header is screenshot from Death Stranding Revisited
Tracing a Body
Grace Benfell

Motion capture is, at least in some sense, a product of the videogame drive toward realism. Accurate expressions help stretch the perceived gap between games and blockbuster movies. It is also the kind of spectacle that only AAA games can really provide, considering the extreme amount of specialized equipment and expertise the tech requires.

Death Stranding is no exception, providing both spectacle and obvious cinematic ambition. It faithfully recreates the presence and movements of genuine stars like Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen, and Léa Seydoux, as well as the likenesses of a smattering of director Hideo Kojima’s favorite filmmakers. Reedus, though, gets the brunt of the game’s preoccupations as the game’s hero deliverer Sam Porter Bridges.

That preoccupation is, of course, inevitable. Sam’s player character status means that the player will spend dozens of hours looking at him. The game's hiking theme means animating, and creating systems around, Sam’s careful footfalls. Death Stranding is obsessed with Sam, and by extension Reedus, in the way that Uncharted is obsessed with Nathan Drake or Super Mario is with, well, Mario.

Death Stranding goes beyond those examples because it is interested in the mundanities of living in Sam's body. There are obviously the normal videogame concerns of health and injury, but there’s a great deal more here. Sam’s feet will bleed if his shoes wear out, he has to sleep and shower regularly to perform his best. Death Stranding dedicates a fair amount of mechanical space to Sam’s human waste, to using the toilet and showering, to drinking and getting drunk. Sam's virtual body has a wholeness rarely granted to videogame protagonists. He is almost doll-like, a Sim from The Sims, a being that has its own needs and wants.

In both story beats and casual rests, we spend a lot of time with Sam's naked body. The painstaking, virtual recreation of Reedus' muscled flesh is not exactly sexualized, but it is lingered on, lovingly rendered. Players can clothe him and take care of him. His body is a place of erotic play, but one that feels holistic rather than limiting. Many games disappear the player’s body whether by literally surfacing it as a weapon or by only emphasizing its functional relationship to the player. As a small example, consider how Samus is (usually) in advanced armor, emphasizing the abilities of her weaponized suit, until she dies. At which point, her human body can be aestheticized. In contrast, the grotesque and beautiful elements of Sam’s body are constant in every part of play. That is the source of many of the game’s profound joys. Delivering packages is a riot in part because Reedus can be freely laughed at. We can watch Sam Porter Bridges trip on a ladder rung and fall into a river and 20 minutes later watch him stoically mourn his lost father, because his body can contain multitudes. It can be simultaneously mocked and respected. That dichotomy is afforded by Sam's axises of identity.

Consider for example, if everything about Sam Porter Bridges was the same, except he had no use of his legs. His relationship to assistive technology, like his limb-mounted exoskeleton upgrades, would be completely different, dependent, rather than accessorial. Consider if Sam was Black, rather than white. His self-destructive journey across America would be inextricable from its oppressive legacy. If Sam existed at any other axis of identity, he would fall under the shadow of that identity's expectations, clichés, and constrictions. Instead, he is cis, white, and able-bodied. Sam, as he is, is free from the burden of an exacting and punishing political history.

That might sound negative, but I don't mean it to. Rather this is an engine that fuels every layer of Death Stranding's complex web of systems and storytelling. The impact of its facetious motion capture, its lingering gaze, and its foot-stumbling hiking is all dependent on Norman Reedus's relatively un-politicized body. Some of this, in fact much of it, is what makes Death Stranding fun and beautiful. Before I even played Death Stranding, I saw people posting pratfalls and ill-advised jumps. Sam's anonymous body allows those gags to be funny. While the game is certainly ponderous about masculinity and fatherhood, it also lets its protagonist throw his own shit to kill motor oil ghosts, without the implication that Sam is being disrespected. It is the profane care one can exercise for Sam that lets the game work.

To be clear, this isn’t to say that even white men do not have constrictions placed on them. They absolutely do. Rather, the possibility space of how those constrictions are depicted in mass media is much wider for a character like him than for many other people. The game even works through this. Sam is stoic, resistant to care and kindness. Over the course of the game, he opens up and learns the power of friendship. You cannot tell me that this is not a common arc for manly men across pop culture. Even as Sam is stoic, the game allows him to stretch into compassion; Death Stranding lends him freedom outside of the rules that define people like him.

It is telling, then, that the marginalized characters are bound into their rules. They cannot express freedom in the way Sam can. For example, Léa Seydoux's Fragile has a young face, but possesses the body of an elderly woman. Thrown into the age-accelerating "timefall" by one of Death Stranding's principle villains, she is split between an idealized femininity and the unseen smallness of elderly women. In some sense, the tragedy of Fragile’s tale is that her body doesn’t represent the narrow ideal of what a body like hers should be. Sam is never so confined.

In another example, Death Stranding turns its lone Black man, the Vice President Die Hardman, into a sigil of America's fictional sins+. Sam confronts him at the game's end, and urges him to make America into something better than it was. While the game is primarily concerned with its own plot machinations here, the scene has an uncomfortable subtext. Die becomes a stand-in for the American state, and the game does not consider what it might mean for a Black man to represent all of America's violence. In some sense, Sam's race lurks over him too, as his rebuke feels hollow, given his whiteness and relative privilege. Nevertheless, Sam is the one who gets to walk away, to be free of the America that will burden Die until he is in the grave.

Additionally, unlike his female predecessors and counterparts, Sam can resist the player’s gaze. Linger the camera around his crotch and Sam will get up and punch the screen. (One of director Hideo Kojima's previous games, Metal Gear Solid 3, meanwhile has a dedicated titty cam.) While Death Stranding is (somewhat) more tasteful, women across Hideo Kojima's work have been freely gazed upon, without rebuke or repercussion. Sam gets to resist sexualization. But even when the game's indulges looking at him, his humanity is never in question. Though doll-like, Sam will never be an object.

The ease with which Sam can be eroticized, idealized, made profane, and laughed at is enviable. I remember for example, the intimacy I could once have with men. How I could embrace or touch men without expectations, be friends as equals and without misinterpretation. That was, in some ways, a lie. I was always different, always hiding, and I couldn't keep up the act forever. Still, it is a freedom I can no longer have. Looking at Norman Reedus' bare ass reminded me of the ease with which my straight friends could inhabit the world, an ease that I could access in flickers and spirits, until that part of me died.

I still long for that ease though, and more particularly I long for the wholeness with which Sam is able to exist in public. There are things about my body that are funny or strange or silly or sad, but they are things I keep to myself or to private conversations or to scant discord DMs. Being messy or silly about myself carries a political burden that it does not for many other people. In turn, I am privileged, free, and expansive in a way others cannot be. In the shadow of expectation though, it’s hard not to wonder what it would be like to exist more freely without struggle.

I can, of course, push beyond. I can not let good taste or proper representation or stifling conservatism or pearl-clutching liberalism get in the way of being truthful, honest, and funny about my experiences. But the culture I want to transcend will still exist, still look at me. Whatever work I produce about being trans, or even the work I make explicitly not about that, will be judged by that culture's gaze. My resistance to it can only go so far alone.

But for Sam Porter Bridges, stretching out those limits will always be easy.

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+This really is an absurd videogame.

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Grace is a freelance writer, a contributor at Paste MagazineGamespot, and Uppercut. You can find her and her work on Twitter @grace_machine.