Metal Gear Solid is a particularly useful example of what’s often called ‘deconstruction’ – taking cliche genre elements and critically analyzing them in the text, which is really just a specific form of postmodernism. One of the criticisms postmodernism frequently gets is that it’s a dead-end, artistically and philosophically – not only in that it exists mainly as a self-reflexive exercise pointing at itself, but that subsequent attempts to build off it are, if they’re possible, even emptier. Like all things that are stupid and wrong, there’s a core of truth here; that yes, there are a lot of bad examples of postmodernism (one sees a lot of them in sitcoms influenced by Rick & Morty the last few years) because it can descend into masturbatory gesturing.
But the fact that something can be done badly does not mean it shouldn’t be done at all. When I look back at my favourite comedies of my childhood and teen years, it becomes quickly obvious that I was a huge mark for jokes that were essentially saying the subtext out loud. How much of this comes from very likely being autistic is an interesting topic; postmodernist humour becomes like a cheat code for understanding other human beings and how they think. This combined with my interest in fiction to mature into an interest in postmodernist fiction, which was essentially saying “this is how fiction works”.
Metal Gear Solid is a particularly useful example of this, because it’s simultaneously a postmodernist deconstruction of action films and a straightforward example of same. To put it another way, it’s an action story that explains to you how it was made as you’re playing through it – not just through dialogue, but through technique that draws attention to itself. The subtext-that-becomes-text isn’t just for its own sake, but is part of trying to create a vivid emotional climax; Snake’s revelation of inner turmoil and trauma in the first game isn’t just the game saying “wow, action heroes are kind of messed up”, it’s part of an emotional climax in which he vows to be a better person and takes steps to do so.
If I may be allowed to throw a petty accusation at a vague concept of people, it’s in my experience that those most opposed to the concept of postmodernism are the most sensitive to any sort of criticism of their favourite stories or genres; ‘deconstruction’ rose in popularity on TV Tropes and quickly became its own phenomenon on that site; partially because its first major examples really are that good, and partially, I think, because ‘deconstruction’ has a veneer of intellectual respectability to it. Fans of anything tend to have an air of insecurity to us because what we do and care about is very silly and extremely accessible; it takes a decade of school to get good at medicine and the stakes are literally life and death, whereas technically anyone can learn to write a good story in five minutes (emotionally it’s more difficult). Deconstruction comes as the result of study and thought; you’re drawing on a wide scope of references, and you’ve put thought into an original insight and often come to a creative conclusion of their consequences.
Obviously, though, this led to a backlash, and the creation of a counterpoint: ‘reconstruction’, which is defined as a story trying to rebuild the genre and tell a straightforward story after the deconstructions. As you can imagine, this is a pretty reactionary concept – not in politics or in hating women and black people kind of way, but in that it’s based on responding to something else. Some of these stories are really good – Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman series is often categorized under this label, and that’s a really successful example of telling old-style stories in the best possible way. But I was always struck by how many examples of this were just dumb stories uncritically offering up old cliches with no intelligence.
Metal Gear Solid is really interesting in this context, because creator Hideo Kojima is sincerely interested in having the player finish the story a better and more positive person than they were when they started; his games exist to uplift and educate as well as entertain. His end goal is for positive action to be undertaken in the real world. In a way, the ‘reconstruction’ that comes at the end is the natural consequence of the ‘deconstruction’ that makes up the first half; Snake and Raiden are made aware of their motivations and so learn how to express them in healthier ways after the events of their stories (one of the major upsides to Metal Gear Solid 2 is that we get to see what this means for Snake).
In this fashion, I’m kind of in their spirit. The ironic thing about being such a big fan of these postmodern deconstructionist stories is that my stories are actually thuddingly conventional; sure, I have an idiosyncratic style, but embracing the ancient art of tragedy is where I’ve totally locked in. Nevertheless, I feel that the spirit of my postmodernist ancestors is ever-present in my own work; Metal Gear Solid trained me to see stories in terms of these techniques by virtue of pointing at them – not just directly, but through analysis I read of the series that took these obvious techniques and explained them further. I learned: here is where we establish the stakes, here is where we see characters connect, here is where we see conflict emerge between them, this is foreshadowing. Above all else, this is how we care so much.
And if there’s one specific thing I attribute to Metal Gear Solid that I don’t to other postmodern works, it’s that it taught me to look at where the audience’s attention is by virtue of its use of every element, even if it was just for a joke. The most obvious one is when Naked Snake’s eye gets blinded in the third game, and from then on, if you go into first person, your vision is a little more limited. Because of that, I often see the gaps in stories where the storyteller didn’t take advantage of a particular element of our attention; moments and elements where the storyteller could have made things bigger, more specific, or more complicated. Ironically, my own works are very minimalist, but I still think it counts; I reduce the amount of things the audience has to look at to the absolute minimum, giving me more control over what information they get.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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What you might call "edgy ambient".
Year of the Month
This is the angriest a book has made me since that fucking Ayn Rand book.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Happy Endings, Season Two, Episode Seventeen, “Cocktails and Dreams”
“Wow, we really are losing the war on drugs if animals are blowing rails.”
“Ah, water, the wettest treat.”
“Bitch, it is 5:40!”
“I will have you know that these are not pyjama jeans. These are pyjoveralls.”
“I think you know why I’m naked, bud.”
“You guys are being really weird. Jane, give me a smell of your sandwich.”
“You don’t get to touch me!”
“This is not easy to say, but… I’m not actually black. This is a giant mole.”
“He made me keep my heels on.”
“You nailed me! It. It.”
“I’m not proud of that.”
“Ooh, floor bacon!”
Max being the self-consciously edgy asshole who finds himself happily falling into a bougie middle class relationship is obvious, but works.
“I didn’t think I wanted fritattas, but now if you told me I could never have one again, I’d kill you in cold blood. Assassin-style.”
“There are two things I always say. One: yes, that Hanks.”
“Wha? I said ‘wha’!”
“Oh. They want you to put that away.”
“But first, we orgy til we cramp!”
The Evil Dead
A triumphant combination of minimalism and maximalism. I’ve always thought that if you go extreme in one aspect, you absolutely must go minimal in another to give your audience a grounding for reality; with this, we have an absolutely archetypal story with the bare minimum of lore necessary to get the story moving. It’s shocking how fast this thing can move, like the sudden reveal of Deadite Cheryl. This is all in contrast to the maximalist filming, where you can see the crew were always asking “what’s the most interesting way to convey this thought?” (even when that blows up in their faces, like the infamous tree rape scene – though it was less graphic than I was anticipating).
Evil Dead is what happens when your budget and limitations mean you have to go maximalist, as you say this means the most extreme version of everything is what’s on screen.
The Devils – sold-out screening of the complete version, and it has also sold out every other screening at my local cinema – impressive. I’ve only seen the cut version before and I liked it even more with several additional minutes of sexual hysteria. Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed are both incredible and the Derek Jarman sets look amazing.
Hell on Earth: The Desecration and Resurrection of the Devils – 45-minute doc about the film’s production and battle with the censors. It’s still kinda surprising they thought they would get away with it! Ken Russell is nicely eccentric and the interviews are solid, but the most notable thing about the doc is that critic Mark Kermode actually located the cut footage while researching which is pretty amazing, it might have been lost forever without his efforts.
Live Music – local indie / punk / DIY festival. I’d seen a few of the bands before but mostly trusted it enough to go in blind, and the standard was very high this year. The “big” names included Bis, who I first saw in about 1996 and still think are great (they did the Powerpuff Girls song and were signed to the Beastie Boys label at one point) and A Certain Ratio, who were a bit of an odd fit for the festival but were kind of interesting all the same. Lower down the bill there were bands from the UK, Europe, US and Australia – my highlights (aside from Bis) included Dutch all-female post-punk band The Klittens, lo-fi keyboard pop from The Chop, NY alt-rockers Savak and Australian synth-punks Delivery, who I’ve failed to see at least a couple of times before for stupid reasons.
I Think You Should Leave, S3 E1 – finally checking out the third season. Generally very funny but the final sketch (The Driving Crooner) was the one that felt like a classic. Wonderfully unhinged.
Woooooooooooo live music! And holy moly, Bis — haven’t thought of them in a long time.
My issues with The Devils have nothing to do with those sets, which are indeed amazing. In some ways they make the stakes for the film better than the characters — don’t tear this shit down! It rules!
I love that the plot is basically “Oliver Reed makes one nun SO horny that it destroys a whole town”
Three Cases of Murder
This may not ascend to the giddy heights of Dead of Night or Asylum, but it’s a handsome, well-crafted horror-mystery anthology film.
The first segment, “In the Picture” (dir. Wendy Toye), is the most overtly supernatural and the most chilling, as an art museum docent is led into the world of his favorite painting, only the welcome is stranger, more bullying, more selfishly motivated, and ultimately far more horrifying than the premise would suggest. Toye has a great eye, and this is, appropriately, the most visually striking of the three sections. (And she knows when to leave specific details to the imagination, which is always a benefit.) Goes hard; excellent sense of dread.
“You Killed Elizabeth” (dir. David Eady) is a pure crime story, albeit a macabre one, featuring two friends, the sub rosa resentment the less charismatic one feels for the other, and what happens when a woman entres the picture and dates first one and then the other. Nicely constructed and clever.
The final piece stars Orson Welles as “Lord Mountdrago” (dir. George More O’Ferrall and also Welles, evidently), a powerful, pragmatic politician who humiliates an idealistic rival (Alan Badel, who appears in all three segments) and is then haunted by him in his dreams. This would probably be the slightest story here if it weren’t for the subtextual homoerotic charge and the sexual anxiety Mountdrago goes through, which gives it some heft and adds a weird, ambivalent charge to the ending.
All in all, as good as, say, two quite satisfying Thriller episodes (the first one excellent, even) bracketing a strong episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which I will certainly take.
Paperhouse
For Movie Club. Beautifully crafted blend of fantasy (with some occasional but quite effective horror: Anna’s dream dad’s enraged howl about being blind would’ve haunted me for weeks if I’d seen this as a kid) and naturalism. This should end just a few minutes before it does, but that’s the only knock against it.
Häxan
Stunning to behold, and the score is an all-timer. The amount of loving, painstaking theatrical and cinematic craft that went into this on every level knocks me back, and Christensen assembles some of the best faces ever here: the close-ups on Maria the Weaver, and her actress, Maren Pederson, feel almost Dreyer-esque.
I appreciate how many times a pointer makes an appearance in the film. Perhaps the most pointer-heavy cinematic masterpiece ever made.
Killer Joe
This would be five stars if Emile Hirsch did not somehow cross the line into being too aggressively annoying even in a role designed for that. But this is an incredible gritty, dark, feverish work of art that’s also just impeccably plotted crime fiction (the reveal of what Off-Screen Rex has been up to is glorious; of course these assholes have gotten played).
It’s easy to focus on McConaughey, and it’s certainly not unjust: I’m glad 2011 correctly decided that this kind of fully committed weird, charismatic monstrosity meant he was due for a comeback, when other eras might have taken one look at that chicken leg scene and put him on the shelf for good. But a young Juno Temple is also so striking here, all soft-faced vulnerability turned just a little bit off-kilter–and given just a little jolt of electricity–in a way that opens her up to being more than just a victim.
The Asphalt Jungle
Extremely well-executed look at the human side of a heist. This is less interested in the mechanics than, say, Rififi; it’s about who vouches for whom (and how far that goes), who wants to get out of the city and go back home, who has kids at home. Standard elements like the double-cross and the crooked cop get fleshed out in interesting, believably human ways. This is also great at coming up with very specific, memorable scenes, like Doc watching the girl in the bar dance to the jukebox on his nickel–such a bittersweet beat of him soaking up life on the outside, and one that plays as though he’s already accepted that it’s over. (This is actually what ends it, both because the dance delays his getaway and because the cops peer in at the dancing girl, but Jaffe plays the inevitability rather than the tension.)
I appreciate how this fucks around with the Code, giving a police commissioner a chance to grandstand about the valor and necessity of the force two seconds before he wholesale dismisses the humanity of the protagonist we’ve spent most of the movie following, making it clear he doesn’t actually speak for the film at all.
Despite all that, somehow this doesn’t have the necessary juice for me. It’s doing everything right–tragedy, nuance, realism, intelligence–but I can’t help feeling like there’s something missing. Maybe Sterling Hayden’s performance needs a little more oomph? He just feels a little bit too tepid, especially opposite Jean Hagen, who’s pouring more emotion into her role.
I was dying to see Richard Stark’s Parker take on Emmerich. This all feels like a clear influence on Stark’s structure, actually; it’s just a Parker novel where Parker never appears, and consequently everything is a little less hard-bitten.
Now that is a damn weekend! Paperhouse is indeed incredible, I actually watched it in middle school English class (it’s one of the great PG horror movies) and I remember laughing at the blind line but it’s one of those things that was laugh-at-instead-of-get-scared in retrospect, the Other Dad (Coraline takes a bit from this, no?) is nightmarish. And hell yes on Temple in Killer Joe, I went into the movie knowing the McConaghuey-ness of it all and thus got suckered by her just like she wanted. Great performance.
And somehow I’ve never seen The Asphalt Jungle, Stark-level crime? Sign me up. And if you haven’t seen it, Crime Wave (the Andre de Toth one) is superb noir with a great Hayden performance as a proto-Ellroy cop, he’s a bull-headed force who nonetheless has a moral grounding in something other than the Hayes Code and that leads to an interesting ending.
It does feel very Coraline! With maybe a bit of Clive Barker mixed in (it makes sense to me that Rose did both this and Candyman: he has the right sensibility).
I’ll have to check out Crime Wave this month!
I remember loving Asphalt Jungle, it’s so full of character detail which my brain seems to respond to more than the slick heisting of Rififi, even if I do really love Jules Dassin. Hoping I can fit in some noir this month although it’s an absurdly busy one.
Also, hell yeah Haxan. And I’ve never heard of Three Cases of Murder but it sounds cool!
The more I think about it, the more I think it really is just Hayden missing a bit here for me (I love him in The Killing, though); the rest of it is perfectly my vibe, and the character beats are top-notch.
My nephew’s grandpa showed him The Asphalt Jungle – to clarify, he is three – and I noted to his parents that I was not the one to first play him a wildly inappropriate movie given his age.
“The Asphalt Jungle? Sounds like something on a playground. Probably just right for a three-year-old.”
Lol, my thought was that he confused it with The Blackboard Jungle, which is obviously a movie about Daniel Tiger going to pre-school.
Live Music! – The annual Ohio Valley Filk Festival, with its usual mix of fairly capable performers (some of whom are very good guitarists and some of whom play professionally to some degree) and fairly good songwriters and people who love of music and of all things nerdy way outpace any semblance of talent. But such is life in the filk community, where you either put up with the rank amateurs or stay home. And of course, at least in theory it’s all about community as much as anything else. (There was a memorial event for several from that community who passed away in the past year. One of whom was both a major figure in filk and increasingly strident and intolerant, and whose life I had no interest in celebrating. But people wanted to remember her, and not a word was about Patrick Stewart, who all of us loved and not a one of us actually knew.)
Wooooooooooo live music! “Put up with the rank amateurs or stay at home” is a good policy/understanding for live music in general.
Live music — basement karaoke! Is there anything more deflating than getting up for a song and realizing you absolutely do not have that key in you? But a great time overall, I would not do the Walkmen’s “The Rat” in a bar (it has too much dead instrumental time) but that is a fun one to blast out.
Send Help — the CG is extremely blatant but Raimi makes a point of leaning into this and having fun, the warthog scene in particular is a delight. So many fluids! And Rachel McAdams is a great actor for his wavelength, she holds together a character that gets sort of wonky in the back stretch. And she gets great support from Dylan O’Brien, neither of them is afraid to look “bad” but O’Brien calibrates his shittiness and legitimate distress quite well. Interesting to watch this in the context of checking out old Tales From The Crypts, Raimi has always been an enormous EC guy in tone (especially the great Drag Me To Hell) and this has some imagery right out of that show, it might have worked better in that shorter vein but it’s still a good time.
Live music! Saw some old friends for the first time in months at Johnny Brenda’s and heard two great bands covering two, uh, great bands. One band did Big Star and did a great job on “O My Soul” and “September Gurls” among others (my friend pointed out how hard the former is with it’s section changes and big drum showcase). Florry meanwhile were “The Florring Stones” and largely crushed it, with even the drunken stumbling on the verses of “Tumblin’ Dice” in the encore feeling apropos. Me and my friend Laura were arm in arm singing the chorus of “Sway”. Great night overall.
The Lowdown S2E2 – Seconding the love for Paul Schneider here as Chili Flakes, embodying a certain ridiculous macho swagger that covers for pathetic self-loathing. (Unlike Lee, I’d be fine with singing along to drunken, white trash honkytonk.) The ending deepens the mystery – McMann clearly doesn’t know where Mekko Dean is – and gets Lee and probably Ginger even further into trouble. Tommy Lee Jones is great too as Lee’s dad who may or may not be out of it as is Mintz-Plasse finally finding his niche as a pervert character actor years after McLovin’.
Heh, thinking of how Matthew Broderick moved into a more pathetic (complimentary, he’s great at it) mode a decade after Ferris Bueller, maybe Mintz-Plasse is in a similar situation?
And wooooooooooo live music! If you’re going to drunkenly fuck up some lyrics, “Tumbling Dice” is the place for it.
Wildwood. I don’t know how this isn’t making more box office. I saw it in a full-ish auditorium on a second weekend sunday matinee. Normally that only happens with movies that are enormously successful. I do live in Portland though. Fully half of this movie’s meager box office must be from the PNW.
This is an incredible experience of a movie. It’s got an unbelievable scale and stretches what stop motion can do. It’s the Bondarchuk War and Peace of stop motion animation, right down to artillery and infantry charges. At the same time, the fine details are likewise breathtaking, down to how they make the puppets breathe. They blow cgi animation out of the water.*
The story itself is very much along the lines of Coraline and Kubo, with a little bit or narnia. The main character, Prue, is plunged into a world of weirdness and the mysticism. (And then she leaves Portland and goes into a magical
forest. ba-dumsh.) The crows have kidnapped her baby brother, she’ll have to learn more about her past and overcome her fears to rescue him from crows, ivy, and coyotes.
I’m on the fence about whether I should take the 7 year old to it. Definitely not the four year old. But otherwise I cannot recommend this highly enough.
*There was a trailer for disney’s hexed, which is probably fine but juxtaposed it feels like a disney parody of Laika and Ghibli.
In fairness, I saw the trailer and had no idea what the actual film was about, which sucks! Not the studio’s fault!
They should have hired me for the ads: “It’s the Bondarchuk War and Peace of stop motion animation” would have surely sold dozens of extra tickets.
What did we play?
Gears of War, Act One, Chapter Three, “Fish in a Barrel”
These ‘chapters’ are really short, which is convenient when you’re playing them on the hardest difficulty once a week but also speaks to how poorly structured the game is as a whole – the previous chapter ended with finding what could be Alpha’s bodies, and you’re arbitrarily given the target of the House of Sovereigns, which you don’t get to by the end of this chapter. Gameplay-wise, it’s pretty cool – there’s a sequence where you’re basically hiding in a fountain while emergence holes pop up around you, which admittedly is about as good as the game does with the concept.
There are two story moments that pop up here: a minor joke where Carmine is playing with some tool he found before tossing it down a hole after explaining it’s not the macguffin you’re after, which sets up a character finding it later and explaining that actually it’s the thing you need to resolve the whole plot. That’s pretty funny; less good is the first Bad Lampshade Hanging Moment. For those who don’t know, ‘hanging a lampshade’ is a term for when a writer gets around a plot problem or absurdity by having a character take note of it verbally and then moving on. This has obviously become somewhat notorious; it’s associated with the MCU especially and both Rick & Morty and even moreso Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as both made their bread and butter out of it and were wildly popular.
I suppose technically this example doesn’t count – it’s actually exposition, with the characters discussing how emergence holes can pop up anywhere and there’s nothing the characters can do about it. But it definitely has the flavour of lampshade hanging, as Marcus complains “You’d think we’d have figured out some kind of goddamned defence by now!” This will actually be a pattern throughout the trilogy; characters raising an issue with the plot and dismissing it as mysterious. It adds to the sense that this game is all the first ideas they had that they didn’t think through further than the absolute, total bare minimum.