Ender’s GameMathis Gasser

Fifty years ago, an alien force known as the Formics attacked earth. Tens of Millions died. It was only through the sacrifice of our greatest commander that we avoided total annihilation. We’ve been preparing for them to come back ever since. The International Fleet decided that the world’s smartest children are the planet’s best hope. Raised on war games, their decisions are intuitive, decisive, fearless. I am one of those recruits.

-Ender Wiggin

Ender’s Game follows the gifted young Ender Wiggin as he swiftly advances through military school. He is closely supervised by Colonel Hyrum Graff who believes he is the ‘One’, a born leader common in sf stories, and similar to Neo in the Matrix trilogy, we witness countless moments where a baffled character utters ‘he’s the One’ as if it hadn’t been evident all along.

Ender’s Game has a twist to it. Battle strategy genius Ender Wiggin is part of larger plan to annihilate an obscure alien race called the Formics. Not much is known about the ant-like enemy species, as Humans seem to have been unable to establish communication

with ‘them’. The military elite’s current intention is to arrange a massive pre-emptive strike against the Formics that would terminate the entire race at once. The fatal twist of the story consists of the Military tricking Ender into committing genocide. His graduation battle was not a simulation, but the actual

end battle.

The whole story takes place in a hardened political climate where the International Fleet seems to have carte blanche in terms of access to funds and military planning. In this scenario, earth nations seem to be united under a technologically advanced military regime

with an important propaganda apparatus.

The propaganda aspect of the narrative is accentuated in the promotional campaign for the film. One poster depicts a Formic spacecraft crashing into Hong Kong’s Cheung Kong Centre. The image composition as a whole is of course reminiscent of 9/11 images. The poster design can be seen as a way of tapping into the emotional cache of US and international moviegoers Ma

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while avoiding the historical weight by displacing the action

to Hong Kong. The poster appeals to a Hong Kong movie market as well. The bottom line is that the threat is global. The image has a unifying agency; the slogan reads ‘Never Again!’. Millions have been killed; therefore we are united in our grief. Suddenly we are human instead of national citizens. Post-national unification, in fiction, seems to demand a high body count. Reality is no different, considering the European Union’s main founding purpose being to avoid all future war between Germany and France. The correlation between trans- or post-national institution building and the piling up of bodies is genuinely scary.

Could there be an alternative, less bloody take on devising a

fictive - and real - post-national world?

The movie’s international poster campaign evokes Hans-Peter Feldmann’s 2001 work 9/12 front page featuring 151 newspapers. The uniformity of the worldwide front pages hints at a certain logic of mass media. In earlier work Feldmann has tried to infiltrate newspaper and magazines and subvert their logic, laying bare a seriality of the mundane. Since his work often contains a secondary autobiographical component, it’s worth

noting that the Düsseldorf of Feldmann’s earliest childhood memory was one of the German cities heavily bombed by the Allies during World War II. War experiences might reinforce memory pathways, real collective abysses.

Movies, or video games can be seen as the restaging of similar intense and harrowing experiences by producing elevated stress

levels. That means bodily reactions, not just simulated ones. Despite the individualism prevalent in larger cities, the movie

and game experiences have definitive collective attributes as people tend to exchange opinions and experiences. Heiner Mühlmann, in his nature of cultures theory, calls major events of violence or elevated stress levels MSC (Maximum Stress Cooperation) events. He argues that if events such as 9/11 produce levels of stress and anxiety in a particular place, this group or society or cultural sphere will tend to become

more aware of what kind of common sense and moral ideas they would want to live by and, if necessarily defend. In this sense MSC events have an unifying effect on a particular group. The theory is provocative. History shows that MSC type events are incredible opportunities for populist or dictatorial types. Often in the past, a period of general instability and fear helped to establish a fascist or other terror regime, or, as in the 2001 context, prepare the US public for the next military campaign.

The installation of Feldmann’s 151 front pages shows the violence and historic importance of the event, yet also points to the omnipresence of the reproduction and the global circulation of particular images, especially iconic ones. Feldmann’s piece is direct and doesn’t reflect the various interpretations of the event itself. It mirrors the cacophony of languages surrounding the same iconic photos. Feldmann’s wall of visually and topically similar front pages with their diversity of languages could portray a sf-like scenario in which a violent MSC type event produces the

necessary post-national unifying energy. In reality, however, 9/11 came with a darker twist leading to a highly dubious axis of evil concept far from any valuable attempt at post-national rapprochements.

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Hans-Peter Feldmann, 9/12 front page, 2001

The Bush administration’s axis of evil doctrine echoes through the Ender’s Game posters. How to sell a war to people? How to trick young minds into enlisting and becoming cold-blooded killers? The parallels to recent history are remarkable, considering the book on which the film is based was published during the cold war, in 1985. ‘Never Again!’ is the ideal slogan from a military propaganda point of view. How could someone who went through the hell of an alien invasion not subscribe to it? Much like the crumbling twin tower pictures,

the Hong Kong Ender’s Game poster evokes collective grief and memories of loss.

As mentioned, in the case of 9/11, the Bush administration used the general scare momentum to pursue the worst of all paths. The way the Iraq invasion was legitimised and came to pass is more tragi-comic than a film script could have sketched it out. What remains are the strangest speeches by military and governmental

officials, absurd theatre gone real. It worked, but one wonders, incredulously, how they got their ways. Humans love distortion, it seems, they clearly do, mass delusions are not something from the past. Maybe they are even more present now in a world where everyone is

armed with a portable device, tricked into believing

it was a high point of civilisation. They are well designed. But, in the larger picture, has man changed? How do periods of war alternate with periods of war? How is time related to violence? A couple of years down the line, many Americans woke up wondering if they had been tricked into a war game, devised by the political

and corporate puppeteers. War games they hadn’t had a handle on from the start.

As Ender’s Game viewers, we understand the necessity of avoiding further millions of casualties resulting from another Formics attack on earth. The film raises some ethical questions regarding war and military decision-making, some of them problematic. The sf scenario of a total humans vs. them scenario makes for a captivating film or novel, but leaves no room for any other f.ex. more diplomatic options. In a high stakes situation with no alternatives but war, as viewers we are forced to go along with it and to very possibly enjoy it along

the way, tuning into the old routine of entertaining violence as the unique solution. But Ender’s Game as a story is not necessarily a relict from the 80s. The film adaption is timely in an age of drone warfare. The people doing the killings have enlisted to the drone operator job, but have they? Weren’t they not

also somehow tricked into doing it, knowingly or

unknowingly? In the sense that they probably already

have a major knowledge of battle games such as Call of Duty and a preconceived idea of who the enemy is. Plus, like Ender, they will have to deal with the psychological consequences the job brings with it

The problem with Ender’s Game is not that it raises important ethical questions connected to military engagement, but that they come too late. In a way, the military strategy works brilliantly. Ender’s genocide was executed by a single, underaged individual who is

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was real and not a simulation. Ender’s state of ethically challenging, permanent non-responsibility is a dominant trait of recent economic and military failures. Elites nowadays are not even considered to be held accountable. The institutional, systemic design is built in a way that it feels as if nobody did commit any wrongdoings, ever. Trickery has been integrated into the industrial-entertainment fabric. It all just feels rather bizarre in an age of supposed transparency. In a perhaps natural evolutionary move, lying and trickery has upgraded to

the next level.

- If we have them boxed in, why go to war?- For the same reason that you kept kicking that bully (...) The purpose of this war is to prevent all future wars.

-Ender Wiggin and Hyrum Graff

9/11 and the ensuing Iraq adventure is a blind spot shrouded by a heavy fog within recent history. So much data and knowledge is available, but nobody from the Bush administration or the neocon think tank ‘Project for the New American Century’ (1997-2006) landed a prison residency. Josh Kline’s work Crying Games is worth mentioning here as it addresses the question of accountability for politicians. The Bush-Blair gang is shown imprisoned; their CGI faces contort and we hear them recite remorse and guilt. Kline’s video is minimal, but it does point at the elephant in the room: contemporary political and corporate detachment from any kind of responsibility. If Ender is not responsible for the genocide, can the Cheney-Rice-Bush-Rumsfeld-Blair chimera at least be captured and locked up? Historical revisionism is opted for without blinking. Is there a job description for those who blur and render opaque recent history? House of Card’s Doug Stamper, a dedicated if totally messed up professional obscurer comes to mind. TV characters doing the job, filling gaps in knowledge. As a result of the professional blurring job, the Middle Ages seem often closer than 2003.

Young people integrate complex data more easily than adults.-Hyrum Graff

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- When the war is over we can have the luxury of debating on what we do.- When it’s over, what will be left of the boy?- What does it matter if there’s nothing left at all?- We’re using these children to win a war.

-Hyrum Graff and Major Gwen Anderson

Ender Wiggin is seen as a super fast biological battle entity that can instantaneously react to the subtlest of enemy changes in formation. The psychologist (played by Viola Davis) expresses concern for Ender’s psychological makeup which is totally ignored, she fairly soon disappears from having any kind of viable influence. Ender’s Game depicts a very male, military world. Ender is to become a sophisticated machine, devised to destroy the enemy. And yet he has a spiritual side and felt that communication with the enemy was possible, but he couldn’t connect the dots before it was too late. In the end of the film, Ender successfully establishes contact with the last queen or queen egg; there is hope that the Formics can live on. The novel has several sequels where more about Formic societal structures and Ender’s travels are revealed. Ender’s Game’s future as a film franchise has been cut short due to insufficient returns, establishing an uncanny parallel with US military adventures under the notion of leaving is easier than living with the aftermath.

Perhaps Ted Chiangs Story of Your Life, soon coming to cinemas as Denis Villeneuve’s adaption titled Arrival will be another, perhaps more generative take on establishing communication

with aliens. A linguist played by Amy Adams is studies an alien language. Ironically, a ‘third party vendor’ made the mistake of photoshopping a Shanghai skyscraper into a Hong Kong (again) skyline, unleashing some furious Chinese online reactions, because of the tense history between Hong Kong and mainland China. This is marketing of an international concept poster - in Arrival, twelve alien ships land in twelve different spots all over earth - gone horribly wrong. It’s also an example of how fragile and tense relations between nations still are (and this poster fiasco is not even between the Chinese and, let’s say, Japanese cities), a stark contrast to some post-national concepts alluded in some sf movies.

Opposite film stills: Ender’s Game (dir. Gavin Hood, USA 2013) My Country, My Country (dir. Laura Poitras, USA 2006)

Ender’s Game and similar military sf narratives choose the easy way: to depict a world in peril, a world threatened by annihilation by an obscure, barely

described alien race. Which is a pretty one-sided scenario, colonial in texture. As said, I wonder, especially in connection to military sf, why post-national scenarios can only happen in utterly desperate,

one-sided, planet threatening circumstances. How about a post-national narrative minus the silly violence?Ma

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The Formics accessed the game through me. Their thoughts. My dreams. All mixed together. They were trying to communicate.

-Ender Wiggin

Laura Poitras 2006 documentary My Country, My Country shows life in Iraq for average Iraqis under U.S. occupation. Poitras focuses primarily on Dr. Riyadh al-Adhadh, an Iraqi medical doctor, father of six and Sunni political candidate. Considering the common depiction of Iraq as a failed country, Poitras is one of the few citizens who actively cut through the fog to meet actual Iraqi people, spending time with them. Seeing these images and persons, one wonders who the enemy is, exactly? Benedict Anderson is another person who spent a lifetime dismantling the idea of the nation. Garry Davis, the inventor of the world passport, was imprisoned at almost every border because

of his lack of a proper passport (he renounced his American citizenship after the experience of being an American fighter pilot in WWII). He explained patiently to the border personnel that he has become a world

citizen.

Individual voices clinging on to alternative systems

or ways of looking at national structures are growing. Without establishing contact to the other, whatever

the other may be, history will invariably repeat

itself as if frozen in a loop beyond control. Colonial thinking is very present in sf narratives and, as Noah Berlatsky suggests in The Atlantic (Why Sci-Fi Keeps Imagining the Subjugation of White People, Apr. 25, 2014) that ‘colonial experience remains more tightly bound up with our political life and public culture than we sometimes like to think. Sci-fi, then, doesn’t just demonstrate future possibilities, but future limits—the extent to which dreams of what we’ll do remain captive to the things we’ve already done.’