What MGS4 Taught Me About War

I am tired of war. The relentless crump and shudder of explosions, and the whineskip- puff of bullets that miss me by inches; my aching lower back; the cynical global machinations of the military-industrial complex. Sometimes I have to find a quiet place to sit and rest just to calm my shaken mind. War is hell.

On the other hand, I’m really stoked about increasing my tally so far of 162 headshots, and I’ve just acquired a new bolt-on gadget for my beloved M4 custom. Plus, for all the ‘war economy’ talk (a lurid sci-fi version of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine), there’s nothing more relaxing than going shopping between missions. For guns, I’m as happy and docile a consumer as anyone else. And I can’t help but look forward to trying out my new toys on the next unsuspecting mercenary. War is great!

Cut to another story of ageing muscle: John Rambo’s body, in Stallone’s most recent film, is eerily similar to that of Old Snake: decades of violence become inscribed into the parchment skin, a palimpsest of creases, veins and tendons. Rambo IV contains perhaps the most viscerally naturalistic depictions yet accomplished in cinema of what happens when human beings are shot with rifles or ripped apart by grenades. It reminds us that a dedication to unsparingly exact representations of violence can have a serious moral purpose. Look, it says: this is what war, that thing that politicians talk about so easily, really involves.

But the same tension is at work here as in Metal Gear Solid 4: the director is telling us that war is hell, but he is also showing us how exciting it is. In MGS4, war is the toy itself, by design. And when Rambo transforms from sulky boat-punter into the implacable killing machine of old, the audience shivers in pleasure even as it winces at the close-ups of bullets ripping flesh.

The problem is as old as Homer, who thrills us with the beauty of his battle scenes even as he laments the waste of life. Perhaps only visual art can avoid it: a single shocking image, like Picasso’s Guernica, does not titillate. But art with a temporal dimension – literature, movies, videogames – implies continuity. In films and books you need heroes, or at least witnesses who survive to tell the tale. So the depicted war can’t be so bad that everyone just dies for no reason. (If all of Saving Private Ryan were like the first 20 minutes, with no one surviving all the way through, it would be unwatchable.) And even if a videogame abjured character continuity, it would still, by its very structure in time, inculcate notions of progression and the satisfaction of victory. It would still have to be, in this sense, fun.

Perhaps Clint Eastwood’s diptych, Flags Of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, has come closest among recent war movies in avoiding the satisfactions of combat. But I doubt that a videogame in which you spent most of your time cowering in tunnels and finally committed seppuku by grenade would trouble the charts. And even in Eastwood’s films, there is glamour and beauty: for one thing, the actors are all really really goodlooking (as Derek Zoolander would say).

Do contemporary media ‘glamorise’ violence? Well, they can’t help it. You cannot make an artificial mimesis of violence without aestheticising it. Could we even suppose that taking something revolting like violence and transforming it into something glamorous, something beautiful and amusing, constitutes a kind of triumph? Hideo Kojima’s games are, in a sense, all about this question, pummelling it with scattershot Verhoevenesque satire, arch reminders to the player that videogames are essentially a waste of time, and the rather lovely absurdity that you can win a campaign using only anaesthetic bullets.

A more troubling approach, for me, came a couple of years ago in Shadow Of The Colossus. My enchantment at the kinetic challenge and haunting beauty of the game was quickly replaced by a sense of waste and guilt at my serial murdering of these dumb giants. I suspected that this was perhaps going to turn out to be the point, but I couldn’t bear to carry on. For me, the aesthetic pleasures weren’t enough to outweigh the powerful regret the game so astonishingly succeeded in engendering. If a game of violence is so effective in its message of anti-violence that you actually stop playing, does that mean it was a success or a failure?

Compared to that, MGS4, with its cramming of the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder into a segmented psyche-bar (arguably a far more damning frivolity than its diarrhoea, porn mags and monkeys), is just a cartoon. Perhaps a wargame can never really be anti-war. In a way that’s a relief, I think, as I smoke thoughtfully along with Snake, waiting for the next act.