Essays, Not Rants! 298: The Ephemeral and The Sublime

Over the years, Hideo Kojima has, because of his Metal Gear Solid games, become one of my favorite video game designers. He's also certifiably bonkers, mixing in discussions of American militarism-as-neo-colonialism in a game where you fight giant mechs alongside a mostly naked sniper who can't speak because of a parasite that uses language to spread (and thus serves as a vehicle for Kojima to discuss how English becoming the global lingua franca is in turn another form of colonialism).

 

Point is, I'm always stoked to see what he's making.

 

A

for Death Stranding, his first post-MGS game, dropped last night. Like the handful of other trailers for the game that have come out, it's weird and near indecipherable, with little information on what it's like as a game. And at eight minutes long, it's a pretty long trailer.

 

To the point where it's less a trailer and more of a short film unto itself. It's very self-contained, missing a lot of the “what comes next”-ness of trailers. While it does evoke a desire to figure out what's going on, but that's hardly the point.

 

There is little narrative in the traditional sense. Sure, we have a protagonist in Sam and a beginning, middle, and end; but it's not about him doing something. Rather, the trailer presents a tableau of a scene, a moment for you to experience and are the better for having done so. The trailer presents the sublime, something quite beyond our comprehension but beautiful in its terror. It's less about the catharsis and more about the process of watching Sam and his compatriots attempt to fend off these unseen creatures in a mysterious, physics bending world.

 

So in that sense it's a lot like the movie Lady Bird.

 

Lady Bird is about a girl in her senior year of high school, her relationship with her mother, her relationship with herself, and that messy transition from seventeen to eighteen. It's a tender story, told with a full heart and helpings of honesty. It's reliant less on vying for that big, cinematic climax than it is on capturing a very particular moment in time for a very specific person.

 

And like the trailer for Death Stranding, it captures the ephemeral. Things happen, and then something else does. Lady Bird isn't trying to say something bigger about the world, it's just trying to tell its story (as Death Stranding’s trailer weaves its vision of terror). There's no One Big Moment that defines protagonist Lady Bird’s life. Rather we see snapshots of a very specific person. Because of its honesty and specificity (Lady Bird’s idiosyncrasies are at once wholly unique and beautifully universal), we, as an audience, are allowed to experience a part of a life. One that, having seen, we are more for having done so.

 

It's a fairly common anti-structure in indie-darling movies; you can see it done well in Drinking Buddies and Lost in Translation. Boyhood doesn't know what it's trying to capture besides “uh, time passes, I guess” and so fails to capture anything. Meanwhile Monsters sets its journey against an alien presence to heighten its exploration of loneliness and presentation of the sublime. Ken Liu’s short story “The Paper Menagerie” captures a difficult relationship. And it's what Death Stranding’s trailer does so well.

 

I will campaign for narrative until the sky falls. But stories can be about moments too. The key is to make the audience feel something. As a reader/viewer/player I engage in fiction not because I want to sit idly by as something happens, but because I want to be taken on a journey. I want to feel something, sorrow or joy, something funny or something epic. Lady Bird didn't need a Big Epic Conclusion to make me feel like a teenage girl. And Death Stranding doesn't need flashy gameplay to present the sublime in a fracking video game trailer.