Postmodernism was not a concept that I was entirely comfortable with until sometime last year. I'd had high school teachers briefly touch on the subject, but it was never truly made clear until I played a video game called Metal Gear Solid 3.

While there are certainly some that would argue the relevance of video games as an art form, that is another topic for another day. What cannot be denied, however are the postmodern influences present in MGS3. The Metal Gear Solid franchise is a curious one. They are games in which you watch cutscenes (pre-scripted action or dialogue-focused scenes similar to a scene from a movie) almost as much as you play the game. One of the more obvious postmodern elements present is the sometimes self-referential, fourth wall breaking humor found in the series. For instance, there is a single moment in the third game where the protagonist (codename Naked Snake) looks directly at the "camera" and prompts the player to take action with a subtle head nod and wink. Also, even though the third game is a prequel to MGS1 and MGS2, Naked Snake (whose two clones eventually become the protagonist and antagonist of MGS1) meets a character who bears an uncanny resemblance to a character that Naked's clone befriends 30 years later. The two have an odd moment together, both almost recognizing the other, while simultaneously acknowledging that they have never met. What is interesting is that these events are at once a parody of the genre (spy fiction) and part of a veritable epic. I found the Yiddish copy of Chandler's novel on Meyer's desk to be very much analogous to the type of postmodern humor found in the Metal Gear Solid series.

While the fourth wall breaking humor may be one of the more obvious postmodern elements found in the series, MGS3 contains a slightly altered version of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the events that followed. Reading "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" and picking up on its subtle references to things like Manchuria instantly reminded me of this game. In the game, President's Kennedy's negotiations with Nikita Khrushchev to remove the US's Jupiter and Thor missiles from Turkey was simply a story to tell the American people. In this reality, those missiles were obsolete anyway. The Russians really wanted a recent defector, a weapons designer named Sokolov, back in the USSR to finish development on a weapon called the "Shagohod", which is a nuclear equipped tank capable of launching from almost any terrain. If it sounds strange, you don't know the half of it, as the story soon complicates when Brezhnev's forces engage in a power struggle with Khrushchev's crumbling regime. Although I am greatly selling the game short, I feel I must stop here. As my girlfriend and friends know, I can wax philosophic about Metal Gear for hours straight, but I'll save you the hassle. I will say this however; whoever doubts that videogames can be a meaningful, moving, and utterly breathtaking medium simply needs to play MGS3. I have a strong feeling that they'll understand.

This video clip should explain things a little better than I am able to:

Novel to Film adaptations

When a work is going to be translated into a film, there is a great risk associated with the translation. Of course, many works of fiction get turned into great films, but one could argue that a majority of these films end up as disappointing. The reasons for this are numerous, but I think that the main reason these films end up poorly is that a certain essence is lost when the screenwriter condenses the work into a ninety minute chunk that average Joe Moviegoer can stand. Also, and more pertinent to our class discussions, there is a double standard in place concerning what kind of racial interactions are acceptable to the public. This was the case in the film version of Devil in a Blue Dress.

Even though the novel stresses the immense sexual tension between Daphne and Easy, there is little to no indication of this in the film. This of course means that the rather explicitly detailed sex scene between the two characters in the novel is nowhere to be found. It is embarrassing to think that the general public is simply not ready to view a consensual sex-act between a black man and a white woman. Interestingly enough, a sex scene which is only briefly covered in the novel is rather explicitly and gratuitously shown in the film. The difference? The scene that made it into the film depicted sex between two black people.

When I think of good fiction-to-film adaptations I think of movies like "A Clockwork Orange", "The Shining", "Misery", and "The Shawshank Redemption". Interestingly enough several of these were adapted from Stephen King stories. His works have made some horrendously bad films (I'm looking at you, "Langoliers") but something about his work can be translated successfully to the big screen. However, Stanley Kubrick took great liberties with King's novel when he directed "The Shining" and I believe it made all the difference in the world. As I said previously, it can be difficult to shrink down a story to work as a ninety minute movie. None of these good adaptations that I've listed are that. They are longer than average and I believe that their high quality can be attributed to this.

In case you are wondering, Stephen King's novel had gigantic hedge animals that came alive to keep Wendy and Danny from leaving the hotel. Kubrick replaced this with the now famous hedge maze sequence. I think we can all agree which version was better suited to the silver screen.