Hideo Kojima often says that while the typical human body is about 70% water, his body is about 70% movies. Anyone who has ever played the Metal Gear Solid games or indeed any of his other games will know that Hideo isn’t just talking the talk here. His games have always featured stories and elements that are full of references and homages to the films and TV shows that have inspired him. There is the Twin Peaks homage in the name of the Metal Gear Solid remake Twin Snakes, or the name Solid Snake uses as cover in Metal Gear Solid 2, Plissken, a reference to John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. His latest game, Death Stranding, is no different with its penchant for references.
Death Stranding is a game about making deliveries across a post-apocalyptic American landscape (that looks more like Iceland) and trekking past supernatural dangers over rough, unforgiving terrain as you control Sam Porter Bridges, modeled after and voiced by Norman Reedus. The story on its surface is probably most comparable to the Kevin Costner film The Postman (1997), and while the particulars of that film do share plenty of interesting parallels to plot, this discussion will focus on a much older film: The Seventh Seal (1957), directed by the great Ingmar Bergman.
Death Stranding shares at least one very striking comparison to Bergman’s tale of a knight who meets and begins a chess match against Death itself on a beach. Sam, as it turns out, is in a fight ending on a beach against his own world’s Death-like force dubbed the “Extinction Entity” (or EE), who is Amelie, a woman Sam believes is his sister. In the world of Death Stranding, when a person dies they go to a timeless purgatory known as “the beach.” Sam is this world’s only “repatriate,” as the game calls him, making him effectively immortal and able to go to and from the beach, instead of passing on like a typical soul.
Near the end of the game, Sam is teleported to Amelie’s beach where he has a conversation with her in order to resolve the game’s main conflict and stop the Sixth Extinction, or the Last Stranding as the EE calls it. After this scene, the game takes a little time to let you think about everything you’ve just seen and heard. The game gives you back control of Sam on a blue-tinted beach that has no exit while credits roll over a musical track although this is not the game’s ending. The way back home is eventually revealed via a set of five floating figures in the sky at this beach which have also been appearing in the sky throughout the game at various points without really any explanation or even hint as to what they are.
But how exactly is Kojima’s work connected to Bergman’s beyond being concerned with death? The Seventh Seal is about Antonius Block and his final days of life as he returns home from some crusade before dying. At the film’s onset, Block is on a beach simply resting when the black-robed figure of Death approaches. The two talk, and Block convinces Death to play chess and to not take him until their game is completed. During the movie Block and his squire meet a family of traveling actors, a husband and wife with their young son, and the two groups form a kind of bond before going their separate ways. Along the way, Death and Block meet in various places and talk and play chess, and in every scene there is a particular context that changes from the previous scene between the two, paralleled in Death Stranding by Sam’s evolving relationship with Amelie during that story. This context is shown primarily in the cinematography employed in the scenes, and reflects the ebb and flow of the chess game as Block attempts his defense before leveraging his position and finally accepting his inevitable defeat.
The main visual trope used to convey the shifting relationship between Block and Death is height. More often than not, Block is shown looking up at Death, even though it’s unlikely that Death’s actor was taller than Max Von Sydow. At one point when Block seems to be finding success with his strategy he is shown sitting across from Death on a slope slanting slightly down, even putting the board on a stone tilted the same way. The two’s eyeline almost draws a parallel to the edge of the board here. But this is just one scene and the point of the dialogue is exactly that Block believes himself to be “winning” over Death, and so this story context aligns with what we’re seeing as well. Nearly every other scene when Block is feeling the need to “fight back” or guard against Death, Block occupies the lower part of the frame. Later in the film as Block begins to accept his death in the context of conversations with other characters Block himself “ascends” to occupy the upper parts of the frame in various scenes and shots.
And indeed in Death Stranding there are several examples of Amelie looming over Sam, most notably going so far as summoning a giant five-story tall tar-covered monster for Sam to fight. Another scene shows Sam sinking into a tar lake as he tries to wade out to Amelie who somehow stands above the pull of the tar, looking down at Sam as he becomes enveloped by the black substance. But here, as it turns out, Amelie was the one responsible for making Sam into a repatriate, and so unlike Block’s meeting with Death being final and ultimately negative, Sam’s meeting with Amelie at the end comes to have a positive context built around it by his, the player’s action: simply going out and hugging her amidst the dead sea life and red waters of her dying beach. And these differences are indeed reflected in the ending’s visuals with several shots putting the two of them on more visually equal ground.
If one were to ask a character from The Seventh Seal where Death was, they would likely say “in the air,” as a plague has beset the entire country where our story takes place. And indeed in Death Stranding, if you were to ask where Death was, they would likely look to the ground, as the BTs themselves are anchored to the ground and only arise from the decayed tar deep in the earth when the timefall passes overhead. BT stands for “Beached Thing,” this world’s disembodied spirits of the dead that have crossed back over via the beach to haunt the living. And, so, in The Seventh Seal, we typically do see Death occupying the upper parts of the frame, and in Death Stranding that is mirrored in the specific referential shots I described earlier, but in a more general sense the BTs and other deadly creatures tend to occupy the bottom of the frame throughout the game, pulling Sam there, too, as his life bar decreases during the rough boss fights. In the cave scene as the BTs handprints appear on surfaces it is almost always in a context evoking a kind of “underneath,” whether it’s the first handprint that appears on the ground beneath Sam’s hand in a POV shot, or the handprints they later make on the ceiling where the camera has twisted around and is fully upside down to keep the BTs tracks “below” everything else.
The prologue of the game, where the five floating figures first appear, shows Sam sheltering from a passing storm in a cave when a group of BTs begin to come near, forcing him to take cover with another porter. Sam hunkers back in the cave at the walls as the BTs handprints, their only visible sign, appear across the ground, walls, and ceiling of the cave. Eventually they pass on as the storm moves across the landscape, allowing Sam a moment looking through the mist of the clearing skies. The five figures can be seen as Sam gazes in their direction, only made out by the distortion their transparent figures cause in the cloudy skies. The scene is presented as having immense weight despite being this early in the game.
Most importantly, perhaps, at the very end of the film when the actor husband Jof—who says he sees visions of spirits and indeed Death—describes the dancing procession of all the souls who passed on at the film’s climax with Death leading at the front, the husband is framed looking up at the line of figures atop a hill in the distance. The visual comparison to Sam looking up at the five figures who all look much like BTs and indeed evoke the same fear for the entirety of the game cannot be understated here. There is even a shot of Jof in close up as he looks on with a kind of peace at the deathly parade that is referenced in Death Stranding, structured visually and even edited in almost the same way, except here Sam does not share the peace or joy Jof does, only belying confusion and sadness.
There is a nice parallel in Death Stranding to Seal’s confessional scene where the prostrate Block bares his soul to who he believes to be a priest but is in fact Death himself. During interludes between letting the player walk as far as Sam can manage on his blue beach before the false end credits, as Sam sits and rests a holographic memory of Amelie in a blue dress appears. As she’s walking around Sam he sits and remembers her words to him on her beach as she revealed her true nature, showing it to the player here instead of earlier. We have full control of the camera to follow Amelie circling above and around us, as the game itself is asking us to really ponder with our own eyes what all we’ve just seen, as Sam must be wondering himself—the perfect union of a player’s behavior with that player’s character in game.
Shortly after that upon wandering around to explore again, and after the false credits end, the voices of Sam’s friends begin alongside the signs of what normally indicate a BTs presence. However, now, they all look to just be holograms. Following the signs to the shore, a white-dressed Amelie tells Sam not to give up, reminding him that he’s still connected, pointing up in the sky where the five figures have now fully formed as a chiral version of BTs, the spirits of Sam’s friends in the world searching the beaches for their lost friend. Death was never in the sky here—it was the bonds he had made that mattered the most, calling back to the dead walking hand-in-hand at the end of Seventh Seal.
Without the existing tradition of film and visual art about death, Hideo Kojima certainly would have had a much tougher time making Death Stranding and infusing it with the meaning he was able to with his virtual camera. He spoke before the game’s release of its inspiration in Kobo Abe’s short novel ‘Rope,’ and its theme of stick versus rope, perhaps also the main theme of Death Stranding. According to Hideo, “It’s a weapon…The next tool created by mankind was rope. The rope is not to keep away bad things. On the contrary, it’s a tool used to keep good things close to you, to tie good things close to you.” This ties in nicely with the final shot of Seventh Seal depicting the parade led by Death bound together by hands and arms, as if by rope. Greats of the past like Ingmar Bergman may not be the first thing you think of when playing a game with sci-fi supernatural thematics, but I think it’s safe to say Hideo most certainly thought of it.
