The Decline of Anti-Americanism in Metal Gear

The Metal Gear series used to have a strong streak of anti-Americanism running through it, back when its political details retained their connection with reality. MGS4, with its slippery political vagueness, backpedaled away from this, and Peace Walker, while in certain ways the most politically specific game in the series, honors and expands the particular points MGS4 backpedaled on.

Series director Hideo Kojima and his current writer, Shuyo Murata, keep changing their minds as to what Big Boss, the supposed villain of the series, represents... especially in terms of his motivation for creating the city-state Outer Heaven, which was the setting of Metal Gear 1 and has since become the ideological centerpiece of the series. MGS4, which purported to add closure to the main series storyline, revealed that Big Boss created Outer Heaven as a staging ground to overthrow the U.S., and that what he really wanted was to oust his old ally, Major Zero, who had assumed control of the shadow group which dictated U.S. policy, a group formerly known as 'The Philosophers' but rechristened by Zero as 'The Patriots'.

MGS4 took a political conflict and turned it into a personal one, between Big Boss and his old commanding officer. This contradicted earlier storylines, which had maintained (since Metal Gear 2 in 1990) that Big Boss wanted to establish a “warrior state” where soldiers would be free of nations. What exactly this meant — and what the exact moral code of this state was — was always ambiguous, which to me was one of the big strengths of the series, especially after MGS3.

Looking back it was probably just wishful thinking, but I very much liked the idea that MGS3 — which took the series back in time to the 1960s and cast a young Big Boss as the protagonist — was an invitation to reassess the morality of all the previous games, to consider that perhaps Big Boss was not a villain. To me this seemed a logical step from the strident anti-Americanism of MGS2, the series installment that introduced The Patriots.

If the lesson of MGS2 is that the U.S. government are a bunch of liars any lover of freedom ought to be fighting… then it seemed logical for MGS3 to suggest that the “terrorist” arch-nemesis of the earlier games might not be so bad after all. The fact that the middle was missing — the 30 year span where Big Boss turned from hero to terrorist — gave the player leverage to read him in different ways. You had to piece together an incomplete picture of who Big Boss was, and this is what made him interesting. Coming right out and saying “this is what he believed” diminishes him.

MGS4 did come out and say these things, and in a way I didn’t like at all (though it had certain interesting aspects). Peace Walker did it again, but in a way I dislike less. What’s strange about Peace Walker — though I suppose it has become typical of how Kojima/Murata approach the series — is how it bends over backwards to foreshadow past games while at the same time ignoring all their finer plot points. The "warrior state" motivation is back in Peace Walker, though robbed of some of its ambiguity when Kojima/Murata attempt to graft it onto some of MGS4's more absurd retcons.

When the girl Paz betrays you at the end, she spouts some nonsense about how her true boss, Zero of course, plans to some day control human civilization with super computers. This is a reference to the absurd plot of MGS4, in which you discover The Patriots' control of America (and by extension the world) is entirely computer-automated. But she never mentions The Patriots. Instead she claims to work from some group called Cipher, who apparently want Big Boss's apolitical warrior-state to serve as their global police force — the one-world military for their one-world government. This is kind of an interesting notion, that The Patriots’ political anti-nationalism and Big Boss’s military anti-nationalism are in fact mirror images of each other.

The problem with this idea is that The Patriots were a lot more interesting — that is to say, politically resonant with our times — when they were not anti-nationalist but nationalist, which is what they were in MGS2 and 3. The MGS2 pitch document, translated and released online a few years ago, makes this rather clear:

The evil in MGS2 is the American government. However, this does not refer to Americans in general, nor to any particular persons, but to the festering discharge that has built-up within the democratic state of America over the years. The intention is not to defame any race, state or ethnicity, but rather to look at the ‘monster’ that the country’s political structure has created. It is an intangible entity yet at the same time a massive menace to the world.

As originally conceived The Patriots were a collective metaphor for those at the highest tier of the American power structure who function outside the democratic process, resembling what journalist Bill Moyers once called "The Secret Government". His so-entitled 1987 report centered around the Iran-Contra scandal, but discussed how it was only the latest example of our government's true contempt for democracy, tracing it back to our coup of Iran's democratically elected prime minister in 1953.

By the time we get to Peace Walker The Patriots are a very different entity, much closer to the Illuminati than the Straussian demagoges of MGS2/3. This may be the reason why the game doesn’t even call them The Patriots anymore but Cipher, because anything American about them has been downplayed to the point of non-existence.

It's obvious that Kojima is back-pedaling away from the anti-Americanism of MGS2 (which was developed before 9/11 but released in its immediate aftermath) more and more with each new game, grafting new conspiracy theories onto the Metal Gear plotline that dilute MGS2's subversive implications. So instead of a group of young idealists in the CIA (The Philosophers) who, through the moral corruption of the Cold War, slowly mutate into a self-righteous fascist coalition (The Patriots)... we get some goofy Master Plan perpetrated by a single maniac (Zero) to control the world through the magic of computers.

Kojima/Murata’s decision in MGS4 to claim that The Patriots were created/controlled by Major Zero (as opposed to being a natural byproduct of America's failing democracy) was bizarre. Major Zero was a minor character, introduced in MGS3, who utterly lacked the tyrannical mania MGS4 (and subsequently Peace Walker) paint him as having. It is this absence of characterization that, I guess, causes Kojima and Murata to regard him as an abstract concept, harping on his name — "zero" — as if it were some sort of cosmic principle that can explain… I dunno… everything.

Not only are such explanations dumb, they gloss over any real world politics the series once had. Making everything abstract removes the story from any recognizable political context, a strategy omnipresent in MGS4. Unlike the previous games nothing is named. We only hear of "regimes" and "countries" in geography never more specific than "The Middle East" or "South America".

MGS4's calculated evasiveness on anything politically meaningful was a massive cop-out after the build-up of MGS2 and MGS3. Both those games were exercises in world-building, in creating and extending a fictional universe, and connecting that universe to real world history in interesting ways. They asked more questions than they answered, which fans found maddening but was also one of the main reasons they functioned so well as a mythology.

Questions like ‘who are The Patriots?’ and ‘was Big Boss good or evil?’ are only interesting if they aren’t answered, and the same goes for the supernatural elements that permeated the series pre-MGS4. Ghosts, vampires, psychics, mysterious organizations, moral ambiguity—all these things used to be part of the same, hard-to-pin-down universe of Metal Gear, when Kojima and his previous co-writer, Tomokazu Fukushima, seemed more interested in befuddling expectations than meeting them.

I find it suspicious that the Metal Gear universe took a turn for the worse when Fukushima mysteriously vanished after MGS3. Fukushima was not only the writer of MGS1, MGS2, and MGS3 (which may explain why they remain somewhat consistent) but he also wrote Metal Gear Ghost Babel, which is even more anti-American than MGS2 in some respects (Its plot is a modern take on the Babel myth, with the U.S. in the role of God, promoting ethnic chaos as insurance against being dethroned by a unified Third World.) which makes it doubly suspicious that the anti-Americanism of the main series took a nosedive at precisely at the moment Fukushima left.

Metal Gear used to be interesting for a lot of reasons. For its excellent mechanics design, emergent gameplay, and clever self-reflexive moments. However, this isn't what made it my favorite series for most of the 00s. I liked MGS1, but I didn't really love the series until MGS2... when it began to transform itself into a counter-mythology of the American 20th Century. MGS3 completed this process, introducing The Philosophers (because that's what all "patriots" are to begin with), and in the process created an origin myth for the modern American Empire... a romantic, pop-art expression of how the U.S. became the sleeping monster that awoke on September 11th 2001.

These sentiments are not gone from the series, just muddled by MGS4's stupid retcons. Peace Walker picks up the pieces and manages to repurpose them with some success, painting a Machiavellian picture of the CIA running amok in 1970s Costa Rica. South American bureau chief Coldman is a character right out of Dr. Strangelove or the Iran-Contra scandal: corrupt to the point of parody, and believing in political Darwinism so deeply he has it tattooed on his scalp. He is one of Bill Moyer's secret patriots if there ever was one... even if Kojima refuses to use the term anymore.

More telling is Peace Walker's sympathetic portrayal of the Communist Sandinistas, going so far as to compare Big Boss to Augusto Sandino himself, the movement's namesake who battled against the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua. And this is to say nothing of the game's worship of Che Guevara, whom Kojima/Murata view as a hero, evoking Jean-Paul Satre's proclamation of him as "the most complete human being of our age", and beating the player over the head with the idea that Big Boss is Che reincarnated.

Sandino and Guevara are only the latest in a long line of famous historical figures Big Boss has been compared to over the course of the Metal Gear series. MGS1, which pre-dates 9/11 by four years, featured an Iraqi Kurd who was convinced Big Boss was the reincarnation of Saladin, the Muslim leader who fended off the West during the Crusades. And even MGS4, spineless as it was, featured Morricone's "Here's to You" in the closing credits, drawing a connection between Big Boss (who is killed the moment before the credits roll, by The Patriots) and Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the famous anarchists executed by the U.S. in the 1920s.

The only thing that links these people is their status as symbols of defiance against Western/American power. That isn't to say that they all can be equated morally, or that they even wanted the same thing, but the fact that we as players are constantly asked to read Big Boss through the historical prism they form is no accident.

In a market culture where military video games increasingly function as propaganda Metal Gear is still a fucking kick in the face... provided you can parse its dense nexus of political ideas. No other piece of popular entertainment at its level of budget and presentation disbelieves in America as much as it does, nor achieves its matter-of-fact pessimism about free-will. No other pop-cultural artifact occupies the space it does. It is the only anti-establishment military blockbuster, an Adam Curtis documentary masquerading as a Michael Bay explosion-fest.

At the end of Peace Walker, when Big Boss inaugurates Outer Heaven, he describes his warrior state as being a political and military tool for those who "have no other recourse". His ronin army offers first world might to third world causes, threatening America's super-power status and - most importantly - undermining its image as the savior of the modern world, forged in a 20th century past it created and sold to the world through its movies.