Editorials
How Borderlands 3’s Sanctuary Reminds us Hub Areas are Safe Spaces From the Terror Beyond
It should come as no surprise that, in Borderlands 3, Sanctuary III will serve as a safe space.
That’s true for a few reasons. Most obviously, it’s true because the dictionary definition of “sanctuary” is “a place of refuge or safety.” Second most obviously, it’s true because, since its introduction in Borderlands 2, Sanctuary—in its earthbound and airborne incarnations—has served as a refuge from the dangers of Pandoran life; a place where Vault Hunters can drink up at Moxxi’s Bar, grab ammunition and health packs at various vending machines and take on quests.
For game developers crafting dangerous worlds, a safe place like this — a place where players can rest and recharge after getting their asses kicked — is a necessity.
Let me give you a well-loved example: After a few hand-holdy entries, Nintendo made major design shifts for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, upping the number and strength of enemies and dropping players into a hostile world where the heat and chill were as lethal as any boss from Twilight Princess. But, they were also careful to add stables—glowing, warm havens where weary players could cook up meals, craft potions and chat with the gentle denizens of Hyrule.
This year, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, likewise, gave players an enclave as they made war against a notoriously steep difficulty curve, offering the Dilapidated Temple, a safe area where players could stock up on paper dolls and whoop on a living punching bag. In the fiction of the game, the shinobi, Wolf, is taken here to recuperate after a near-fatal fight in the game’s opening moments. And, mechanically, the Temple serves a similarly convalescent purpose; it’s a refuge where players can chat, shop and practice their parries.
This rhythm of moving from danger to safety is most pronounced in the survival horror genre, where the beasties have the run of the place, except in a few select areas. As I played this year’s Resident Evil 2, I often felt like I was sprinting through a horrifying game of tag, plotting out my course from one safe area to the next, making mental notes of where the gooey red Lickers laid in wait. After Mr. X was introduced, these mad dashes were laced with a panicky mania. I was driven by a need, deep in my gut, like a child playing tag approaching a designated jungle gym, to get to “safe.”
In all of these games — Breath of the Wild, Sekiro, Resident Evil 2 —the safe spaces are clearly delineated from the rest of the game. But, remember the moment in Resident Evil 2 (the original) when the closed door that appeared on every loading screen suddenly opened to reveal a zombie shuffling at the player? Or, remember when Prosperity, the camp in Far Cry New Dawn, became the setting for one of that game’s most memorable battles as the Highwaymen staged an all-out assault on its survivors? Or, in Sekiro, how the Dragonrot infected the characters in the Dilapidated Temple despite the fact that they never left its grounds as a result of your failures? The best safe spaces aren’t completely safe. Sometimes, the danger of the outside world breaks in, and these spaces become more compelling as we realize how precarious the peace they provide actually is.
Borderlands 3’s Sanctuary III isn’t just this literal kind of safe space; it’s also a refuge from the ravages of time. During Gearbox Software’s gameplay reveal event, the developers showed off a hub area that functioned as a living museum to the series’ history. Remember Tannis? She’s here. Remember Marcus? He’s here! Remember Maya? She’s here!!! All the characters you know and love are together in one place (in a hub area reminiscent of the delightful Eva’s Hammer from Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus).
This emphasis on fan service in Sanctuary III fits in nicely with the general vibe of the marketing surrounding Borderlands 3. Onstage at the Tuesday dress rehearsal for the gameplay reveal, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford promised a game with “no microtransactions… no free-to-play, pay-to-win type of junk” (a claim which is roughly half true, but that’s not what this article is about). Gearbox is promising that the game won’t require an online connection. Generally, the studio is pitching Borderlands 3 not as the MMO-ish Destiny-like that many had suspected it would be, but instead, as more Borderlands.
That is, more Borderlands, but with the rough edges sanded off. Like any number of studios making a retro-inspired throwback, Gearbox is promising a game that captures the essence of the old games you remember, but without the frustrations inherent to revisiting an artifact from another time. In September, Borderlands will be back and better than ever, a gaming oasis in a culture that has largely moved on.
And I’m sure I will enjoy it. I like this series and I had a good time with the hour-and-a-half I played.
But, Borderlands 3 doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the most interesting aspects of its story, design and very existence as a consumer product testify to that. Its villains, the Calypso Twins, are streamers—a word that was primarily associated with long strands of crepe paper when the first game launched— and Randy Varnell, Gearbox’s narrative lead, has said that he hopes to explore questions of how influencers *ahem* influence their followers. Additionally, Borderlands 3’s release will be one pawn in an ongoing battle between Valve’s established Steam storefront and the nascent Epic Games Store, where Borderlands 3 is a PC exclusive. This game is inseparable from our current moment, and that’s part of what makes it worth talking about.
There’s a moment in that live gameplay reveal where the player, ensconced in the fan-service-y safety of Sanctuary III, pulls the lever on the Cash Trap slot machine in Moxxi’s Bar. The reels spin for a moment, before landing on an icon of Claptrap in a captain’s hat and a pair of robot eyes — a combination that, on this one-armed bandit, apparently spells death. The machine dispenses a live grenade. The player quickly ducks out of the way and the grenade explodes.
I hope Borderlands 3 feels like that. Safe, but not too safe.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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