| Liminal Space |

by Pier-re Lova-ti

What if video games could help us understand other fields of artistic creation? To have a revealing effect on the nature of the images that surround us, with the power to create communication between media, to be more transversal than anyone else. In each episode, Révélateur proposes to cross-reference a video game with a work from a foreign discipline (whether theatrical, cinematographic or literary), resulting in an unexpected encounter and equally surprising outcomes.

and today,

Revelator.

episode one

A cross-analysis of Playtime and Death Stranding

Both Death Stranding (video game, 2019) and Playtime (feature film, 1967) open with a look at the landscape: the massive, glazed mountains of the Paris suburbs and the natural buildings of Iceland, whose cold silhouettes are underlined by the gaseous sky. A way of leading the spectator-player into the interior of their stories. A composition of vertical architectures, so that in media res, we begin our immersion in the proposed fiction.

From the very next shot(s), it’s humanity that emerges, the presence of bodies on these delimited spaces: the scorched lands of DS and the mirrored, artificial surfaces of PT.

The staging aims to create spontaneity: to see how life takes hold of these spaces. In both cases, this shows us how people relate to one another – how life takes its course. And there are many similarities, to say the least, such as the relationship of scale on the screen, which makes these works a singular experience of space, where the latter dominates humans in every way, and particularly in its complexity.

In the case of Death Stranding, it all begins with a primal scene of humanity, summoning up a set of beliefs about our sapient nature. The virtually mute on-screen character (who lacks the knowledge of language) enters a cave. A cavern, the lantern of our perception of the world and the original myth of man living in hiding to survive (the truncated, non-archeological truth of the Neanderthals). The rupestral also uses handprints to suggest humanity, as does the fear of a hidden wild beast, a play on the off-screen and silence, breath (as in Jurassic Park (1993) – “its vision is based on movement”), right up to a meal scene, the result of (albeit summary) gathering, which closes the introduction. All these gestures, which call on the imaginary of prehistory, are decisive in the Death Stranding experience, a way before the game of putting the foundations of the world back in place, before explaining the context of the chaos that inhabits the wastelands, and understanding the lifestyles of these now Homoludens (as Kojima likes to say). In fact, this situation will never occur again in the game – it’s a single, inaugural cave. In this return to the essential, to what defined our ancestors, we don’t leave the cabin without evoking Adam and Eve, already a symbol of union, and our mortal condition in the face of the eternal moors.

Playtime, meanwhile, begins with a meticulous, sharp image teeming with detail. Jacques Tati opens the experience of his film, in the cloistered gray of transitional spaces – the way in which we, as spectators, will act in front of the screen. In the midst of the placarded typography, the boldness and italics of the posters, we hear a mumbled narration, which, if not fully heard, allows us to compose a soundscape of movement. Throughout the film, we grasp the essential message of the conversations, in the manner of the transitional spaces of life – hallway conversation – from which we often retain only the primary informational meaning without all the coating. That which is applied to the action requested, for example: understanding a direction, about what to do. And that’s what Playtime mostly produces: stage/table spaces that fill up and empty out, which the spectator must observe and listen to rigorously. In particular, these actors and extras (NPCs even) must interact with the furniture and partitions, in the camera angles chosen by Tati, in actions of displacement, often requiring understanding of the environmental enigma given by the scene: orientation in a hall by signs and the presence of a guide (well in pulpit), an enigmatic waiting room decorated with paintings (almost a point and click) or bourgeois salons lit like theater scenes. So much so that the film’s title reveals itself to the viewer through its meticulous device: Playtime, a time for play. Developing an active posture for the spectator, who is invited to continually scan the screens with his or her gaze, looking for particularities in the décor, listening for scattered noises, anticipating the moving action to come – an FMV (full motion video) game that doesn’t quite live up to its name. You’ll even leave the film quite exhausted, so engrossed is it – yes, it’s a game.

There’s also an unspoken link here between the cinema window and the supermarket window, which induces all those random behaviors and trials of wandering provoked by the scenes. As in a store’s shelves, this orientation of the gaze passes through design in the broadest sense of the term (shapes, advertising, signage and industrial objects), in an obsession with interlocking, with position; testimony to the framework of the action’s reality (in the case of PT, the suburban expansion of the 1960s, and for DS, the technological anticipation of the world to come, what our urbanism would be like in a few decades’ time). In both cases, Kojima and Tati use imagery that comes from radical design (mostly from the Helvetian school), Swiss-German inspirations such as Dieter Rams (designer and project manager at Braun) or from the archipelago, the SONY Walkman of the Shōwa era (of which Hideo Kojima is enamored, see MGSV). Thirty years later, this functionalist school of thought was joined by the purity of the Japanese speculative bubble, both characterized by the purity of surfaces and a sobriety of form and function reduced to the bare essentials.

“A fridge

A nice scooter

An atomixer

And Dunlopillo

A stove

With a glass oven

Lots of cutlery

And cake shovels

A tourniquette

For making vinaigrette

A beautiful aerator

To get rid of odors

Heating sheets

A waffle gun

A plane for two

And we’ll be happy”

Both Tati’s film and Kojima’s game are fictions-documentaries of their respective eras. Like the love affairs in Boris Vian’s La Complainte du progrès (1959), where objects become words whispered in our ears. Reflections on social interaction in the midst of the bazaar created by our modes of production, the acceleration of the world and the automation of the gaze – in the midst of increasingly complex and invasive infrastructures that take precedence over our free gestures. We sit in a world beyond common sense. These themes were also addressed in previous works, such as Tati’s Mon oncle (1958) and Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015). This also produces burlesque narratives in DS and PT, funny through a whole lot of misunderstandings, where the protagonists are played with, many gag scenes, where these bloody bodies get lost amidst the coldness of the scenery, move forward and backward, coordinate or are parasitized. They’re jostled to the point of falling over, spinning their wheels, using and abusing misunderstandings.

In a way, these cultural works symbolize our entry into the age of the compartment (always a reminder of the archaeological periods: the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages). Life in a Playtime box, in its natural state or framed in color. A place for modularity in these reproductions of offices, like perfectly aligned cartons of goods, giving a perspective of poultry raised in batteries. This is precisely Death Stranding’s strong concept, that of having us embody a character captive to his condition (enclosed in packaging?), but in the form of an Uncle Hulot Sam from the future. A person edified as a promotion of the USA, who has the task of carrying the nation, reconnecting lives to one another, with the real burden of the world on his shoulders: the weight of the goods he must give to others (which we are told are essential for the entire future). The player is thus physically at the bottom of the ladder of a pyramid system. A workforce that has to deliver goods after the end of time has already passed, in a post-Playtime world where you play alone.

Like PT’s mumbled narration, Death Stranding plays on informational overload. It’s overflowing with every message we receive, whether it’s data on our physical state, the race we’ve completed, or other evaluations that are accumulating on the state of our merchandise and our load distribution. This pile of information that we form virtually, as well as physically behind our backs, is becoming ever more vertical. And what’s worse, these accumulations never become natural for the player; we just end up getting used to their presence and no longer question them. A quantity that, from the very start of the game, is purely indigestible and will remain so, that we will zap and scroll over and over again, no longer paying attention to this chaos, accepting an ever-increasing workload under increasingly difficult conditions. This overwhelming presence of information goes hand in hand with the hero’s mastery of his body, all the sediment of which is used to advance the adventure – everything is recovered, composted, transformed. Except that the bare world we pass through on our escapades is quickly overtaken by our destructive habits, leading us to abandon all manner of objects, goods and vehicles as situations arise. In the face of obstacles, we pollute. It’s as if we were both the bearers of hope, and the first step towards another end of the world, already a nemesis through our strategy of small steps.

Like PT, DS uses the idea of a prison place as a spatial rhetoric, notably through Sam’s capsule room, which is a place of eternal return to oneself, where he spends the night, nurses himself back to health, regains his purity through the shower (leaving behind the endurance of the terrain, its stigmata). This prison dwelling, or warm belly of a whale (if we refer to the architecture of refuges), are empty places which, although all similar, are thought of as antechambers to the outside scene (the open world), places in which we don’t linger. There’s no one to greet us, just a few holograms at most. The player is invited to validate his or her quest on arrival, thank the sponsors, hand over the merchandise, and then is told to go to sleep so that the journey can continue the next day. This empty room is introduced at the very beginning of the experience. We’re handcuffed, an explicit signature to the game’s contract. We’ve become a commodity (like the objectified BB we carry, so often described as defective). If DS pays a great deal of attention to products (objects as well as people), where each case or box is always beautifully decorated with an adhesive tape already attached to a package (the pleasure of giving and the joy of receiving), it’s because it represents, in a way, the last profession in the world: that of deliveryman. Against all odds, the capitalist model has succeeded in keeping us captive through the gesture of self-giving. It privatizes our hands! A like-for-like metamorphosis, turning us into objects.

And perhaps this revelation comes from contact with emptiness. For unlike the first corridors Sam walks through in the head office of the company that employs him, where he can observe life as it circulates, like Tati’s Monsieur Hulot, he will never again have the opportunity to come across anyone physically during the adventure. Holograms, ghosts and a few colleagues all the same, but never again in that innocuous way of bumping into people wandering down a corridor or a street. All this is replaced by a total absence of crowds. Our only contact is with artificial goods that we transport to transit and logistical sites, far removed from social life. If Hulot remains in a sense free in PT, Sam in DS, with his pallet truck of the future, is no longer. He has symbolically left his human condition, belonging to the void of plains and megastructures alike, another category of homo ludens, the result of the experience of a homo faber (Henri Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice, 1907), who manipulates bodies other than himself, in order to pursue this endless quest for novelty.

If the varnish cracks, Sam is weighed down by loneliness. Partytime’s grand finale concludes with the long restaurant sequence that occupies the second half of the film. An accumulation of twists and turns that show what goes on behind the scenes, back and forth between the reception room and the backstage area, where more and more people accumulate on screen, until the bath overflows, and the artifices of the world cease to conceal the workings of the service, the kitchens and the staff who bustle about conducting the spectacle of social life. The set even collapses, like a dike breaking, and the viewer gloats over the ultimate viewing experience imposed by the film, a frame agitated by dancing bodies. And yet, Tati succeeds in this maneuver until the place is disengaged from the bourgeoisie, in a coordinated sweep of the return to the checkroom, until the end of a bender, the sloppy slow dance and the lit cigarettes.

Playtime lasts a day, 24 hours uninterrupted, as if played in real time, over two full hours that end as they began, with a return to traffic, to the terminals of Paris-Orly airport. Death Stranding brings its story to a close, with its expected revelations, but also closes with a loop, that of retracing one’s steps, of having traveled all the way back. A strange carousel closes PT, and a farewell gesture by a glazier rubbing the glass, where the same clouds and buildings from the introduction are reflected – how the end of a dream. The game also promises hands, repeating the very first ascent mission to a crematorium – in a finale that is moving in many ways. In its final shot, Sam and Louise (the child carried by our hero), both freed from their prisons, leave their conditions as products, freeing themselves from their utilitarian roles in reborn society. In a final pact, they accept the dark future of the world, its inevitable downfall, but politically reappropriate the use of their hands, with a warm squeeze, a final clap.