Metal Gear Solid Act I: Liquid Snake

NOTE: As always, there's a standing spoiler alert for any game I discuss on this blog. Here, I will be talking about Metal Gear Solid for the first PlayStation. Most of the discussion will focus on and spoil only that storyline, but because the five games that comprise the saga (as of this writing, with MGS: Portable Ops taking a necessary place) are linked, it's important to know that some things may get spoiled if you haven't played everything.

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On Liquid

In a certain sense, Metal Gear Solid is Liquid's game. Ever one to want to emulate the Patriots--albeit a type of radical, hate-twisted emulation, similar to the one that he has for Big Boss--Liquid takes it upon himself to manipulate, control, and twist Snake's progress. If anyone controls Snake, it should be Liquid, not the gamer. The controller in the hands of the audience is happenstance, for the entire ballet of Shadow Moses is conducted beneath the baton of Liquid. From the commencement of the game, when he first makes an appearance on the elevator, Liquid's shadow darkens all of the remote Alaskan island.

The master of the game, Liquid's motives are simultaneously ennobling and perverse, a wicked sense of humanity's worth. A charismatic, dynamic, powerfully motivated character, he stands as the perfect opposite to the purposefully-empty Snake. The greatest of villains always stand at the polar end to the heroes, and Liquid does so in almost every significant way. He is eloquent, erudite, and smug. Like his brother, he adapts, but his adaptations are causal, rather than reactionary. He creates a better situation perpetually. Every set back is used to his advantage. Even his deception as McDonell Miller had been taken into account. Upon the death of the real DARPA chief, Miller was killed in his home, meaning that Liquid's plan to infiltrate Snake's camp as stealthily as Snake would infiltrate Shadow Moses commenced long before Snake even hit the frozen Arctic waters.

Would Liquid have attempted to usurp the Patriot's control at Shadow Moses had Solid Snake been the one sent in? Doubtful. Knowing of his twin brother, their freakish conception, and the fratricide on the part of Snake, Liquid probably knew his plan would lure in his opposite. Snake had already had a couple of 'run-ins' with Metal Gear; it would be logical that Snake would arrive to 'save the day.' Each is the other's Moby-Dick, and Ahab would never set sail if he didn't think the white whale would one day be visible.

Despite his brilliance, Liquid missed part of high school biology: a gene's dominant (or recessive) qualities are neither superior nor inferior to other genes. They are simply more or less likely to be expressed. A child with blue eyes is not suffering from inferior recessive genes (if those genes responsible for the eye color were, indeed, recessive). Similarly, the twist at the end that Liquid is the one laden with Big Boss' dominant genes helps to show why his hair is blonde instead of brown (apparently, Naked Snake's hair color--and all of his physiology, even down to the voice--is a recessive gene, meaning Solid Snake's identical look to Big Boss comes from the recessive--though not necessarily superior--side). As noted in Metal Gear Solid 4, Solid and Liquid Snakes have a very small genetic difference in them--a matter of only a couple percentage points. Very small differences at one point can lead to drastically different ends.

This distortion of reality works well for furthering Liquid as a character, for not only is he more capable than Snake in almost every way, but he is a well-rounded character from a narratological stand point. He is flawed in his reasoning, just like many other people are. Despite his fantastic ability to think, he still misses small details. Similarly, Liquid provides the necessary contrast to Solid by being hot, rash, bombastic, and self-aggrandizing in posture, speech, and assumptions. Snake, when asked about the death of his father, is remorseless and cool. Liquid, on the other hand, holds the grudge of patricide against Snake for all of the wrong reasons. He feels cheated that Snake was able to become Big Boss' murderer.

There is more to Liquid than there is to Snake, at least at the beginning. He is a more capable fighter, a faster thinker, and more adept manipulator. In fact, it is traitorous genetics--the one thing that he fought longest to control, yet never could--that killed him, not one of Snake's well aimed missiles or punches. The gamer never can kill Liquid, just like the gamer never can kill Vamp; they are both impervious to the manipulations of the gamer. They both are free of any sort of control; they are exactly what the Patriots hate.

One of the many things that differentiates MGS from other stealth/war genre games is the overt anti-war, anti-nuclear weapons message that powers the narrative. Death, in fact, is often a subject of conversation. Liquid rightly surmises, "We were accomplices in murder before the day we were even born," when explaining the fact that six (well, five, though Liquid didn't know of Solidus) other fetuses were originally in their mother's womb. These potential snakes were all aborted to encourage stronger fetal growth for the three remaining clones. This overture of death is important to Snake, but is something that Liquid seems to relish (yet another difference between the two). Liquid's idea of utopia is one of endless war, an Outer Heaven in which soldiers always have a place. Implicit in that dream is that a soldier's place only exists to exterminate another's. Though Liquid was an accomplice in murder before birth, his is the goal of continued death and destruction. Nuclear proliferation, for Liquid, is only one possible way toward death proliferation, his true goal. In the purest (and most distorted) Machiavellian form, Liquid seeks freedom from the Patriots' control in order to do lead others to do what he loves most: killing.

For the gamer, this is the greatest irony, the harshest reality that the unreality can create. Summed up in the shouted accusation, "You enjoy all the killing!" This is not just something Snake has to face; it is what the gamer is forced to recognize. The game is just a game (supposed to be fun) and it fulfills its digital destiny at the expense of endless digital deaths. The game is not sold on the pretense of being a look at the perils of nuclear proliferation; nor is it sold on the grounds of high quality voice acting; nor is it sold as a fantastic character study of conflicting philosophies, purviews, and experiences, though it is all of that and more. The game is marketed as "Tactical Espionage Action," a game of strategic spying, interspersed with the sugar-coated noun for violence: action. Prima facie, this game is not tactile beyond the controller (despite excellent DualShock progaming), and the spying is an orchestration by Liquid--Snake's presence has been noted almost immediately, and nothing was given to him that was not deemed permissible; hardly a very good spy. No, the game is touted as action, though in this, as in almost all design choices, the action itself is subverted. The guards are not supposed to be harmed. They are not supposed to die. They are supposed to be avoided, distracted, and fled from. Yet there are many deaths throughout the game that come--it is unavoidable; it is the reason for the game.

This should be more distressing to the gamer, but the unreality of fiction has wrapped up the minds observing this fascinating spectacle, shielding the gamer from the guilt of simulated murder with the thin veil of plastic and glass. This same phrase, echoing through Old Snake's memory in MGS4 causes a violent reaction in Old Snake, causing him to retch and lose Psyche. "You enjoy all the killing!" is the very reason the game--specifically and generally--is a success.

In the end, Liquid dies of FOXDIE, an appropriate end to the leader of FOX-HOUND. His genius, however, at encouraging others by participating in his philosophy of 'those who can, should' remains, a spore of an infected hatred for the world that is, in a twisted, sad way, his victory. His desire for the Outer Heaven of Big Boss' dreams only comes to fruition in the millions of hands that manipulate the puppet he most wants to control (and never can): Solid Snake.