A Level Portfolio Project. Day 5: The squad + strangelove

CRUELTY SQUAD

 Now if you're feeling the strangest wave of deja vu upon reading the title for the video game "Cruelty Squad" it might just come from my portfolio project from last year where I talked a bit about it. The game takes place in the far future where the evils of big companies and consumerism has turned the world into a shithole, people rummage the streets shooting people and facing no consequences, everyone you interact with is incredibly hostile, and all aesthetics have completely vanished leaving all clothes, streets, art, and symbols looking like a pile of rainbow vomit as consumers will buy anything thats sold with a big and vibrant logo.

    You play as an empty fuck (that being the play on words of his name: MT Foxtrot) who is hired to work for a gigantic company called Cruelty Squad who's purpose is in assastinating figured deemed contriversial. This ranges from killing people who have thrown away money that Cruelty Squad invested into them in cheap "chunkopops" to a assassinating a politician who wants to pass an incredibly extremeist and contreversial legislature dictating that trillionaires be taxed 1%. There's a level that has you be hired by three up-and-coming billionaires to exterminate their recently retired father so he doesn't throw away their inheritence and another level that has a very popular eugenics company's board of shareholders hiring you to kill the company's CEO as he has been missing on work due to burnout.

    What cruelty squad gets right is that it's not afraid to pull any punches. It knows that the best way to deliver it's anti-consumerist it needs to be as grotesque as possible with its imagery, to the point where  some audiences would definietley be turned off from it. It's honestly an idea that has shaped how I think about the art I one day hope to make.

DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB

    You and me? Yeah, we're gonna meet again, not sure where or honestly even when, but for sure when we meet again, it's gonna be bright as the BOMB. Wanna hear a joke? Ok so, the cold war, the Yanks send a nuke on accident to the Ruskies and they can't pull it back, and the Ruskies, they get so scared they send a missile to explode the plane with the nuke, but the missile only scrapes the ship, now eventually the Yanks get the code they need to bring the ship around they try to send it to the pilot, but the communications broke, why? FROM THE MISSILE! Hilarious I'm aware.

    Dr. Strangelove looks at the absurdity of the nuclear arms race and chooses to laugh as there is not much else one could have done, it points at the people in charge of our country and characterises them as childish, moronic, reactionaries, and actual nazi's who were hired by the government operation-paper-clip style. The whole movie has many sexual undertones, starting with an image of a ship docking on top of another before adding its "tube" into it and pumping it with gas, later on the movie ends with the titular Dr. Strangelove getting so excited about his ideal dystopian future that his arm erects into a sieg heil in what is definietley a raunchy innuendo for something I'm probably not aware of. 

    Kubrick combines all of the era's paranoia and cynicism of knowing you weren't in control of your fate and chooses to laugh at the icompetance of those in power. I have similar cynicism for religion and how people are unable to understand those who want to stray off of it so I'm definietley putting a bit of personal angst into my short.