You Are Literally A Metaphor

I recently played Donut County, in which the player uses an app to send out a sinkhole which, bit by bit, consumes everything in your world. It consumes food, sport, leisure, your free time, your friends, local businesses - and the more it consumes, the bigger and hungrier it gets. And it doesn’t matter what the things were on the outside - how important or significant or beloved they were - because inside the hole everything is garbage. It turns out the hole was created and sent out by raccoons who love garbage and want to make everything garbage.

Then, late in the game, confronted with why they would do this, a character just says “that’s capitalism!” and I think well fuck, there goes my video.

Now to be fair, Donut County is specifically about Silicone Valley Gig-Economy capitalism, but nonetheless it called itself out, and I am suddenly reminded of all the pieces of media I have loved but been unable to write about in any length, because the whole piece in its entirety is literally a metaphor. Pieces of media that first got me interested in media analysis because they were like puzzles with satisfying, simple answers, but now that I write about media professionally, I would be unable to formulate a full essay talking about them.

What would I write about John Carpenter’s They Live? What would I write about Snowpiercer?

“The train is society, thanks for watching don’t forget to subscribe”
Okay, probably more accurately:
“The train is society, and the bit where Chris Evans figures out their guns are empty fucking rules, thanks for watching please if you can chuck me a couple of dollars on Patreon”

To be clear, though, I think this is only the case for media that is literally a metaphor that I also really enjoyed.

By contrast, something like It Follows which I did not like at all would be very easy to write about, because I would talk about how the metaphor of the sexually transmitted haunting is communicated in an unclear way that doesn’t make it easy to tell whether the obvious reading of just being about STDs is what the film was going for or if it wanted to examine something deeper about the spread of trauma through relationships. If it did want to do that, why didn’t they defeat the ghost by doing something like talking to it - like they do in The Babadook, another horror film which is literally a metaphor. I could talk about how the unclear messaging of the film creates a probably unintended shaming of young people for having sex altogether.

With media I like, though, it feels a lot harder to get into it. 

I could write a longer piece about Ben Wheatley’s film High-Rise, but all I would really be able to do would be to explain the relevant history that it is a metaphor for - the winter of discontent and Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power - and then translate what happens in the film into its allegorical history.

A very very famous piece that set the precedent for this is of course Animal Farm, George Orwell’s classic about some animals on a farm who overthrow the humans, but then become cruel oppressors like the humans nonetheless. As you probably know, it is a historical allegory for the rise of the USSR.

Tonnes of kids movies with animals standing in for races, are basically following in Animal Farm’s footsteps. For example, Zootopia, American Tail, Ringing Bell - okay, maybe just watch Jack Saint’s video on this, because there are some problems with this particular trend.

Getting back to games, though: A friend sent me this tweet, and I have to say it’s extremely on the money - “Oh I get it, it’s a metaphor for depression” is practically its own genre at this point.

For example, I’ve been playing a lot of Celeste recently, the game where you confront a negative, constantly doubting version of yourself that comes out of a mirror and then learn to accept them so you can progress together. It’s easily my favourite 2018 game about climbing a mountain.

My favourite 2017 game about climbing a mountain, Getting Over It (With Bennett Foddy) tackles the metaphor even more directly, as the author of the game, Bennett Foddy, directly talks to you about how the game works, why it exists, what he wanted to create in making it, what inspired him to do so, but more than anything, through the use of quotations about failure and success, and sad songs that trigger when you fail, Foddy reminds you that this game is primarily just about Getting Over It.

Gris, my favourite 2019 game about climbing a mountain, starts with you in place at the top, everything calm and peaceful before your whole world crumbles around you and you are plunged to the ground as all colour deserts you. Through five stages, you regain the colour in your world and then your character walks off into the light, but you never reach the end of the journey, because that’s the point. It was about the stages of dealing with grief, and how that’s a journey you will always be on, even as you reach acceptance.

Maybe there will always be a hot new indie game that uses a mountain as literally a metaphor. If there is, I want to dub this Enc’s law of Big Hill: there will always be a mountain, and it will always be a metaphor.

In 2014, the best mountain game was Mountain. In Mountain you don’t climb, navigate, or overcome the mountain, you are the mountain. Or maybe you just see the mountain. Maybe the mountain is life? Maybe the mountain is nothing?

Mountain isn’t literally a metaphor like the media I focused on here because it was entirely supposed to be open to the interpretation of the player - so in one way, the game totally shirks the pattern and is the perfect opposite of all these mountain games. You don’t climb the mountain, you are the mountain. It isn’t one big allegory for mental health and struggle, it just is. In another way though, Mountain fits in perfectly, because one pretty clear interpretation I’ve seen people arrive at is that helplessness is the point. You can’t do anything. The mountain just exists, and time passes, and all you can do is watch.