Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole holds his nose and delves into the endless culture war
The idea of a ‘culture war’ sounds peculiarly modern, familiar to most of us from the battles between Republicans and Democrats in the US over issues such as abortion rights or gay marriage, and becoming a more global affair of late with the rise of the so-called ‘alt-right’ and so-called ‘identity politics’. Yet the phrase appears in English as early as 1879, in a history of Germany and Prussia in Napoleon’s time. There, it is said that a ‘culture war’ (from the German kulturkampf) arose in 1819, when university professors became the object of suspicion and censorship.
Indeed, though we have not always had the term for it, culture war has been a part of civilised society from the very beginning. In both its senses: first, that political debates focus on ‘cultural’ values (and when have they not?), and second, that cultural objects – novels, plays, and so forth – become interventions in political debates themselves.
It may then be a sign of videogames’ mainstream toleration as ( some kind of) artistic medium that big releases in this medium, too, can now be greeted as culturewar salvos. So it has happened with two much-anticipated autumn titles that have been interpreted as representing opposing factions on the cultural battleground.
The rebooted Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, for one, goes all-out with a version of modern reality in which Vladimir Putin is essentially what Hitler is to games of the Second-World-War era. It is set in a country called “Urzikstan”, which sounds like a poor joke of lazy xenophobia but is evidently supposed to be a mixture of Ukraine and Syria. Your band of covert operatives is, of course, helping the nationalist faction against evil Russian militias.
Most spectacularly, this Call Of Duty has taken a notorious historical episode of mass killing by American forces and blamed its fictional version on the Russians. At the end of the first Gulf War, in February 1991, a long column of Iraqi forces retreating from Kuwait was first halted by American Air Force cluster bombs, and then annihilated over two days of what General Colin Powell described as “wanton killing”. It later emerged that the convoy contained civilians as well as surrendering soldiers: the bloody episode became known as the Highway of Death.
Twenty-eight years later, the new Modern Warfare tells the player in a mission briefing of “‘Tariq Almawt’, the highway of death” — but this highway of death, crucially, has different perpetrators. “The Russians bombed it during the invasion,” a character intones, “killing the people trying to escape”.
Now, you may say that this is just a fictional excuse for the player to spend some entertaining minutes trying to snipe tanks, and of course it is. But it’s something else, too: if you are going to use the phrase ‘highway of death’, you simply can’t be unaware that it refers to a specific act by American forces, easily within living memory, that many people regard as a horrific war crime. A cynical observer might even suppose this latest play in the Russia-baiting series (remember the controversy over Modern Warfare 2’ s No Russian mission, in which Russian terrorists massacre civilians in an airport?) to have been deliberate, resulting as it has in publicity-generating mainstream news stories in both Russia (where Activision will not be selling the game) and the west.
Compared to which, Hideo Kojima’s latest work of baffling artistry might seem determinedly anti-political: a surreal version of the post-apocalyptic mail-delivery epic The Postman (starring Kevin Costner), with added creepy babies: it’s a bleak walking simulator with a Shenmue- influenced attitude to finding transcendence in the boring trudge of repetitive work. And yet Kojima – an auteur by any aesthetic standards – has said that even this game is deeply political. “President Trump right now is building a wall,” Kojima told the BBC. “Then you have Brexit, where the UK is trying to leave the EU, and it feels like there are lots of walls and people thinking only about themselves in the world. In Death Stranding we’re using bridges to represent connection.” Even this game dramatises a stance on political values, and is intended to do so.
Where, then, is the line between art and politics to be drawn? Well, one cynical soldier remarks in Modern Warfare: “You draw the line wherever you need it.” As in war, so in art. But the very act drawing of such lines is inevitably an explicit battle in the culture war we all live through.
Two much-anticipated autumn titles have been interpreted as representing opposing factions on the cultural battleground
Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.o is now available from Amazon. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net