Posted in: Movies, Video Games | Tagged: call of duty, entertainment, games, kevin spacey

Call Of Spacey's Introductory Lessons in Fascism – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

Published Mon, 10 Nov 2014 14:30:09 -0600

Adi Tantimedh writes,

Another year, another Call of Duty game. This year it's Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, set in the future and starring Kevin Spacey as Jonathan Irons, the head of the a Private Military Corporation that drives the story, providing you the player with all kinds of fancy gear with which to kill people when you get sent out to fight wars.

While many Call of Duty players ignore the story campaigns altogether and just buy it for the multiplayer, the actual stories themselves over the years have always been interesting repositories of subtexts from the zeitgeist. Even since Call of Duty: Modern Warfare took the setting of the games from World War II to the present day, the campaign stories have drawn on the post-911 mood of the War on Terror and US interventionism. I always thought the Modern Warfare Trilogy was inherently fascist in the way it justified the way its main soldier heroes went from country to country with impunity to shoot swarthy, brown-skinned Johnny Foreigner and Russians all in the name of protecting the US from terrorism, and with its pompous quotes from philosophers about the nobility of war and sacrifice in between chapters. The trilogy coincided with the Bush years while the rah-rah triumphalist attitude of interventionism was in full swing, and it seems fitting that the third and final part of the trilogy came out in 2011, after Bush left office. After that, the series went back to the more comforting and clear-cut morality of the Cold War with Call of Duty: Black Ops, again making the Russians the villains. Call of Duty: Black ops II actually had a more subversive, questioning edge in the way it shows that the villain is a victim and product of American interventionism, and shows him as a karmic payback. The story also calls to attention the evil dictators America formed allegiances with during the Cold War, people like Jonas Savimbi and Manuel Noriega, which actually fight alongside the player during the campaign. It also addresses the protesters against American financial corruption like the Occupy Movement, but typically with the right-wing paranoid belief that it might be a pawn manipulated by America's enemies to sow revolt and destruction. Last year's Call of Duty: Ghosts had the ludicrous and racist premise that in the near future, the Latin American countries might band together to gang up on America and reduce it to ruins, and the only resistance is the remnants of the US military forming a rebel force against them. Ghosts seemed to hint that the franchise was groping for an story that might still be relevant. I think it was Ben "Yahtzee"Croshaw of Zero Punctuation who offered the theory that the series and war games in general moved away from outright War on Terror plots when the US campaign in Iraq and Afghanistan proved to be embarrassing fiascos and quagmires, which also saw the end of the Bush era.

Which brings us to Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, or Call of Spacey, as I like to call it. Set about 40 years in the future, the plot has the main player character leave the US military to work for Atlas, Jonathan Irons' private military company that has become richer and more powerful than the US government, and thus hired by various countries to help with hostage rescue, counterterrorism and rebuilding infrastructure.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKYHuhg0l3I[/youtube]

What's striking to me about the story is the way it explicitly paints Jonathan Irons as a corporate fascist Bond villain. It's very meta in the way it references Spacey's recent performance as the Machiavellian Frank Underwood in House of Cards and various cold-eyed baddies he's played throughout his career. The game is littered with speeches and cutscenes from Irons expounding explicitly his ideology and beliefs: democracy is folly at best, and what people want is a strong hand to rule over them and keep them safe, and who better to do that than Irons and his company? Irons voices the frustrations and disgust many people have about politicians, but also embodies the hubris and megalomania of corporate power. A good supervillain will say things that you almost agree with, combined with batshit insanity. That makes Irons the perfect Bond villain to want to go and shoot in a video game. This is neoconservatism and neo-colonialism for the 21^st Century, and Irons is practically a lesson in 21^st Century Corporate Fascism 101. He is a monster of the zeitgeist, a fictional culmination of the last 14 years of news headlines about PMCs and corporations profiting from America's wars abroad, and anxiety over their power.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyM4DCN5dM[/youtube]

The Call of Duty games are now the equivalent of a Bruckheimer blockbuster movie. The series has been about outgunning the enemy, of Fascism (military might) vs Chaos (terrorism). Advanced Warfare is an attempt to move the series' stories forward by having the player initially side with Irons before realising just how insane he is and finally going against him. It's now military might versus corporate terrorism. The climax in an Iraq rebuilt into an urban corporate jungle is an apt metaphor. You go in and shoot everything up and everything explodes.

This isn't the first or best game about the evils of PMCs, of course. The Metal Gear Solid series has done it in more depth and wit, not to mention with a crazy sense of humour and Brechtian irony. Crysis 2 also went down that road (with the sense of humour but with more hard Science Fiction concepts), and Advanced Warfare cribs a lot from its gameplay design. This is all in the ether.

It's just too bad we don't get to fight Kevin Spacey in a giant mech suit as the final boss.

Spacey-ing out at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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