jalsonmi said:
One of the most intellectual passages ever told in entertainment? You've got to be kidding me. I knew someone was goingto play the philosophical card, actually. And I can tell you, as an avid reader of philosohpy and literary theory, specifcally being a big believer in deconstrcution a la Jacques Derrida, the postmodern philosophy of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard (especially the latter's constrcution of the simulacrum) and the poststructural reading of history pioneared by Michelle Foucault, I can, I believe with good authority, say that the philosophy found in MGS is for the most part drivel. It is, as I've said before, philosophy for dummies, an oversimplified and crude look at simulacra and the forces that control our lives. It's good that it's trying to explore such things, but it does it fairly piss-poorly, with absurd dialogue, reams of exposition and a need to hammer it over the viewer's head. It may stand on it's own in a textbook, in that textbooks also oversimplify and don't do a great job with subtlety and nuance.
If you want real intellectualism in entertainment (which is a pursuit that I pretty much devote my life too--as a film student I strive as a goal for my own films to have a subtle intellectual aspect to all of my film), here's a list, off the otp of my head:
1. The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick - A ripping, spooky what if? tale that contains a deep exploration of the nature of reality and perception, years before poststructuralsim made such things basic to its philosophy.
2. Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson - Post-structural theory in novel form.
3. Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson (won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004) - The nature of god and faith, and what it means to forgive, all without being dogmatic about religion at all.
4. The Big Lebowski and The Man Who Wasn't There, directed by Joel Coen - Deep explorations of pastiche - the way filmic tropes from the past can communicate to a contemporary audience and to each other.
5. Shadow of the Colossus - A Shintoist parable in game form. The dual nature of good and evil in all actions, the way you can do horrible things without regard for consequence, and how sacrifice can redeem that selfishness.
I could go on, touching on Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Midnight's Children by Salmon Rushdie, the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Bunuel and David Cronenberg (Cronenberg wrote the script for Videodrome immediately after reading Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media), and others, but the point is there are many, many examples of intellectualism in entertainment that are done better than that conversation in MGS2.
I live Metal Gear games. I like them a lot, actually. But well plotted, full of good dialogue, or the pinacle of intellectualism in entertainment they are not.
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