Metal Gear Solid and the Theatre of the Absurd
— Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011“One of the great things about Metal Gear Solid,” I thought to myself, chuckling slightly, “is that it doesn’t glorify being a violent soldier. You can get through them without killing virtually anybody, especially if you’re skilled, and it’s a game with an anti-war message at its core.”
As I was saying this, Snake was in the canyon between the tank hangar and the nuclear storage building, and I was trying to get him to properly lob grenades as he, single-handled, took on Vulcan Raven’s M-1 Abrams tank.
I still laugh when I read about the fans who complained that Metal Gear Solid 2 featured a bishounen swordsman and a sexually-provocative vampire. Clearly, it was a blow to the verisimilitude – the gritty realism, even – established by the beloved previous title, in which you later have to shoot the aforementioned Vulcan Raven in the face with multiple Stinger missiles as he chases you around a warehouse.
The great thing about the Metal Gear Solid series is that it rewards nearly any interpretation. There’s a lot of thought about the real world, and a lot of thought about gaming conventions, and if either of those things are what you’re looking for, that’s what you’ll find. If you’re looking for proof that Kojima’s notorious love of film has infected a medium that should focus on gameplay, you can find your evidence. If you’re looking instead for proof that the gameplay matters, and the lengthy cutscenes are just set dressing, you can find that instead, and you’ll come off just as correct – let’s get a high school debate class on that dividing line, the bloodshed will make the six o’clock news. If you’re trying to substantiate your claim that the series is a researched and deliberate evocation of realistic combat and espionage, it’s there – and it’s equally true that sometimes these games are really, really goofy.
I’m not complaining, here, mind.
A lot of people have spent a lot of time and effort taking apart the latter games in the Metal Gear Solid series, and with good reason – the second game’s unseating of the protagonist made it clear just how ambitious Kojima was going to be, and the later games played that out just as much, if not further. There’s a sort of temptation to view the first game as a sort of empty template, a “standard” adventure that allowed the later games to deviate. But that’s not really true, I think. There’s more meat in the original than we sometimes give it credit for, and a lot of it stems from how silly the game’s not afraid to be.
I was reading Leigh Alexander’s terrific recent piece on the original Metal Gear Solid, which has plenty of insight on some things that are great about the game, but my interpretation of the infamous battle with Psycho Mantis differed from hers. When I figured out what it meant, I smiled; because with MGS, as is often the case, both of our interpretations were right – if anything, they supported each other. Even though I thought that legendary boss battle was, really, pretty silly.
Fandub based on the comic from Hiimdaisy, aka Gigi DG.
I’m reminded of the great Osamu Tezuka. Even in his most serious manga works, he would always insert jarring humor and fourth-wall breaking sequences at the drop of a hat, no matter what effect said moment might have on the emotional tone of the story underway. This wasn’t a defect of his, it was a sign of confidence that the reader was along for the ride, and there was a reason behind it. Tezuka was a great humanist, and many of his most powerful works dealt with big ideas – he was more concerned with you contemplating what he had to say than he was with your “immersion” – and it was rarely to the detriment of his stories. It’s generally called “Brechtian” storytelling, and it’s something that Kojima is absolutely in love with – he’ll never hesitate to remind you that you’re playing a game, a fact that seems to bother some gamers, but is pretty essential to what he’s trying to do. And like Tezuka, one way he does this is never shying away from being silly.
Hence, you can get off of your Codec in Metal Gear Solid with Nastasha, who is providing serious information about the dangers of nuclear proliferation, and immediately have to karate kick a wolf-dog in the face. A wolf-dog, in fact, that seems to have the ability to teleport, given how the cave area seems to work.
Leigh Alexander’s piece was discussing, among other things, how each boss fight uses the game mechanics in order to exposit on each character. Sniper Wolf’s battle, for instance, being about her needing to keep people at an emotional distance conveyed through the physical space of the sniper fight. But regarding Psycho Mantis, she refers to the infamous gimmicks of that fight as a way of conveying his invasive manner. Like I said, she was absolutely right, but it wasn’t what I took from the battle at all. Actually the opposite, because Mantis didn’t “invade” me at all. Partly because I was expecting it – everyone expects it now, the game has been around for a very long time – but more than that, because it didn’t impress me.
The confrontation with Psycho Mantis consists of a few separate components. First, Mantis controls your love interest Meryl Silverburg and taunts you with the idea of sex. As we learn, Mantis is digusted by physical contract, particularly procreation – and we also learn that he, in reading Snake’s mind, finds that Snake is less interested in sex than he is with violence, finding a sort of kindred spirit in Snake in that respect (though he eventually finds Snake more vile than even Snake’s “brother,” the final boss Liquid). Watch how Mantis-in-Meryl acts, first in the cutscene, and then even during the introductory fight before Mantis himself is revealed. Mantis is taunting Snake the way that a child would taunt, practically playing a game of “keep away” or “I’m not touching you.”
The second component is arguably the most famous bit. It’s actually enacted in another cutscene, before the fight proper begins, but it’s clearly a part of the game itself – that is, it’s interactive – because it’s reliant upon the contents of your memory card. Psycho Mantis says, “you don’t believe that I’m psychic? Watch this!” and then pulls his tricks. You’re not yet battling him, per se. You’re standing there watching, both in-game and in your living room, as Mantis tries increasingly “invasive” attempts to wow you with his skill.
“You don’t believe me? Watch this!” …It’s a small child, stamping their foot. If he could, he’d wish us to the cornfield. He “reads” us when he discerns our personality based on our skill in the game and our number of saves. That one’s pretty good. It’s a direct attack on the player’s sense of self. But he can’t stop there, because he’s a child. “Ooh, I can see you like Suikoden.” I know a secret, I know a secret! And then the worst of it, which is when he makes your controller vibrate. Sorry, Psycho Mantis, by that point you’ve lost me, because lots and lots of games make my controller vibrate, and by this point you’re looking a little desperate. It’s his tone, his “Oo, look what I can do,” that makes him out to be a little pathetic.
And the final component is the battle itself. And what does it consist of? What do the game mechanics tell us about his character? He throws furniture, like a child in a temper tantrum; to get anywhere in the battle, you have to get up off the couch and switch your controller points – what a jerk! And if he feels like you’re winning at all, your screen “goes out” – he ragequits like a twelve year old on XBox Live.
He’s not scary, at all. He’s a grunting toddler, who’s afraid of sex, throws furniture, cheats, and acts petulant all the way through. The final indignity is when he tries to make Meryl shoot herself, and if you slap her back down, he whines.
All of this is to say that the first time I played this boss battle, I was laughing. I thought it was funny. I found it silly… deliberately so.
Because Psycho Mantis is a child. His trauma began when he was a child, and his power first awakened, and he learned that his father didn’t love him. In response, he had a temper tantrum – he burned down his whole village. Ever since, he’s been a small child in a man’s body.
This is tragic, but it’s also Kojima delivering a lesson in microcosm – this is a boy who never learned to be a man. With deference to the lovely and talented Ms. Alexander, It was mostly boys playing Metal Gear Solid. And it was boys who refused to grow up, who found Snake to be an admirable badass.
One game later, Kojima would drive this point further home by letting us see Snake through another’s eyes, and conveying that we shouldn’t necessarily like what we see. And the larger response, at the time, was give us Snake back, because he’s the cool one.
Remember Tezuka? Arguably the man who’s earned his title as the king of manga, the modern legend Naoki Urasawa, created a terrific story called 20th Century Boys. In one of the earliest volumes, a viciously funny scene occurs in which a secret cabal ask a scientist to build them a mech robot so that they can conquer the world. They argue over which manga and anime the robot should be based on, even though the scientist insists that such a robot is impossible – that these are not things that are possible in the real world. It’s very, very funny. Of course, this shadowy room full of boys who can’t grow up are the ones who do take over the world, and it’s not very funny at all. The entire plan is based on a children’s game, and the whole story is about childhood versus adulthood, about the dangers of living in the past.
Otacon designed Metal Gear REX, he tells Snake in Metal Gear Solid, because he loved the robots in “his Japanese animes.” He was having great fun, too, until he learned that there were consequences to his actions.
Kojima doesn’t want you to forget that you’re playing a game. Oh, I’m sorry, you didn’t want to go all the way back through the map to get the sniper rifle, then trek all the way again to go back? Well, tough. In breaking the rules we have about back-tracking, he’s taken you right out of the story and he knows it. Perhaps one of my favorite moments of being intentionally silly, though, is the first battle with recurring villain Revolver Ocelot. There is a man wired to explode, and you’re in a desperate shoot-out with a brilliant sharpshooter… but what’s really happening on screen is that you and he run around a square plaza over and over like a Benny Hill sketch, while he shouts homoerotic taunts at you.
There is a place that Kojima flips the script on you, though, and it’s another infamous doozy – the torture sequence. Tapping the button rapidly to match the life drain is torturous on the player, as well as Snake, because Ocelot keeps doing it again and again, and the continues have been removed. He still has Ocelot speak to the player about using a cheating controller, but once the torture begins, it’s just you and him, trying to keep that life meter up. And after you’ve done it a couple of times, it begins to feel pointless and mean. Like… torture. This is why it’s the only moment that affects the overall narrative, because he wants you to feel bad about submitting or failing. He wants you to take it seriously. Because torture isn’t a joke, not in the way that fighting FOXHOUND is a joke – a battle against Spider-Man’s Sinister Six, basically. Those guys shrug off rockets to the face and still show up in the cutscenes because they’re video game characters and we all know it. They can be silly. Torture shouldn’t be.
And in the end, that’s a lot of Kojima’s point. He’ll be absurdist, he’ll be downright goofy even, because what you’re doing isn’t war, and he wants you to be reminded of it at every opportunity of gameplay. Cutscenes, that’s different – characters can do cooler things, because when they do them then, you’re not doing it with them.
Consider modern war-based games these days, overall. How do we feel about war, how do we approach the reality of war, when playing those games? I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. But I’m definitely saying that it’s different than what Metal Gear Solid does. It has very few illusions about what it is. And it refuses to let you have them, either.
