The Flesh Of The Gods

[Ghost/Diaphragms] aims to explore the rough/soft edges of the visual worlds of games, and the ways in which we haunt those spaces. Each series, focused on one title, is composed of a selection of shots taken in-game via the available capturing tool accompanied by a short text. Today’s introductory series,The Flesh of the Gods, was made with no ulterior alteration to the images and focuses on Santa Monica’s 2018 God of War reboot.

–

As an object, God of War is very concerned with godhood. It revels in the nature of divinities, recounting their faillings and victories at every occasion, as both cautionary tales and musings on what it means “to be a God”. At the center of this perpetual conflict are Kratos and his son Atreus, every step of their journey through the Norse Realms documented with a one constant : its singular long-take. God of War‘s camera is not quite omniscient or omnipotent, it seeks a rather different kind of all-mightiness. One defined by its unwavering status as the anchor of the experience. We are glued to the perspective of Kratos throughout the whole game – and consequently to Atreus’s, for most of it, too. This, in turn, is supposed to further immerse us in the physical and emotional intimacy of this dysfunctional family. This unblinking eye – of course – has to shut itself eventually, even if for just a moment ; whether it’s to conjure up some sort of interface, or simply to put down the controller at some point. The cut will happen.

What’s the point, then, of a gargantuan “oner” that nobody will witness ? From the start, my playthrough of God of War felt like a hollow exercise ; the first time I freezed one of my battles using the photo mode to gain some height on the action, the bombast of its algorithms and colours were only felt more clearly. Now detached from Kratos’ movement, the fiction appeared ever smaller. God of War in a way seeks to inhabit all temporalities at once, casting the history of its mythical beings in a somber light while paving the way forward through careful world-building and newfound themes of grieving fatherhood. But it’s also a game irrevocably about the here and now. Whatever the “mise-en-scène” of Cory Balrog misses, the player will catch glimpses of nonetheless, because God of War‘s world is simply unmissable, constantly painting a retina of smear and complex shaders. Sometimes things just click ; a character’s model pierces through the noise with its gaze ; the scenery manages a careful equilibrium between its colossal means of productions and craft; Kratos beats a dragon to death to leave you breathless. Such instances are difficult to dismiss. But as they imbue the game with the sense of grandeur it desesperately craves, they also highlight what it – so often – becomes instead : A documentary-style slog that demands constant attention to the bodies of its actors all the while disregarding them. Like a bunch of flesh troopers fed to the panoptic machine, Kratos and Atreus are perpetually “present” yet never truly embodied. Godly by their very nature but asynchronous within the confine of the game’s design and cinematography. God of War is the space where the long take meets the loot system and then completely crumbles.

Attempting to “shoot” God of War, in this instance, meant to act upon its continuity, to constantly cut the action and run it back, break it to rearrange the drama of its polygons. More precisely, it meant trying to find a temporality that would be able to frame Kratos’s skin for what it is : Remarkably friable, eye-catching yet lost.

–

There is a scene in Sam Mendes‘s 1917 – another work revelling in the single long-take – that lays bare the surreal beauty of this radical format ; as our two soldiers stumble out of a forest, the camera slowly follows them while they try to catch their breath before moving forward. Ahead of them a meadow stretches as far as the eye can see. The men walk and make conversation about the worth(lessness) of their respective medals and experience of the war. Everything about this bit of action, from the content of the dialogue to the movement of the camera, feels quite mundane. That is until one of the two stops dead in his tracks, confiding the dread he felt when seeing his family again during a leave and realizing he couldn’t stay. The camera obliges this movement and stops to soak in the moment before he eventually keeps on walking off the frame. The shot lingers on the other speechless soldier, slowly spinning around him to absorb his reaction to the confession, before he resumes his march as well. But as the camera completes its arc, what lies ahead of the two men is no longer a simple open field of grass but more immediately the brick ruins of a village’s garden. In other words, a space that seemed to appear out of nowhere. The film never acknowledges this happening nor does it need to. Revelation simply occurs to the eye of the camera, the porous nature of 1917‘s endless long take suddenly betrayed – and elevated.

God of War can never manage such an effect. It does feature some degree of space-warping, most notably through its comedic duo of dwarves, Brok and Sindri. But their playful teleportation, one of the game’s main source of humor, is rarely more than a cheap trick in an expensive digital robe. Often, one of the dwarves will disappear mid-cutscene before suddenly popping out somewhere else in the frame, or pull an endless number of objects out a tiny magic bag. Seeing this kind of movement happen outside of the cutscenes, though, shatters any sense of illusion the game had going for itself. When Brok comes out from behind a rock to toss the player-character an upgrade and simply clips out of existence if you care to look for him after all is said and done, the vanishing carries with it no sense of wonder. To judge the game on such nitpickings would be unfair. Yet it rather cruelly illustrates the philosophy of Santa Monica‘s cinematography. What concerns Balrog and his peers when filming Kratos is to capture the gravity of his situation – forgeting in the process that he was having his way with Greek goddesses for shiny red orbs two games ago. God of War‘s long take excels when it accepts to leave behind any sense of sanctity ; or rather as soon as it embraces its now two-fold nature. As an object that seeks to smash as much as it wants to revere its protagonists.

A thought I long held while playing the game was that it would be better-off powered by heavy metal screams rather than Skyrim chantings, and I stand by it still. This dichotomy is at the heart of God of War‘s failure, and that’s why The Flesh of the Gods aims to be both a work of fetishization and disintegration.