Michael Thomsen's recent Kill Screen
article
on what he calls "the nonsense art" of the games of Suda
Goichi makes a few points that I'd been mulling over for a while.
Firstly, his assertion that writers and critics see every piece of
art they encounter as a fundamentally interpretable and cohesive.
This is true enough; non-fiction writers can be seen as interpreters,
of sorts, in that they take information either not available to the
masses or not easily discernible by them, and distill it into a more
digestible format, lest we all comb over patents
all day. This may or may not aid us when examining art, since, as
Thomsen puts it, "Irreducibility is a defining characteristic of
surrealism," so when something doesn't discernibly make sense,
game critics might push against it.
I love the absurd, the surreal, when
put to good use -- but I can't completely fall in line with Thomsen's
way of thinking. At times, I think Thomsen gives Suda a little too
much credit, doing what he calls out others for doing:
overinterpreting minor details. He
calls the simplistic movement in Killer7 an
"elegant and obnoxious decision"
that is part of Grasshopper games' tendency to be "hostile
to interpretive idealization in every aspect"
when really, Suda himself, in an
article Thomsen linked to, has explained his use of the
simplified control scheme:
“In many action games you control
the character directly. But there are many people who find that too
difficult. They don’t know how to hold the controller, or how to
use the analogue stick. I decided not to use that complicated control
scheme."
If you
take that quote at face value, any artistic statement made by Killer7's
simplified movement is an unintentional byproduct. Later on, Thomsen
interprets the overbearing sexuality of Lollipop Chainsaw
"as a bizarre ventilation of guilt, acknowledging how lurid
and disfiguring these clichés must always be—men depicting
themselves as monsters who need defeating at the hands of their own
cultural creation," He then makes the point of dismissing any interpretation of any
of Suda's games to make his real point: that Suda's games are surreal
art because they're fragments and small correlations of meaning that
don't cohere, and don't do so on purpose, and that it's "trap
surrealism lays for us," that trap being a pile of non-sequitors
rife with potential meaning that maybe, just maybe, connect into a
grander statement. Of course, the grand joke here is that by
Thomsen's logic, his own interpretation is itself meaningless (though
to be fair, he kind of makes that point himself).
His argument isn't that all
interpretations of all forms of art are meaningless, just that Suda
creates his works in such a way as to defy easy interpretations. This
might be true of his earlier titles, but not of his later ones. Shadows
of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw, both of which were
more collaborative efforts and whose surrealism is more aesthetic
than intrinsic, for example, both seem less surreal than absurd,
using ludicrous setups as backdrops while they engage in more
traditional gameplay (another point Thomsen makes). They're not as
weird as we're used to from Suda (a case I've made before),
and to me seem easily interpretable as the exploitation-inspired fare
they appear to be at first glance. They're crazy for the sake of
being crazy, and while not every piece of art needs layers of meaning
to work, the nonsense Thomsen identifies in them as isn't there as
statement; it's there because elephant motorcycles and giant cock
guns sound cool and edgy, and for the purposes of creating a game
that's fun to play, that's good enough. I don't think there's an
intentional surrealism -- it's just a byproduct here.
And really,
the term "Nonsense art"
seems like a dismissive pejorative, especially considering that
Thomsen correlates Suda's games with surrealist art, which I'd argue
might be a more appropriate title for the article. He's not
chastising Suda for making games that don't follow a neat string of
logic -- he's reveling in their absurdity. And I do too, going as far
as considering Suda one of, if not the, best designers in the patently
odd.
Thomsen actually leaves out some of
Suda's earlier works in his analysis, which would've actually aided his arguement. Flower, Sun, and Rain, for example, fits nicely within
the surrealist label. But FSR's surrealism doesn't just come
from its Groundhog Day-esque
time-loop premise, or its fever dream of a story. Playing the game
itself is often frustrating and weird, which I've argued
before is an intentional design decision. And all you need to see
of Michigan: Report From Hell to conclude that it's surreal
apart from its title is this clip.
These titles are surreal to their core, whereas Damned and
Lollipop are only superficially so. You may be in punk-rock
hell or fighting zombies in an arcade, but you're doing the same
shooting and slashing you've done in so many other games. Suda's
history seems to heading towards something resembling an avant-garde
director losing his patented touch over the course of becoming more
mainstream, though he's thankfully not there yet.
I do think that Suda's earlier works,
like FSR and Killer7,
cohere into a grander statement. FSR
stands as one of the few early parodies of game design, and makes the
point about the intrinsic absurdity of videogames while laughing
right along. Killer7 is
the closest thing video games have to a David Lynch film. But they're
full of practicalities, like the decision to make movement simplified
because anything else was too complex for Suda, who simply wanted
players to see his vision without worrying about spatial awareness.
They're likely also nonsensical at first not because of some artistic
intent, but because of some fumbling in presentation (see this
link for a great interpretation of Killer7's plot). So while
Thomsen's point of some interpretations often reading too much into
nothing does work, it's not for the reason he thinks, and even if
it's self-admitted, he makes the same mistake. It's not nonsense,
even if that can be a good thing -- it just takes a little more work
to interpret. And while interpretations can completely miss the mark,
if enough of them overlap, there's probably something there. Of
course, the final say is up to Suda.
Now, if Grasshopper can bring The
Silver Case over to the States, we may have this conversation again
some time.
Addendum (Spoilers): Thomsen makes a
factual error when he says that Harman is not a definable character,
and that his multiple personalities "eliminates any conception
of self that we might have for him." It's actually Garcian
Smith/Emir Parkreiner who assimilates the Killer7, including an
avatar of Harman Smith. This is important because the game
does make an effort of fleshing out the game's real main character
(Emir), so he does have a sense of self. Even Harman, as complicated
a character as he is, does have a backstory. He is not simply a
surrealist trick used to rock the player off-base.
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