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Last night we saw ten minutes of Death Stranding 2 On The Beach, and I feel I know less about it now than when I started. At the very least, I have a lot more questions. What’s the deal with the puppet? What’s the deal with the baby? What’s the deal with the electric guitar that shoots lightning? What’s the deal with George Miller? And so on. I don’t really ‘get’ Kojima as an artist, but I’m very glad he exists in the way he does.
Kojima should be perfect for me. I love movies as much as I love video games, especially ones that embrace the strange meta styles of storytelling like Sunset Boulevard, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, or Synecdoche, New York. I appreciate that Kojima has an affection for movies that runs deeper than many modern video games and their quest for assimilation. Kojima doesn’t want to be accepted by movies because he thinks they have a more respectable prestige or as a ticket to bigger opportunities. He is genuinely moved by cinema. Kojima makes games like he’s Diego Calva tearing up at the montage in Babylon’s final scene.
However, I’ve never felt this connection with Kojima when playing his games. The fact we both enjoy Barbarella does not make his games any more immersive to me. I need to go back and replay some of his earlier works (backlogs are always too long and time too short), but from what I’ve experienced of Kojima’s games I fail to see what the fuss is about. I will need to make it through Death Stranding before the sequel, because Death Stranding 2 looks so compelling that I will need to be part of it even if I don’t quite understand it, but it’s not the Kojima name alone that sells me. It’s what that name means.
Yes, the industry has a major problem with auteur worship and tends to put the work of the many down to the hands of the few when dealing with personalities like Kojima or Druckmann. I also think giving him so much time at The Game Awards when denying the winners a chance to speak is emblematic of this problem. But while the way we talk about these people needs to change, the work of Kojima should not.
Death Stranding 2’s trailer embraces the lyrical strangeness of storytelling. It doesn’t set itself up as a plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s not a narrative. Plenty of games do linear storytelling well, and a few even do nonlinear storytelling too. Death Stranding doesn’t seem to be teasing any of that. No lines at all. Events. Emotions. Vibes. Something deeper than ‘do you understand what is going on?’, it asks you ‘do you feel it?’.
That means wild ideas that don’t seem to fit together. Maybe they never will. We don’t need to make sense of every corner of the story, because maybe Kojima doesn’t. Maybe this is just how he feels, whatever that means. Wes Anderson, another famously idiosyncratic artist, addresses this idea in his latest feature Asteroid City. A story within a movie of a play within a play, one of the characters (playing an actor playing a character) tells the director “I don’t understand the play”, to which the director (of the play within the show within the movie) replies, “Just keep telling the story”.
Please God Let Jordan Peele Direct The Death Stranding Movie
His directorial sensibilities are a perfect match for the arthouse vibe Kojima wants
When we’re telling a story that reflects our own emotions, be they fears or grief or hope, they don’t need to be plots. They don’t need to go from in medias res with a driving action to work towards a third act denouement in the hero’s journey. You don’t need to understand it. You just need to keep telling the story.
None of this should be above criticism. There is a tendency to dismiss any word against Kojima as you simply not getting it. I even did this to myself, right in the opening paragraph. It feels as though Kojima has reached a platform where his biggest fans won’t tolerate critique because to critique Kojima is simply to fail to understand him.
Once Death Stranding 2 is out, I’m sure it will garner a mixed bag of worthy criticism. But at this stage, when all we have is the unbridled wildness of the ideas, I can’t help but support it. With games becoming safer and audiences themselves rejecting bold storytelling for safe blandness, Kojima introducing a stop-motion puppet that sits on your shoulder feels like exactly the sort of thing we need.
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