Metal Gear: Liminality and Legacy
I didn’t know what I was in for when I first got into Metal Gear. My point of entry to the series was Metal Gear Solid 3. Near as I can remember I would have been around thirteen the first time I played it, and at that age I wasn’t looking for much more in a game than to be decently entertained for a few hours at a time, without having to think too much about what I was actually engaged in. So, what I expected from this game was assumption based on what little I knew already. I knew the lead character, Snake, and his growly voice from so many imitations. I knew the setting and plot were vaguely realistic and militaristic. That was about it.
What I didn’t know based on the fleeting things I had come to understand about Metal Gear beforehand was how downright goofy it would be. Where I expected standard action fare, I was met with a game that showed no hesitation in introducing a swath of characters with weird supernatural abilities, including a man whose superpower is “bees” and one completely literal ghost, with absolutely no attempt at explaining or justifying any of it. At about the point the game rolls out an elaborate title sequence a la James Bond I realized what this actually was. It’s parody. A completely non-serious pastiche of various genre elements, all exaggerated to humorous effect. With expectations reconfigured, I went on to see through a story that proceeds to take itself deadly seriously, about loyalty, the shifting sands of time, and ending on an indictment of the U.S. military industrial complex as a cruel machine that chews people up and spits them back out sad and broken. Some parody.
At that age the only exposure I had to any media that dealt with the military was very much in a post 9/11 “respect the troops” mold that glorified soldiers and offered no room for considering that maybe the American military is in fact a bad thing. The idea of anything, least of all a video game, levying criticism at that fundamental idea was a new one by me. The fact that it had come from a game that varied so wildly between its cartoonish excess and somber commentary on the world drew me in. I would continue to grow a fondness for the rest of the series, and that balancing act of juxtaposing absurdity and self-seriousness would persist as a defining trait in several of my media favorites. The term that best embodies this duality in Metal Gear is “liminality.” Sang Hyun Lee explores this concept in his book From a Liminal Place: An Asian American Theology, where he defines it as a state “in which a person is neither one thing nor another, but betwixt and between.” (5) Lee goes on to explain the idea and its applications further:
liminality is a space where a person is freed up from the usual ways of thinking and acting and is therefore open to radically new ideas. Freed from structure, persons in liminality are also available to a genuine communion (comunitas) with others. Liminal space is also where a person can become acutely aware of the problems of the existing structure. A person in a liminal space, therefore, often reenters social structure with alternative ideas of human relatedness and also with a desire to reform the existing social structure. (6)
While the balance of humor and drama is one way this concept manifests in Metal Gear, it is far from the only way. As Japanese games largely and unashamedly inspired by American movies, the series is a product of a strong pop culture crosscurrent that makes it what it is. The series’ creator, Hideo Kojima, wrote a series of articles from 2002 to 2003, detailing the movies he fell in love with from a young age, and what each of them gave to his own eventual creation. The Great Escape (1963) instilled a desire to create a game that could capture the tension of hiding from your enemies. The Guns of Navarone (1961) lent itself to the structure and objective behind the games, to “infiltrate, destroy, and escape.” Escape from New York (1981) most directly inspired the lead character, with Kurt Russel’s portrayal of Snake Plissken leading to the design of Metal Gear’s protagonist, Solid Snake. North by Northwest (1959) led to the choices around camera use for both first and third person perspectives, the use of recognizable landmarks and tourist locations for the site of the climactic action, and the decision to blend humor and tension to enhance the effectiveness of both. Dawn of the Dead (1978) led to the idea of setting the action in a singular interior location. Lastly, Planet of the Apes (1968) influenced the anti-war and specifically anti-nuclear themes of the games. In this regard the games also take noted influence from Japanese films, Godzilla (1954) especially, the titular Metal Gear being a titanic nuclear weapon capable of striking anywhere on Earth, representing the destructive capabilities of the nuclear bomb in much the same way as the famous Japanese movie monster.
This practice of borrowing from so many sources is a common tradition in almost all art forms but is especially noticeable in cinema. The book Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory dedicates a chapter by Jenna Ng to understanding what she refers to as “Transcultural Fusion.” Ng writes:
Thus transpires the cinephilic impulse of intertextual referencing: love shown in tribute and celebration inherent in the practices of homage and memorialization, conveying an uncanny mixture of admiration and affection – the former in implicit acknowledgment of a unique superiority of the original; the latter in the complicity of unspoken recognition deep in an affected and subjective memory. (69)
The concept is also applied to the film Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) in Margaret Hillenbrand’s article Of Myths and Men: “Better Luck Tomorrow” and the Mainstreaming of Asian America Cinema. Speaking to the film’s broad use of genre elements from both teen movies and crime dramas, Hillenbrand writes, “Lin’s movie is less about the recital of an encyclopedic list of influences than the bricolage effect that these influences collectively conjure.” (62-63) The effect is similar for Metal Gear, where the assortment of influences and the elements borrowed from each of them does less to make the whole seem unoriginal, and more to establish the identity of the work as its own. The idea of art as theft is common parlance, whichever artist the particular quote might be attributed to. The extent to which anything can be truly original is more a matter of exactly how its influences blend together than whether or not its an idea that’s never been done before, increasingly unlikely as that latter possibility is.
The last influence to note for Metal Gear is the long running James Bond franchise. Starting from novels that were then adapted to film, the movies alone are at fifty-seven years running. In addition to the more obvious influence the films have had as spy fiction and espionage thrillers, the way the films have carried on for so many decades was itself an influence on the thematic elements Metal Gear is interested in. Writing the last in his series of articles on the films that influenced him, Kojima says of the Bond films:
While the producer, scriptwriter, musicians, main actor, supporting actors and stuntmen have all changed since the first Bond film, 007 continues. Just like parents passing on to their children and masters to their apprentices, the essence of 007 is passed on so that the series continues generating hits. The way the 007 series passes on to the future is the theme I wanted to communicate in [Metal Gear Solid]. What will [Metal Gear Solid] be like 40 years from now, created by those who share the spirit of Team Kojima? I would like to stay alive and experience it myself.
This brings us to the concept of “legacy,” and then there’s going to be the rest of an essay here at some point.
Works Cited
Hillenbrand, Margaret. “Of Myths and Men: Better Luck Tomorrow and the Mainstreaming of Asian America Cinema.” Cinema Journal, vol. 47, no. 4, 2008, pp. 50–75., doi:10.1353/cj.0.0024.
Kojima, Hideo. “Hideo Kojima at the Movies: 007.” Official PlayStation 2 Magazine, 3 May 2003.
Lee, Sang Hyun. From a Liminal Place: An Asian American Theology. Fortress Press, 2010.
Ng, Jenna, “Love in the Time of Transcultural Fusion: Cinephilia, Homage and Kill Bill.” Cinephilia: Movies, Love, and Memory. Amsterdam University Press, 2005