#I have read Battle Royale and an interview with Koshun Takami about the name and wrestling inspirations but I couldn't tell you where

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Film Friday: The Legacy of Battle Royale

Today, I want to air out an idea that has been rolling around in my head a bit, and it's not a straight film rec (or furious evisceration) but I figure it'd do in this "slot," as the starting point in this whole line of thinking starts with an obscure film that I rather like, although it ends somewhere decidedly less tidy. Today, let's talk of what became of (the) Battle Royale.

For the uninitiated Battle Royale started its lifespan in the public eye as a somewhat controversial Japanese horror/thriller novel. The novel depicts a dystopian near-future Japan where the solution to youth rebellion, truancy, crime, and altogether bad attitude is picking out a random class to go through a death game where they have to kill or be killed by their classmates. Technically, the term is older than the book, as the author was inspired by the wrestling term for large, no-holds-barred wrestling matches, but it's safe to say as the term as a short-hand for all-out violence has probably survived its wrestling origins. The book itself is cynical and heavy on the satire, taking great lengths to parody the Japanese "compulsory optimism" attitude prevalent in the era, which somewhat tinges the bleak proceedings with absurd black humor.

The 2000 movie version further expanded on this theme of contrasting the bleak meaninglessness of the concept with the absurd "Ganbatte!"-style optimism, in addition to attracting western viewers with a postmodern Tarantino-inspired touch to the ol' ultraviolence and showcasing yet another strong turn by Takeshi "Beat" Kitano and at least one future Quentin Tarantino collaborator in Chiaki Kuriyama. This flick drew Western attention to the Japanese style of violent cinema, thus giving Takaishi Miike steady work and Quentin Tarantino a quarter-chub at east. In addition to inspiring swathes of "Death Game" style stories in Japenese media in the coming years, a genre that admittedly lost steam once the novelty and shock value of game-ified murder wore off, albeit the odd resurgence with a gimmick, most recently the South Korean Squid Games is not unheard of. Still, Battle Royale's biggest cultural impact would not be known for many years.

Apart from the observation that teenagers are impulsive and have the potential to do violence if given a chance, Battle Royale's most ingenious mechanic is no doubt the bomb collars, an anti-stalling tactic that would prevent the students that weren't one MCR song away from going on a spree from barricading up and waiting it all out. The area of the battle royale "game" would periodically shrink, and the students would, lest they be decapitated by explosives, be corralled into an ever-shrinking area, making violence all but assured at an expedient pace. This, it turns out, is not only good for making your student violence machine produce student violence, it's also strong game design, and this is where the penultimate link in our chain of inspiration comes in.

Players Unknown's Battlegrounds, or PUBG , for short, jumped on this bit of good game design from the dystopian government playbook and expanded it into a series of mods as well as a standalone game. The Battlegrounds game design maintains some of the Battle Royale understanding of violence, in that the ever-contracting circle seeks to force the player into violence, making the whole thing brutish, unforgiving, and short. This approach probably limited the reach of PUBG some, and made it more a game culture curiosity than the protoplasmic juggernaut of media that took the torch and ran all the way past any point of satire.

Fortnite started its life as a co-op multiplayer game with base-building elements where the primary concern was to stop the zombies that now were everywhere from eating everyone. The game has since shown remarkable flexibility in game design, swapping out gameplay functionality Ship of Theseus-style until the removal of building in the main mood of the now pvp Battle Royale-style third-person shooter slash engagement-driven content platform.

Now, that last bit sounds a bit like me snarking I will admit, but I do have a point here, stay with me. While the gameplay of Fortnite certainly is still a sped-up more fun take on the PUBG formula, it would be missing the forest for the trees to describe it as a mere third-person shooting game. Fortnite is a platform, a delivery vehicle for expressive content in the form of digital avatars and animations. Just about every major media franchise has had a collab with Fortnite at this point, the debut of a pivotal plot point in the latest Star Wars movie took place on the platform as part of a cross-promotional tie-in, which sounds like something that should be a joke but it is not. Whatever else you can say about the thing, there is some strong multimedia brand management going on here, and whether such a Ready Player One-ass digital platform of unlimited brand recognition works is a good or at least Mostly Harmless thing or yet another symptom of a metatext-obsessed media-as-consumable-good cultural landscape slowly milling every aspect of the human soul and mutual recognition of the human spark inherent in creation that can be excised from the aether into hotdog filling "assholes and eyelids"-style, remains to be seen, and surely discussed.

Anyway, my point here is that of the many things Fortnite has assimilated, is the ever-shrinking safe zone, making for a dynamic an fast-paced action experience. There's something deeply ironic in that, in that the same thing that represents the inevitability of brutal state-enforced violence also represents the defining borders of the play area where you'll get a #1 Victory Royale and do The Carlton over the bodies (slash killcams) of your vanquished foes. There's a slight incongruity there I suppose, but there is some grim resonance between the "all smiles over instructions of how you'll be murdering or be murdered by your classmates" and "easy breezy gun violence as Hello Kitty murders Boba Fett" if you were to frame it like that.

Now, I don't mean to say Battle Royale predicted Fortnite any more than 1984 predicted whatever conservative pundits claim George Orwell predicted this time. Dystopias like Battle Royale don't predict the future other than incidentally. They comment on the present. It doesn't claim that in the future the Japanese Government will sanction youth murder games, it says that the things the Japanese Government is doing to the youth is, in some way violent and overly cruel. Battle Royale, I would argue, has much to say on the cresting population wave and the unsustainable pressures it puts on the youth generation and the inherent hopelessness of the future in such a situation. The real-world Japanese government has perhaps not forced the youth to participate in blood sport, but less social mobility, later retirement, lifted restrictions on child work, austerity, and general corrupt political fuckery sure does fuck over the younger generation pretty well without bomb collars being involved even a little bit.

So where does this all leave my point? I'm not sure I have one other than tracing the idea of "Battle Royale" as a genre centered around violence in a constricting playfield and how the meaning of it has changed. While I kind of want some subversive black comedy property to give the concept a whack again, it's probably just too solidly claimed by Fortnite to ever be anything other than a commentary on that game in particular. This isn't to say you can't make a salient commentary on one of the biggest media properties in the world, in fact, I'd love for someone more incisive than me to take a swing at it, but the symbolism here is probably out of the General Use bucket for now.