GRRF: The Last Lecture (2009)
Running time: 31 minutes. A Demo Noir piece by Tristan Newcomb. Also starring Prof. Amy Alexander and Jared Hinkle.
If you’ve been going along our projects in chronological order, and have read the intro to GRRF: The Sound of Suicide Postponement (2009), then you know the Demo Noir methodology & its nefarious ways. The Last Lecture was one of the final GRRF performances, a version in which a modest, downheartedly announcement is made to the audience: the video game we’re about to present to them is, sadly, the last video game level developed by “Ben”, a student from their university who has just died of a terminal illness.
Once the room is doused with that bit of somber falsehood, the game demo proceeds…and it becomes increasingly clear that Ben’s last game is…er…*cough*…quite possibly the worst game ever…
Simply put, it was a satire on the rising tendency (at the time) of people claiming a terminal illness to gather extra promotional momentum for their media projects – which was doubtlessly going to spill over into the world of, say, reality TV shows about a supermodel who is “dying”, or a chef who is “dying”, or a porn star who is “dying”…a kind of tragedy + voyeurism rating boom. Mortality was going to become a kind of cheap “X factor” boost, a buzzword among TV and book people, i.e. if the celeb or author is dying, that’s gold, baby! Go with that! So death, mighty unknowable death, becomes a lipsticked golden goose on a leash for inexpensive TV and cheesy non-fiction bestsellers. The title of the piece is meant to Google-tangle our satire with the book that started the trend.
And one day, out of nowhere, Ars Technica reviewed this performance, suddenly putting Demo Noir on the map. Annnnnd here is the performance in its uninterrupted, squirm-worthy entirety:
