The Duke Delusion: Why Duke Nukem isn’t a parody
There seems to be two very distinct Duke Nukems. There’s the “ideal” of Duke Nukem, and the “reality” of Duke Nukem. The ideal is the one that you’ll hear Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford talk about in interviews — he’s witty, he’s sexy, he’s an extreme character who parodies the action genre and dishes out extreme loads of asskicking.
Then there’s the reality — a series that doesn’t so much parody an existing property as parody itself. Duke Nukem is really about action that falls flat in comparison to other, more competent examples of the genre, with a character who spouts unfunny, stolen dialog in a dry, flat, borderline monotone style of delivery. There is simply no joke in play when you examine Duke with a mind free of preconception. If he’s intended as a comedy character, then the results have truly failed.
Duke Nukem has survived in our minds as an over-the-top, hilarious pastiche. When you peel away the marketing hype and the character we’ve partially invented in our collective mind, however, you’ll see something quite different. Duke Nukem is not what we think he is.
Apologists will tell you that Duke Nukem is a satirical creation. They claim his misogynistic attitudes and sociopathic tendencies are meant to mock cheesy action films and typical videogame heroes. It’s easy to sit back and say Duke is a parody, but let me ask — what exactly is he parodying? Duke treats women like **** and his games portray females as ditzy sluts who exist only to satisfy Duke’s urges. To the best of my knowledge, the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone have never been about that. To my mind, the majority of first-person-shooter games fail to include a character like Duke. He’s more of an original character than we give him credit for, but that is by no means a positive thing.
It’s more factual to say that Duke creates a problem, rather than highlights and mocks an existing one. We pretend Duke Nukem makes fun of action heroes, but action heroes don’t inhabit titty bars and spend their time getting blowjobs from women in school uniforms. When Duke delivers cheesy one-liners, he’s not making a joke, because the one-liners have been ripped verbatim from movies like Army of Darkness and robbed of their original context. Duke makes direct, sincere references or outright steals from action movies. He does nothing to make fun of them, he simply mimics them at best, and that’s not enough.
For a parody to work, you have to have context. It can be from a comedian expressing an opinion in an overtly extreme manner that runs contradictory to what we actually know about his personality. It can be something like The Onion, that uses a straight-faced news presentation to describe fantastical and unbelievable events. What it can’t be is a man who simply acts like a dick without consequence, irony, or comparative extremity. It can’t be something that pretends to have a message while saying absolutely nothing.
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