Beta Test (2016) and Art Dictating Lives

Art can have an immense influence over people’s lives. It can inspire people. It can be an emotional outlet. It can be entertainment. Art can be many things to many people. It’s tough to imagine a world without any forms of art. It’s difficult to imagine the soft caress of art no longer being there to comfort people who need it. A world without art would be a completely different world. It would feel incomplete.

Movies are a form of art. Better yet, movies frequently portray art. They will show the making of certain pieces of art. They will feature characters who work in art. They will feature characters who watch, look at, read, or listen to art. Art becomes an intrinsic part of movies, which is only fitting since movies started as an amalgamation of different art forms. They were photographs put together to give the illusion of movement, frequently with accompanying music to add more emotion. Movies were created by joining a visual art form and an aural art form.

Some movies went deeper with their look at art. They portrayed how characters’ lives were deeply affected by art. This doesn’t necessarily mean they loved art, worked with art, or created art. There have been some movies where art determined what happened in a character’s life. It wasn’t through the character seeing art and being affected by it. It was through the character becoming a part of that art. The character was the art and they couldn’t control it. Their life was being determined by another person in control of where that art would go.

Consider a movie like 2016’s Beta Test. Orson Creed (Manu Bennett) was a former employee at a video game company. He left the company after disagreeing with CEO Andrew Kincaid (Linden Ashby) on the use of a revolutionary piece of hardware. Kincaid took revenge by sending mercenaries to Creed’s home. Creed was connected to a chip that controlled his body. Beta tester Max Troy (Larenz Tate) unknowingly controlled Orson Creed while testing a new video game. He was playing as a real person. When Max found out, things got much more complicated.

The video game world and the real world of Beta Test came together in a big way. Max Troy was testing out the newest video game for Sentinel, the leading video game company. He was given the task of stopping a bank robbery with his avatar, Orson Creed, by whatever means necessary. He went into the bank, killed the thieves, and walked out with their money. Soon after, he found out that the real Orson Creed had gone into a bank, killed a bunch of thieves, and walked out with the money. He was controlling the real Orson Creed. The video game world was becoming the real world.

Beta Test was about more than the video game world and the real world coming together. Much like another movie that will come up soon, capitalism was a large part of Beta Test. Andrew Kincaid wanted control of the video game world. Orson Creed didn’t see Kincaid’s way, which was why he left the company. Kincaid couldn’t have that and came up with the whole video game to control Orson Creed as revenge. If Orson Creed was going to fight him on the capabilities of his video games, he would use those capabilities to take Orson Creed out of the picture.

This was a similar idea to the film Gamer. Gamer was set in a future where convicts were put under the control of a video game chip, making them the avatars in a Call of Duty style death match. If the convicts were killed in the battle, that was fine. They were convicts. Their lives didn’t matter anyway. To the characters in Gamer, at least. Criminals were being used to make money for a video game company by risking and losing their lives for the entertainment of players and audiences around the world. There was also a Second Life type of video game that featured actors allowing players to control them in a simulated world that was actually a real world.

Both movies featured a world where video games and real life were intertwined. Real people were being controlled through video game technology to live out the entertainment of other people. The art was affecting real people in the real world. It was still art, but that art involved real lives being manipulated for the amusement of the players. It was as real as video games could get while still having that level of dissociation for the players. They were controlling other people, but they still had that anonymity and safety of holding a controller. They weren’t the people doing the deeds. They were the puppeteers.

Video games weren’t the only works of art to become a piece of a movie’s world. There have been movies that also involved someone’s life being manipulated and directed through a different kind of art. With the many ways to create art out there, it would be impossible for video games to be the only way that a character could be controlled by someone else’s work. That brings us to writing and how some characters have been controlled through prose.

A writer’s work on a new novel was an important part of Stranger Than Fiction. The main character of her novel turned out to be a real man whose life was being controlled through the author’s words. Everything she wrote would happen to him. She wrote him into a budding relationship. He heard her words in his head as the relationship blossomed. She wrote about his strokes while he was brushing his teeth, and he wondered why she knew this about him. He needed to find out why he could hear her voice, so he sought the author out for answers.

Stranger Than Fiction functioned much in the same way as the video game movies in terms of logistics. There was a person whose life was being controlled by the choices of another person. Instead of that other person being a gamer with a controller, it was an author with a typewriter. The words that were typed became the reality for another person. That other person lived a life decided by the author. Whether or not the author’s other books and characters had been real life funneled through her writing was not determined. It was alluded to as a possibility, but nobody knew for sure. In the case of the current main character of her newest novel, however, the writing was real life. He was living it in the same world that the author was writing it.

That wasn’t nearly the only time a movie has featured an author’s writing becoming real life for a character. Ruby Sparks featured a novelist who wrote about his ideal woman. The more he wrote about her, the more he fell in love with her. One day, she was there. Out of nowhere, she had appeared. She could have been a figment of his imagination, but other people could also interact with her. And he showed his brother that everything he wrote about her would affect the person she was and the things she did.

The writing twist was a little different in Ruby Sparks than it was in Stranger Than Fiction. The main character of Stranger Than Fiction, as far as the audience knew, existed before the book and outside of it. The writing affected his life, but his life existed beyond the writing. Ruby Sparks, however, was wholly dependant upon the writing. She became a part of the real world. People in the real world could interact with her. Their lives would be impacted by her. But her life wasn’t separate from the writing. She wasn’t simply affected by it. The writing was what created her life. The writing was her life.

Then there was a movie like The Pagemaster. It may not have been a character being directly controlled by a work of art, but the work of art was definitely impacting what they could do and how they could do it. A child was thrown into a series of literary genres and had to traverse his way through them to get back to his normal life. Through his journey, he teamed up with Adventure, Fantasy, and Horror, three books whose genres were the stories that the child had to navigate. Those characters were inspired by the writing. Without the art, they would not exist.

Adventure, Fantasy, and Horror were physical manifestations of literary genres. Their personalities were based on the tropes of those genres. But the movie wasn’t about the characters having their actions decided by the writing. They were navigating through the writing. They still had their own free will. It was just contained within the world of the writing. They were placed into the setting of the writing. It was a different way that their lives were directly affected by the art. They were experiencing it as a part of the art. The child and the books were trying to survive the literature that they found themselves inside.

A similar movie to The Pagemaster was The Final Girls. This one wasn’t a movie where the characters were being controlled or created through video games or writing. This was one of those movies that Hollywood tends to love that was about movies. A group of characters got stuck inside a horror movie, Camp Bloodbath, that they were watching in the theater. They had to make it through Camp Bloodbath while trying not to get murdered by the slasher killer. With them in were the characters of Camp Bloodbath. They were interacting with the characters they had seen on screen.

Again, this wasn’t a case of the main characters’ lives being determined by the art. It was a case in which the main characters were brought into the art itself. The characters they interacted with in Camp Bloodbath were characters created for the movie. The main characters had the free will to change the immediate narrative of Camp Bloodbath, but they couldn’t change the eventual outcome. The Camp Bloodbath characters were destined to live out the movie in excruciating accuracy. They were written for the movie and could only live through the runtime. Most of them couldn’t even live for that long. Their lives were contained in Camp Bloodbath. The real-world characters could move on with their lives, while the characters from Camp Bloodbath could only live in the hour and a half horror flick.

Screenwriters like to explore the idea of characters’ lives being directly created, changed, or limited by works of art. Inspiration is good and dandy, but writers also like to see how a work of art could have control over someone or something. They like to write about people losing their complete free will due to the limitations of some form of art. Whether that would be video games, literature, or even movies, the art can greatly dictate what a character does, what happens to them, or what happens to the world around them. Art influences art.

Art can move people in ways that few other things do. It can inspire them to make art. It can push them to try new things. But it can never take away a person’s free will. In movies, that might be different. A piece of art could control a person’s life to the point where they no longer have free will. As much as they might try, the art will determine the choices they make. It will decide what they do, who they love, and when they die. The art will play with the characters as though they were characters and not real people. Luckily, that doesn’t happen in real life. We still have our free will.

 

Hopefully these notes are good:

• Linden Ashby played Andrew Kincaid in Beta Test. He could also be seen in Anacondas 4: Trail of Blood (week 80) and Mortal Kombat (week 140).
• Manu Bennett made a Sunday “Bad” Movies return this week. He was previously in The Marine 3: Homefront (week 30).
• Finally, Yuji Okumoto made an appearance in Beta Test after appearing in Robot Wars (week 37).
• Have you seen Beta Test? What did you think of it? Do you like movies where art determines the actions of a character? Let me know your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter.
• You can use Twitter or the comments if you want to throw me a line on what movies I should be checking out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies weeks. I’m always looking for suggestions. Anything helps.
• You should also be checking out the Sunday “Bad” Movies account on Instagram.
• Next week, I’ll be taking a trip into 1980s horror. Specifically, I’ll be checking out a 1980s horror movie that was intended to be a sequel to something from decades before, until it wasn’t a sequel and was changed into something else. Blood Diner is what’s up. I’ll see you next week for that post. See you then.