Cinephilia as Characterization in Deadly Premonition

Now that the dust has settled a bit on Deadly Premonition it's interesting that by most accounts it's actually a good game. The bad reviews it got early last year seemed to fade completely by year's end, leaving only warm and fuzzy feelings form the increasingly vocal minority - both inside the games industry and out - who loved it. SWERY's GDC talk - and even just the fact that he was given a slot at GDC at all - seemed to disperse any lingering sense that the good points of his game were an accident.

Given everything that's already been said about Deadly Premonition I'm not sure what to add, though there is one thing I feel hasn't quite been articulated to my satisfaction. The copious film references in the game, appearing almost exclusively in optional monologues by Agent York (mostly while driving) and dealing primarily with 80s pop-cinema, are a lot more than just a developer speaking through his character about his love of movies. By the end of the game, and especially in light of the final plot-twist involving York's real identity, these references reveal themselves to be an important element of characterization and story.

The only other game I know of that uses film references as extensively, or at least the only one that's coming to mind, probably because it's also Japanese and exhibits a similar sense of exotic fascination with American pop-culture, is - surprise, surprise - Metal Gear. If we put the two games side-by-side however, it becomes clear Deadly Premonition has much better reasons, on the whole, for its characters to be so be mentioning movies all the time.

When Snake in MGS1 makes a joke about his real name, David, being the same as the protagonist of 2001: A Space Odyssey it feels like Kojima baldly projecting his cinephelia onto a character. It's not believable that Snake, a hardened special forces badass who lives in Alaska (and doesn't even seem to own a television) would be quite so familiar with 2001. Likewise in MGS2 Snake's choice of "Pliskin" as an alias, and Raiden's instant understanding of why he chose it, suggests a world where everyone is just as familiar with John Carpenter's 80s output as a film nerd like Kojima.

Kojima's best rationalization for expressing cinephelia through his characters is in MGS3, where nearly all of them are filtered through the sweet bookish girl who saves your game, Para-Medic. Her extensive knowledge of American movies from the 40s through the early 60s is of course a winking nod to Kojima's cinephilia, but it also functions quite well as an extended piece of characterization. Because she's the only real movie fan in the story the movie conversations feel more like part of the fictional world than quasi-diegetic asides.

It becomes a running gag in MGS3 that Big Boss doesn't watch movies at all, which makes his conversations with Para-Medic, who tries to sell him on a different movie every time you save your game, a rather nice window into both characters' personalities. Movie conversations go in all sorts of places, like the time she mentions how the 1953 film version of War of the Worlds wasn't as scary as the Orson Welles radio play, which she remembers from being a kid in the late 30s, which causes her to tell the story of what her family did the night of the mass panic following the broadcast. This is characterization, backstory, and a film history lesson all at once.

MGS3 doesn't do much with this aside from use it to make Para-Medic, a supposedly minor character, surprisingly endearing and fleshed out. Though these film references arguably serve a thematic function, they don't serve a literal function in the overall story. In Deadly Premonition however they do, and quite cleverly.

York's endless monologues about movies are rather similar to Para-Medic's conversations with Big Boss, only the decade under examination is the 80s not the 50s and the conversation is now one-sided, since York is speaking to "Zach", a mysterious unseen person who cannot answer back. Deadly Premonition's brilliant central conceit of course is that you, the player, are Zach, and that the person York is speaking to the whole game is really just his other personality, the one who handles things like shooting and driving while he handles the talking.

This much is clear after the first few hours... or is it? Although any reasonably astute player will pick up on the psychosis-as-interface metaphor early, it is impossible to predict the curve they throw into this concept at the very end. York, not Zach, is the made-up personality. Zach is the real him, the person he was before a traumatic childhood experience causes him to invent a second personality, whom he increasingly imagined as an unflappable, wise-cracking know-it-all. York is the Tyler Durden of the story, the impossibly capable and confident person Zach wished he could be / needed to be / became to survive his trauma.

York's unflappable nature is rather hilarious. Nothing, not even someone mutating into a Dragonball freak before his eyes, seems to phase him. ("Hm. No Olympics for you, George.") Throughout the game this just seems like the behavior of a typical (though untypically witty and well-acted) smart-ass hero. In the end, however, we realize York's comical unflappableness is very much a function of his status as a defense mechanism for Zach's shattered psyche, a psyche that also happens to house an encyclopedia of 80s pop-cinema. In a lot of ways he is very much like a character from those movies, handling increasingly absurd situations with the cool aplomb of Remo Williams or Christopher Reeve's Superman, but still maintaining the knowing smirk of a child who knows it's all just pretend, that it's "only a movie".

The Sublime Joy of Flight

Playing Pilotwings Resort this past week has reminded me why I love flying games so much... at least when they get out of my way and let me fly. I never liked flight sims, an unwieldy genre that's more about dials and switches than the joy of aviation. The flying games I love are the ones that strip away all that techno-fetishistic noise and just let you feel how amazing it is to actually fly.

My first real encounter with this sort of game was the original Pilotwings on the SNES, and the new Pilotwings for the 3DS is a similarly pleasant love letter to aviation aimed at a mainstream audience. Both games have extremely simplified flight controls, minimal UI, and breezy music that creates a deliberate mood. In the 3DS version you can't even control the throttle. The game controls it for you, and you can only temporarily boost or break.

Pilotwings Resort  is quite nice, but it also leaves me craving for a deeper, more textured exploration of humankind's romantic obsession with flight. To date the only game that has really satisfied this craving was Sky Odyssey, a little known PS2 launch title that everyone seems to have forgotten, but which, to me, represents one of the best, most complete expressions of Man versus Nature in a video game.

Sky Odyssey is one of the most exciting games I've ever played - a superb action game. It also has a oddly spiritual dimension, a thick sense of human smallness at the edge of an expansive Unknown. It is not, in this sense, unlike two of my other favorite games: Demon's Souls and Shadow of the Colossus, both games that achieve a phenomenal sense of scale and use it to evoke the sublime. It's no coincidence that Colossus and Odyssey share the same composer, Ko Otani, whose music in both games creates the same mixture of awe, desperation, nostalgia, and terror.

The first time I got this feeling is when I saw The Right Stuff as a kid. There is a scene in that movie when a (heavily mythologized) Chuck Yeager, played by playwrite Sam Shepherd, steals a conventional aircraft and tries to fly it into outer space. In spite of its hokiness (mostly thanks to Bill Conti, who also scored Rocky) this scene does manage to express something unspoken about humanity's (not just America's, as the movie seems to suggest) inherent, sub-rational desire to break free of Earthy limits.

The shit you do in Sky Odyssey all feels similarly reckless, extravagant, and irrationally irresistible. Each level is about trying to survive horribly exciting things, like having to perform a daring mid-air refueling from a speeding train as it's going through a tunnel. Or flying your plane through an underground cave as it's collapsing. Or attempting to slingshot your plane over a mountain twice the height of Everast by dropping your fuel at the summit and then coasting on air down the other side. Or catching air currents to shoot your plane through the heart of the lightning storm. Or, to top it all off, flying right into the eye of a fucking hurricane.

The developers of Sky Odyssey do everything in their power to try and convince you that nothing could be more exciting than flying. They throw every conceivable exciting thing that could possible happen to a plane at you, and the earnestness of their romantic vision is so desperate it's almost heartbreaking. They even concoct an elaborate framing narrative to justify their whimsy, something about the last unexplored island on Earth in the twilight of aviation's golden age, when (at least in the minds of Sky Odyssey's makers) there were still some legitimate mysteries left on this planet... and aviators - those amazing men in their flying machines - were the lone explorers of the last frontier.

This brand of nostalgia feels a lot like Hayao Miyazaki, in that it is a Japanese evocation of a romantic 1930/40s centered around flight technology of the era. Porco Rosso is probably the most direct expression of this in Miyzaki's canon, showing a particular love of the pre-war era, an exotic fascination with the West, and a transcendental sense - present in all his work, but most directly expressed in this film - of what it means to fly. I am thinking of the moment when, after being separated from his friends in battle, the protagonist encounters them again above the clouds only to realize they didn't survive after all, but are in fact spirits ascending - still in their planes - to join the rest of the dead in heaven.

Aviation as a concept holds the promise of transcendence, of somehow being able to reach heaven through creative use of technology. Those who know me know I like Kubrick, so take this as you will, but I can't help but think "Sky Odyssey" might be a riff on "Space Odyssey". 2001 is a movie about God made by an atheist. The desire for spiritual transcendence, to commune with forces we don't understand, seems to be a hard-wired human need. Secular attempts to grapple with this, I suppose because of my own atheism, feel a lot more interesting than religious ones... perhaps because religious mythologies are "known", whereas scientific rejection of them lands spiritualism squarely back in the realm of the unknown.

What does flying mean to us? In Pilotwings Resort (and in most conventional flight sims, I'd wager) it's a fun way to relax, but in Sky Odyssey it can be a serious encounter with our own existence. There are times, somewhere in the clouds, when the you seem to leave Earth entirely and enter another world, a world of unfamiliar colors and lights. What is that place?