SURRENDERING TO THE DEATH STRANDING (Patreon)

Amalie: “I know you have questions, but can you save them for after?” 

Oh, I have questions, Amalie. A whole lot of them. 

That’s because Death Stranding might be one of the most baffling, jaw-dropping, obtuse, and frequently misguided narrative experiences I’ve ever come across. And at the same time, it might be one of the most weirdly hypnotic, gorgeous, unnerving, and ultimately moving narrative experiences I’ve had, too. In normal circumstances, I might be more at a loss to explain the duality of this experience. But we know better by now. That’s because Hideo Kojima has been heading toward this for a long, long time…

Who? What!?

Okay, I’ll be clear from the top that I am not an expert on the lore of Mr. Kojima, but in case you’re unfamiliar, he’s a legendary game designer who had a 30-year career working for Konami, where he made the (in)famous Metal Gear games (and a bunch of others, too). But that series rose to prominence not just because of its constantly evolving, brain-stretching combat, but by lending a certain kind of flowery soulfulness to the war-like proceedings, asking such highfalutin questions like, “Can love bloom on the battlefield?” But this hyper-seriousness is often mixed with what can only be called a puerile sense of humor and wanton engagement in titillation. It will also suddenly diverge into some of the strangest plot developments and / or otherworldly imagery you’ve ever seen. The real key to this all functioning is that Kojima’s games are unapologetic about literally all of it. Once at a loss to explain his career to a colleague, I went with: “the video game industry doesn’t have a lot of auteurs, but if you wanted to find the Georges Méliès, the Michael Bay, and the David Lynch, they’d all be the same guy.”

Then about five years ago, Kojima got into a big Konami kerfuffle, where they either seemed to want to trap him in an unending hell of having to make more Metal Gears / take him off the project completely (I can’t say, there’s mostly a lot of rumor). All we know is the rift finally got to the point where Kojima left and then went on to make his own production company, where he would be making his own game for Sony and the PS4. This instantly prompted a lot of speculation, mostly around a central question: without the Konami handcuffs, what would an unchained Kojima actually look like? 

Well, now we have an answer: it would look like Death Stranding.

So what is Death Stranding?

I’m not sure if I know how to describe it better or worse after playing the entire game. But let’s go with this very simple single sentence: You’re a post-apocalyptic mail courier named Sam Porter Bridges- though that name changes, as do a lot of others, and you have to deliver packages with your little awkward hiking suit, but it’s a world where if people die they become tar ghosts called BTs who come to attack you and to fight them off you have to pee on them or, if you’re lucky, throw poop grenades and the whole time you have this little baby called a BB that’s attached to a metal umbilical cord and it warns you of the tar ghosts because it is part ghost or something, but you can only see the BTs if you’re standing still, but they come at you if you are breathing, so you have to hold your breath a lot and evade them and oh wait — your big mission is given to you by your President Mother, and Guillermo del Toro is there but its not his voice, and there’s also dude named Die Hardman who is wearing a clearly evil mask, and they are asking you to rebuild America by collecting materials and building bridges and delivering people’s pizza and / or top quality underwear to their bunkers for these post-apocalyptic facebook likes, but what you’re REALLY just trying to hook people up with this magic wi-fi that makes you float when you install it, but even then you still mostly interact with people as holograms, and oh, the rain is really dangerous because it makes you old and deteriorates your packages, and oh, when you get tired you fuel yourself using brand sponsored Monster Energy Drinks (™)and when you go to the bathroom to poop it shows a real ad for Norman Reedus motorcycle reality show, but then Mads Mikkelsen shows up with his well-coordinated skeleton platoon and by the way, when you die you go to a mysterious heaven beach and get reborn with this little animation where you go down his mouth and inside your stomach that I think is a little baby version of yourself(?) that gives you a little thumbs up or shows you its butt.

I swear I made none of that up. 

I’m also barely scratching the surface. Because it gets much, much weirder. 

So it’s like an avant garde art piece?

Sometimes. Mostly it’s just throwing endless scientific jargon at you to explain each and every single thing I just told you about.

So is this the most confusing lore ever created?

Yes. Next question.

Wait, there has to be more to that, right?

Yes. There is. But it brings us square into the endless duality that will drive much of the discussion of this game. So let’s start with one side of your question.

Okay, is this the most exposition-heavy game you’ve ever played?

 Yes. I cannot overstate how much this game is people explaining things. Like 60% of the game is exposition. Half the time it is things that did not need further explanation. The other half of the time it is things I actually needed explanation of, but that I did not understand because of said jargon. We are talking like Zybourne Clock level convolution. The treatment of science in this game is word salad.

Do you feel like any of this has to do with issues of language translation?

I don’t know, but I also don’t feel like that’s a fair question. The first reason is because I think making assumptions about anyone’s second language skills skews xenophobic. The second is to understand that I think Kojima plays more coy than he lets on when it comes to his English skills. The third thing is to understand the reflexivity of language in any conditions. Think about it like this: when an English speaker picks foreign words and is like “oh it means hope in X language,” we hopefully realize how much we don’t actually understand the specificity of word choice in that language and its context. But often they don’t and it doesn’t stop them (particularly when it comes to tattoos, seemingly). Which is all part of why word-play can feel so difficult to execute in another language. Here, we’re just seeing the flip-side of that. There’s lots of lines, like a character is named Fragile and they say “I’m Fragile, but I’m not that fragile” and pronounce them differently, but I don’t think they understand the reason that it gets pronounced differently is regional not based meaning, or hey, who knows. Point is, there’s a ton of clunky stuff like that. But Kojima is also well intentioned with his thematic meanings that there’s this whole capacity to roll with it, anyway. But we’ll come back to why we roll along in a second.

The real problem is when the heavy exposition instincts is that it interrupts the larger dramatic structure. Because there’s times where the explanations severely undercut the dramatic tension of moments to just explain shit in a way that deflates everything. I mean, quick spoiler alert, but this game doesn’t just have one, but SEVEN Psycho-esque epilogues that try to explain things that totally don’t need explanation and it makes things so outrageously anti-climactic. Death Stranding just constantly feels this need to clarify story points and the science of what’s occurring, but it does such a bad, repetitive, over-long job with so much of it that you can see them making it so much worse for themselves by trying to fix it.

So it’s like this Homer Simpson clip? 

Yes. But here’s the weirdest thing. You expect this constant explanation to have this terrible effect (and sometimes it does like in the aforementioned dramatic context), but other times you can sort of just let it wash over you. It becomes this vague, silly jargon that you can just surrender to. It’s weird to say you just “get it rhythm with” something you don’t understand. But you totally do.

Okay, so it’s like THIS Homer Simpson clip?

Yes.

So you’re saying this whole game is meaningless?

Oh no, not at all! In fact, it’s weirdly powerful. But this is where we really come to the duality aspect of Kojima’s style. Because as much as it gets caught up in nonsense sci-lore, he has also crafted a future world with Nostradamus-like clarity, which some have called “the most 2020 game possible” even though it was released at the end of 2019. To wit, there’s been a pandemic and everyone’s trapped in their bunkers. It puts incredible importance on people delivering necessary goods, while highlighting the unfair dangers they face, the capacity they have to keep things going, even the way they get called heroes, but often highlighting the emptiness of those words from many who are unwillingness to fix the system (including those leaders who actively seek to hasten the apocalypse). It even highlights the importance of getting good wi-fi with regards to the haves / have nots / those who treat such technological connections with fear (cuz da gubermint). Yes, in terms of these specifics it feels downright prophetic. But it’s about more than literal plotting. 

I’ve often argued that the best “art films” aren’t just some cerebral game of connect the dots, but the ones that engage in the visceral realm. Luckily, Kojima has always had this element to his work, too. Not just with endless, beautiful poetic imagery he likes to streak over battles, but he’s also produced the most haunting things I’ve seen in a video game (if you were ever lucky enough to play his Silent Hills demo… my god). Likewise, Death Stranding has so many images burned into my brain, from the first attempted burial scene, to someone’s forced march with the mask in the rain, to Mads’ otherworldly introduction through the water. But the feelings go deeper than these moments. They’re soaked into every inch of the game. For as you traverse the world (and you do spend most of your time hiking), you are surrounded by loneliness and vast spans of distance. Everything you see taps into the ever creeping the nature of death and decay. Meanwhile, all rebirth feels violent and mechanical. This collective solitude of what you face feels so haunting…

Haunting Solitude? Wait, this is a video game, right? Is it fun to play?

Sometimes! Mostly because there’s a lot of frustration, as I feel like I was constantly trying to figure out what the rules were. Again, the game often tries to explain things to you, but it’s in those big exposition-heavy sequences, so you not only miss small, critical things, but it’s sort of hard to figure out how to make them work in the actual game play. Then right when I would figure them out, I feel like there would be some strange wrinkle that upended it, especially in the various boss fights where I’m like, “wait are these people ghosts? Why can I hit them now? WHAT ARE THE RULES!?!?!” Which would have made it feel like an unending game of Calvinball. 

Also, I was left to question “the point” of a lot of the game. Like when it comes to the core mechanic of stealth and avoiding the BT areas, I realized how often it was easier to run purposely into them, trigger the giant tar pool, run away, then just go through the area once they’ve all been cleared after the escape. This all makes for a very slippery notion when it comes to “playing the game” of the game, but luckily, there’s another thing that keeps you grounded.

That would be the rhythm of the game loop. It’s this strange thing that happens when you get into this good headspace where you are delivering these regular delivery runs, ideally to build up your connections and unlock new leveled equipment, but mostly, just because you’re in the rhythm. You carefully pack your backpack, taking exactly what you think you’ll need. You set your course and hike through dangerous areas. You get past them. And then you know you’re in this safe space when the songs by Low Roar come in to gently greet your ears. Then you see this stark and beautiful environment take space around you as you come into the cities and get people what they need. There’s something so uniquely satisfying about this process, no matter how many times I did it.

I’ll put it like this, even though I beat the game? I’ve been going back for unfinished missions and getting all the random bunkers connected. I rarely do this sort of thing anymore, but it actually felt important. And most of all? I wanted to build the highway in the big middle map. Because yes, there is this big highway you can build that takes A TON of resources, but it’s so outrageously helpful to the game because it lets you get from base to base really, really quickly and avoid danger. It’s literally the most helpful thing in the entire game. To boot, you sort of do this as a collective group with other players and all help one another (but I’m also unsure of those rules) . Basically I became so obsessed with finishing this giant highway that I spent an extra week after this game finishing it. There is no achievement for doing so. No special pat on the back. I just thought it was something that could really help other players. So while beating Sekiro was a personal thing, this felt more important than anything else I did in a video game this year??? Simply because it was helpful to others.

Huh, what you described sounds kind of beautiful, no?

That’s the whole thing, I’m hard pressed to think of a game that has so straddled the line between beautiful and haunting, at least in a way that feels aesthetically different from other work I’ve seen. There’s this way Kojima always sees these vast, spanning cities of empty space and sterile mechanisms, almost as if it imagines an unpopulated Tokyo, full of ghosts. It’s a world on the edge of both nothing and only itself. The landscape is not lush with vegetation, but frozen in a state of eruption, probably due to the Icelandic landscape that inspired the look of the setting. Everything designed in Death Stranding looks utilitarian, yet fanciful, bulky, yet somehow sleek. All part of the endless duality that sums up Kojima.

Okay if there’s always duality or whatever, can I ask you about some of the game’s most baffling moments?

Sure.

What was up with that Mario and Princess “Beach” moment?

This is sort of a perfect Kojima moment. It’s this groan-inducing pun that doesn’t even really make sense as a pun, but it’s also a legit comment on the nature of video games and needing a princess goal, but also a direct comment on one character’s chasing of another, but it’s fully committing to the silliness of the joke and showing them running with abject seriousness.

Okay, why is the game also obsessed with “London Bridge is Falling Down”?

Ah yes, the old nursery rhyme. The basic gist is that it’s about entropy. London Bridge is always in a state of disrepair. We could project into the lyrics of the other verses like, “Who has stole my watch and chain?” or “London Bridge is broken down” or “Off to prison you must go!” But really the big question is, who is the “my fair lady” in this case? Heck, is it a reference to the musical? It would seem to be a reference to Amalie, but she’s also the one singing it, so it’s kind of hard to unpack. Like a lot of things in Kojima games, it strikes as one of those gut level art decisions that he could have thought “very little” about or “infinitely much” about. We don’t know and we can’t tell. So we simply have to take it at that baseline theme of “entropy” and maybe that’s it. 

So it’s a half-there metaphor? Is Kojima following the rules of good semiotics or not?

I hate saying “sort of,” but sometimes he’s crystal clear with semiotic intention and sometimes it’s completely inscrutable. Trust me, I wish I could write some 12,000 word breakdown of each and every detail of Death Stranding and how it builds up to this thoroughly coherent take, but that’s not Kojima’s bag. A third of the game is in tune to semiotics for all the aforementioned reasons. Another third is mixed and wonky, but just vibing. And another third of it is something I look at and have to use one of these things: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But the whole thing is I don’t think Kojima cares much for the difference. That’s just how he comes at his art, for better or worse. 

The important thing is that I’ve accepted this approach and wouldn’t have him change for anything. There is no point to making him “better” because it changes the fundamental joy of what he is. Because without that devil-may-care instinct? There are no princess and the “beach” moments. The flaw is both human and humane. The flaw is what connects.

So is there an artist in any genre that both confirms and yet eviscerates the idea of “the death of the author” more like Hideo Kojima?

Thanks for bringing us into an extraordinarily complex discussion! First up, death of the author can be summed up thusly: “how much do you (or should you) be incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author?” This also includes anything the author says outside of the text. Basically it’s part of how we gauge what is intentional versus not intentional versus what is meant on a deeper level versus whether you should include the author at all and just work off the text. I’m not sure I’m helping with that complicated explanation. The real point is moot. When it comes to this discussion, we tend to cherry pick when we think really matters, but it’s harder to do with Kojima for obvious reasons.

So can we talk about that ending? 

Which one?

I dunno, all of them?

 Spoilers again from here on out, but getting into the end of the game highlights yet another duality: the single most troubling choice and also the single best choice of the game. 

After a lot of rigamarole, we somehow reach the climax, which is a really just a big discussion between Sam and Amalie on her beach and it sort of treats her as being an extinction entity like it’s a reveal even though it’s already revealed? (The game is often bad at tracking where the audience is at with this stuff) But it all somehow gets to that moving, soaring choice about Sam fighting to live and you realize, “oh shit this is all a big suicide metaphor, isn’t it?” And when that clicks so many other things click, too (including the loss of “Lou” and why there’s nothing to do with that old gun now). Right at the moment Sam make his attempt, the gun clicks empty and it cuts to black... Oof, it's this really powerful moment that made my hair stand on edge.

But then came the “end credits.” 

Where the opening credits were this powerful, hypnotic experience, this final one is six monologues of Amalie re-explaining EVERYTHING you’ve seen, done over this seeming mini-game where you have to run around and tire out before they start the credits again. It was completely infuriating. I genuinely couldn’t believe how long they kept going. It was all of Kojima’s worst instincts piling onto each other in a way that felt downright spiteful??? And worse, it was verbalizing all the beautiful points of that last scene in a much less effective way. Gah.

Then you finally get to the “after credits” sequences that you (hopefully) knew were coming and you go to this inauguration and are the “unsung hero” of connecting the world, but then Del Toro shows up and up and asks, “hey do you want to to know how we got you out!?” And you’re like “NO, NO MORE EXPLANATION, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE NO,” but he gives you the seventh Psycho monologue anyway. I’ll be honest, at this point I was losing my mind and feeling like Kojima had maybe ruined his entire game… Then something happened. 

What starts with an out of nowhere, deeply-impassioned Die Hardman speech on the tragedy of a choice he had to make, cascades into this final delivery where you have to take your BB to the crematorium. Which is… heavy. And as you start getting closer, the music swells and you make this choice to stop it… and you go into a final sequence where you come to grips with the thing you cannot do. It morphs into one last memory being revealed, the sequence that has been cryptically teased (close to a hundred times depending on how often you stayed in a private room?) and we finally see the Mads escape with BB sequence play out.

But it’s not “information” being told. It’s emotional and gut-wrenching. Particularly because Mads’ performance is incredible (my god, this lullaby). And even though you can guess pretty early on that the BB is really “Sam as a baby” and that it was you in those memories and this was your dad, the logic doesn’t quite matter because it’s something vague enough to just be on that wavelength. More importantly, because there’s a bigger point, which is the choice to breath life into “yourself.” The ensuing scenes of Sam attempting CPR are harrowing. And the relief that comes with BB’s resuscitation wash over me with genuine emotion, not part of some feigned fake out. And as it gets to that final shot of Sam coming out with tears in his eyes… I had tears in mine.

Final cut to black… Wow.

A lot of times you’ll see narratives attempt a thematic exploration of “life and death,” but it will just rely on the iconography (like the tar and beached whales stuff) without really getting into the meat of the thing, where the questions are always more focused: how does the character feel about life and death? Why? How are they navigating and coming to terms with it? How does this all work together? And while Death Stranding so often tries to explain some magic metaphysical mumbo jumbo, it always seems to try and say something meaningful in these moments of transcendence… which means it comes down to the intention of what is being said… which therefore leads to probably the single most important question…

Is Death Stranding’s heart in the right place?

This matters more than anything when it comes to semi-successful narrative execution (and even beautifully executed ones) because it always gets to the heart of “why.” 

After years in the Metal Gear world, Kojima didn’t want to make another story about violence. The world was already coming apart well enough on its own. It doesn’t need more guns. So he made a story about someone trying to connect people. A game about bridging gaps of loneliness and loss that can feel incomprehensible. A game that wants you to take care of a child and soothe it when it all becomes too much (and in an extension of the metaphor, a game that wants you to know how to hold yourself, too). A game where the core mechanics are about building shelters, resting, and stretching, even telling you there is, “no shame in taking a break from time to time!” A game that reminds you that life is fragile and that creating more death in a world that’s full of it is a sin. A game that reminds us that saving each other is a path towards collective salvation. A game that meditates on the choice to have a "kids" in a dying world. A game that makes incredible use of actors who give this story their everything to it, from Mads’ lullaby, to Fragile’s first terse goodbye, to Mama’s story of being trapped in the rubble, to the sheer exhaustion of everything that Norman Reedus must have gone through. They all surrendered to both the absurdity and sincerity of the vision and thus helped bring it to life without outstanding verve.

Because remember, surrendering isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s not giving in or giving up. It’s acceptance. And we know how much this hopeful intent seems to matter to Kojima, even if we know little of the author himself. We know almost nothing about his family. We know he has long loved movies. We also know he lost his own father at age 13. I can’t speak to any of that, but from the game, I can see how he feels about the walls of grief that surround us. I see how he feels about the inky black pools of grief that drag us toward not wanting to be alive, down toward all the things that make us want to give up.

What we really need is that other kind of emotional surrender. Because you’ll note that we don’t see Sam actually cry until those final moments. When he’s standing there, holding Lou / Louise, looking to the sun. It’s not the literal resuscitation that brings this emotional release. It’s the moments that came before, the surrendering to the fact that he DOES have an attachment here. It’s surrendering to the fact that we are human, that we are alive and need to experience the true, terrifying reality of letting our emotions come to fruition. Like I’ve learned so many times in life, crying only comes when we just let ourselves let go. But it is an act of healing, the single most needed "surrendering" that our bodies can often afford to us. And it is there that I’m struck with the only duality of Death Stranding that really matters.

Grief is a prison.

But grieving is freedom.

<3HULK