Connections and Making Friends at the End of the World
Post-rock in the post-society
It's the holiday season! So before I forget, let me thank you for reading this. I am enjoying writing the occasional essay and sending it out into the world. There will not be another one of these in the next week or so, so Happy Holidays all.
I started this substack (or revived it really), like quite a few people are doing, in the wake of Twitter completing the final stages of its metamorphosis into mass mental health plastic-fueled bonfire. I had actually gotten close to that point with Twitter long before a certain overrated and odd man took it over from the odd man who preceded him, but when my infrequent logins to the website became far more likely than before to feature people saying just pure uncut awful stuff, I realized I was done. So, taking my cue directly from Ian Bogost and others, I came to substack and spent a day or so with a spanner and a hammer getting the machine back up and running. Still working on it, really.
But why? Truthfully, I just like writing and I should probably be doing that more. I also liked the idea of committing to writing somewhat regularly without giving oneself a weekly deadline that must be met; there are a lot of reasons that approach has not worked for me in the past, and I knew it would not work now. So, if you subscribe to this (and thank you if you do!) you know I might write to you on a Monday, or a Thursday, or a few days before Christmas while the kids are watching the Unikitty tv show.
There are potentially other reasons, I suppose. The C word looms a little bit. Well, peeks around the corner, more like. You know what I'm talking about.
Connection. I'm talking about connection.
I'm not sure to what extent I've ever really craved or celebrated that aspect of social media, given that it is ostensibly the entire point. But it's difficult to escape, isn't it? And what am I getting at here, exactly? Some of you got it the second you saw the song linked above: I want to talk about Death Stranding (2019).
Hideo Kojima, friend. He's an interesting guy. I can't say I've always really "got" Kojima. The Metal Gear Solid series has always been interesting; it's useful in class too. Here, I tell my students, let's play some of these games made by an enormously successful creative who grew up in postwar Japan, a technically neutral country under the security umbrella of a friendly superpower while figuring out its own legacies as the only country to have been successfully targeted with a nuclear attack. Anyone picking up on any themes here???
So he's always been thematically rich. He's also stylistically... his own thing. I guess that's why Kojima is SO attractive to various corners of the video game enthusiast world. In a space that once cared an awful lot about the "are games art?" conversation, surely this guy was a compelling exhibit in evidence. He has to be an artist, doesn't he? He's just so weird!
I think people also fall in love with Kojima because he genuinely is a video games person. He reeks of them, he is them. He both absorbs them and then sends games out that basically EVERYONE plays, and then we talk about Kojima. I am seriously considering proposing an academic talk on Kojima but I worry a little the people reading it will pull a face. Really? Kojima? Gee, that's refreshing and original! (I'm a child of the 1990s. I think we'll always talk with this patina of sarcasm. I apologize if you are young and honest.)
But he is, isn't he? The Psycho Mantis trick from Metal Gear Solid looms large as an example. Sure, making you plug your controller into the other port in the machine is a weird thing to do, but who thinks of that??? Someone who plays a lot of video games!!! What's the equivalent of that in film, the goliath media to which video games constantly compares itself? Can Brie Larson turn to the fourth wall in the next Captain Marvel movie and say "hey everyone, go into the room next door to this one to keep watching!" It's this weird, nutty, obvious but incredibly obscure thing to do. And it's something that only makes any kind of sense at all if you play video games. Kojima was communicating to the players that he gets them. And he does. Kojima fundamentally gets video games.
Which makes it interesting that he has been so pronounced in his love and apparent mimicry of cinematic photography, from as soon as it was remotely technically possible to perform such mimicry in a convincing way. Death Stranding feels like a masterpiece, to me; though frankly it may just feel liberating because it's not another Metal Gear Solid game. Kojima gets to have it all here: he casts interesting, recognizable actors and other creatives (or at least uses their appearance) for key roles. This all hinges on picking Norman Reedus, an actor who was probably fairly available, but thanks to his astonishing success portraying Daryl in the AMC show The Walking Dead brings a level of... well, I was going to say fame, but it's not quite that. It's certainly not notoriety either. But when I began to play Death Stranding my brain had to reconfigure itself a little: I recognize this person but they're inhabiting a specific role in this thing. I don't usually need to do that in video games. And, like any film, I've played the game a bit and he's Sam Porter Bridges now. That's who he is.
The game can be incredibly weighty, it's fond of self-reflection and a lot of the core underlying ideas are fundamentally and brazenly weird. Sorry to be vague but I don't want to ruin too much. In short, this is all coming from Kojima's brain and not many other places. It shows up in his willingness to be absurd as well. Sam can recover stamina, a classic video game action, by downing a Monster Energy Drink; a little bit of capitalism meets zeitgeist weirdness that sadly did not survive the release of the Director’s Cut. When sitting in his private quarters, Sam might tap on the "camera" lens and gesture to you which option he wants you to select next. There is a reason, completely justified and informed by in-game lore and rules, to get Sam to walk over to the other side of the room and pee.
Death Stranding is also a creation of where Kojima's head seems to have been in the early 2010s - and he is thinking a lot about human connections. When Sam completes one of his missions (that is to say when you complete one of your missions) he receives "likes" which have little thumbs up emoticons that are making little to no effort to dispel associations with Facebook. NPCs gush at what a great carrier-of-things you are, but it goes beyond the standard fawning the player-character receives in games. Everyone is lonely, and they're happy to have someone to talk to, not just look up to. They send you letters just to say hi. And everyone is on drugs to stave off loneliness-induced depression and severe mental health crises.
Yeah, post-2020 Death Stranding feels like a thing even though Kojima had written, made and shipped his game before the pandemic began. The game is one huge statement of the fragility of our social systems in the face of technology and the absolute, unassailable inadequacy of the social media corporate spiderwebs that some of us have decided to pretend are variations of a public square. Or the coffee shops and tea houses of the public sphere, though that feels more like Mastodon right now. Yes, I'm a fan of Jurgen Habermas. The truth is out.
There are a whole host of reasons I love Death Stranding. I have finally "got" Kojima as an artist conveying themes. I always saw the themes, but these ones are clicking with me. It is, as all Kojima's games are, a good video game that respects the expectations and hopes of people who play video games. The game evokes all kinds of ideas about how we make our histories, and as you go on through the game a theme emerges of sorrow and mourning over a past that might never be recovered. That sounds like something I should write about for History Respawned...
But mostly I love Death Stranding because it is beautiful. Sam is alone for long stretches of time, which as the game begins at least is how he wants it. He walks through and over beautiful landscapes. The sound design is a perfect fit. Playing Death Stranding feels like alone time. Sometimes that is a bit of a tough thing, which is certainly something Kojima wants to convey. Sometimes it is peace. And sometimes as you press forward on the left control stick and Sam starts to get his hike on the camera pulls back and you are submerged in mournful Icelandic post-rock. And it feels good.
Thanks for reading! If you find this kind of thing interesting do please tell your friends, and subscribe if you have not already. You might also be interested in History Respawned! Over on the site Bob recently talked to Dr. Winston Black about sexy hit-with-the-cool-kids murder mystery Pentiment!