record our heaviest. That goal was a bit more challenging this time since we were extremely satisfied with our last album Kill, but we knew that by working with producer Erik Rutan at Mana Recording Studios again, we would be able to start at that same level of heaviness and take it even further. Now that we can hear the finished product, I would say we’ve been able to achieve this goal, and I think our fans will agree.”

This is what I like to hear. Most of the bands that I listen to decide two or three albums into their career that they’re “musicians”, and they start putting singing and ten minutes jazz solos onto their albums. It’s refreshing to know that I can trust Cannibal Corpse to keep doing what they do best: Writing heavy metal songs with lyrics that would trigger my gag reflex if I could ever actually understand what the hell they were saying.

I mean, come on. The lead singer’s nickname is “Corpsegrinder”. I rest my case.

One more thing: Some guy named “Kutiman” mixed a bunch of youtube clips together to make songs. I think they turned out pretty great. Here’s a sample:

Good day.