MGSV — The Broken Mirror of Shining Lights – A Critical Analysis

Overview

This is an attempt to discuss the themes and motifs of MGSV with an eye towards film-style criticism. I will explore the symbolism of both cutscenes and mission structure.

INTRO – SHINING LIGHTS AS MIRRORED PROLOGUE

First off a note this is my first theory posted so go easy on me. I captured many images and may add these later. There are a few ideas I have mixed up together:

Cyclical nature — Chapter 1 is building up you base, gathering friends and enemies. Chapter 2 has them leave, in the opposite order that they arrived. Creation followed by destruction.

Shattered mirror – Chapter 2 acts like a shattered mirror. The same images and people from Chapter 1 are there, but they are fragmented, splintering off. The game is about building up and then deconstruction the legend of Big Boss. This process is ritualized by Venom in the Truth ending in front of the mirror.

“Shining Lights” is perhaps the penultimate mission in The Phantom Pain. It is a traumatic experience that takes Venom to some very strange places. We begin The Phantom Pain playing as a hospital patient. By the end of “Shining Lights”, we are rubbing the ashes of our dead soldiers on our face. I am convinced these two missions are linked.

What’s more “Shining Lights” is a kind of inverted or mirror (or “phantom”) version of the “Prologue”. The appearance of many motifs and themes in both missions invite comparisons between the two. They also serve to show us how far Venom has traveled from whoever he once was into a total clone of Big Boss. Keep in mind all of this is my opinion, I am not saying this is the right or correct way (if there is one) to interpret this.

DUAL LINEAR MISSIONS

Most tellingly, both missions are the only wholly linear narrative-based missions in the game. They both take place in enclosed areas, completely walled off from the open world outside.

Throughout MGSV Kojima uses game design and mission design to get the player into certain moods. The symbols in cutscenes combined with the art direction during gameplay and mission structure creates a ritual that creates the legend of Big Boss. For instance, in A Quiet Exit, it is the only mission you cannot back out of. This is to make us feel a certain way about her departure.

DESCENDING vs. ASCENDING / FIRE vs. LIGHT / HELL vs. HEAVEN

In “Prologue” you are making your way from the top of a hospital down to the bottom. In “Shining” you are making your way from the bottom of a quarantine facility to the top. The path you take has been inverted. In the “Prologue”, you descend downwards, into the night, towards hell. In “Shining” you are ascending towards the light of the sun, the light of heaven. Only rather than trying to make that journey yourself, your purpose is to stop DD soldiers from doing so.

So you go down the stairs in “Prologue” and you go up the stairs in “Shining”. You also stop in front of caged-in areas. In “Prologue” you are let into a small room halfway down the stairs by some hiding hospital staff. “Shining” has a caged area at the very top. It is the door that the Diamond Dogs soldiers who are set on fire run through.

METHODICALLY KILLING STAFF

In “Prologue” XOF soldiers are methodically killing staff looking for Big Boss. In “Shining” you are methodically killing staff looking for Parasites. Venom has essentially swapped roles with XOF soldiers.

In both areas, every NPC that you come across is destined to soon be dead. In “Prologue” it is usually a short cutscene that concludes their life shortly after they are introduced. In “Shining”, it is the sad and tragic inevitability of the player having to kill his own soldiers.

STABBINGS / SACRIFICE / QUIET (XOF Soldier) v DD Soldier

In “Prologue” Big Boss is stabbed by a knife during his struggle with Quiet. In “Shining” Venom is stabbed by a knife during his struggle with DD soldiers. Big Boss’s aim is to kill Quiet and he is stabbed by a thrown knife in the heat of battle. Venom’s aim is to somehow save his soldiers and he more or less accepts his stabbing up-close, almost like a Samurai warrior.

It calls to mind an earlier cutscene where a riot is breaking out at Mother Base between soldiers and one of them stabs Venom with a knife. Venom lets the soldier stab him then as well. In that scene I see it as a gesture of good faith, a promise from Venom: “No matter what, I will never turn against a fellow Diamond Dog. We are family.” In “Shining” that same interaction is referenced, and it only heightens the tragedy of the situation. Venom no doubt is reminded of the same scene yet is powerless to do anything other than kill his soldiers.

The stabbing as a symbolic act in that MB cutscene shows us devotion. It is an act of self-sacrifice, an act that is shared between the Diamond Dog soldiers, Venom, Big Boss, Quiet, and Paz. Paz went under the knife as well, by another Diamond Dog soldier. Sacrifice connects Big Boss to The Boss as well. It is a key theme in his saga.

Does Big Boss ever show real self-sacrifice? Or is he acting solely for his own interests? During the “Prologue” is he putting on a show for Venom? Did he go easy on Quiet? It almost seems as if he is trying to create a villain for Venom. I talk about the way Big Boss uses language elsewhere. It is clear that Big Boss is using the situation for his own good, whereas in “Shining” Venom is sort of mired and trapped by his.

It is difficult to say what is what, and ultimately perhaps up to the viewer/player. Big Boss lost MSF, but now that we have seen Venom’s sacrifice first-hand, can we really say that it was fully his to lose? The medic and countless other soldiers died for Big Boss’s cause on the regular. Paz betrayed him but she also physically suffered way more than anybody else involved. Or did she? These are difficult questions to answer, and perhaps form the central moral question risen by the entire MGSV enterprise.

Certainly Big Boss is stabbed in “Prologue” as Venom is stabbed in “Shining”. It is almost a ritual, symbolic of a blood-oath, that shows these brothers-and-sisters-in-arms. Diamond Dogs. Living for Eternal war.

LANGUAGE AS WEAPON

In “Prologue” Big Boss tells you “I….we gave her a light.” in reference to events that happened while you were unconscious. Venom personally had nothing to do with setting Quiet on fire, yet he is given responsibility for it by his association with Big Boss. To put it another way, Big Boss is flattering Venom based on a lie. In “Shining” we get the opposite treatment from Huey. He is chastising Venom based on the truth — remember Huey has been injected with lots of truth serum. Big Boss is using language to build up a legend, where Huey uses language to tear it down. One of the main themes of Chapter 2 is the deconstruction of Venom As Big Boss.

FIRE/LIGHT INFECTING vs. CLEANSING

Furthermore there is the double meaning to “light”. In the “Prologue” it means destructive fire. In “Shining” it is written in blood on the floor, in Goethe’s last words, “More light”. This light is a spiritual, cleansing, transformative light. For Goethe it was the light of heaven. For the Parasites, it was the light on the roof. They needed to ascend, to travel upwards, towards heaven.

Ironic that Big Boss’s fire is responsible for INFECTING Quiet with the parasites, whereas Venom’s light CLEANSED his soldiers of their parasites. One giveth, the other taketh away. In Metal Gear Solid 3, The Boss says the following when she first meets Snake at their final battle:

Boss: Life’s end… (lowers her weapon) Isn’t it beautiful? It’s almost tragic. When life ends, it gives off a final lingering aroma. Light is but a farewell gift from the darkness to those on their way to die. I’ve been waiting, Snake, for a long time. Waiting for your birth, your growth, and the finality of today.

The fire throughout the game is symbolic of the fire in the helicopter at the end of Ground Zeroes. In a way it is almost as if Venom is constantly reliving that moment, trapped in that fire, consuming him with revenge. Let’s not forget that Venom WAS BORN IN THE FIRE to a large degree as “Prologue” is sort of a birth-by-fire. In “Shining” it is a destructive fire; meant to kill the infected soldiers, kill the birds, kill the parasites. Venom’s fire has become all-consuming: like a fire, he wears the ashes. Like a fire he creates ashes.

Like a fire, he burns out. Burn brightly and fade away.

ASHES/FACES/MASKS

The ending scene is strange. I still need time to process it. It feels almost disrespectful, what Venom does here with the ashes. Imagine that was your buddy who died saving you, and your commander just smeared his ashes over his face, even stopping to taste the ashes. The taboo of cannibalism is touched on here, so subtle that most missed it.

Venom does taste the ashes on his dead soldiers by touching his lips. I concede that the scene itself is meant to be respectful, but on some level it still irks me.

He won’t scatter them to the heartless sea. When Paz died she jump out into the sea, some of her ending up embedded in Venom, some of them ending up scattered to the heartless sea. Perhaps this entire end scene is meant to be an inversion of that. Venom possibly trying to reconcile, through ritual, the disposable nature of his soldiers. Venom trying to reverse the sins of Paz.

At this point, to me, Venom has completed his transformation to Big Boss, a man who tries to kill his own soldier in Metal Gear 1. Like the ending in the mirror, it seems ambiguous, which I think is on purpose. We are meant to question what it means, what Venom thinks of the whole thing, etc. Perhaps he has accepted that he IS Big Boss (and knows the Truth already) and this is a visual form of “I’m already a demon”.

Is he covering his face to hide, or is wearing the ashes to show the truth? Of course covering your face, construction of masks, is a big theme in this game. Venom is covering his face with his dead soldiers. This is directly the opposite of Big Boss, who covers his dead soldiers with his face. Venom’s real face was changed by someone else, and now he is trying to change it himself. Again, is he trying to hide, or is he proud? I think this is up to the player.

Venom is a dead man wearing the face of a dead man covering his face in ashes, effectively wearing another dead man’s face. This is symbolic, possibly of schizophrenia. Without a doubt it shows us a man in the midst of war: THIS MAN IS WAR. He wears his dead soldiers as his skin.

Venom is Big Boss’s warlike nature incarnate.

“Shining Lights” is his initiation ritual: he is now ready to kill (Solid Snake).

BREAKING MIRRORS , SHATTERING ILLUSIONS, THE BOSS/GOOD V EVIL

The mirror broken in the “Prologue” is a quite affecting moment. The doctor holding it in front of you, then shaking it violently, as he is strangled from behind. The camera movement and shaking of the mirrored image adds mise en scène to the psychological trauma of the whole experience. I do not know if there are any mirrors in “Shining”, I did not see any of note. But if we take “Shining” to be an inversion of the “Prologue” then the latter’s creation is the former’s deconstruction. The mirror, of course is also symbol of self-reflection.

Chapter 1 is a cycle of creation and Chapter 2 is a cycle of deconstruction. Many believe the journey towards self-realization is a journey of deconstruction, of stripping away external influences (“maya”, or illusion) and reflecting on a pure inner core that has many names, Truth, Soul, God, Reality, Nirvana, etc. Fitting that the Truth revelation comes so soon. We spend Chapter 2 stripping away the excess — Huey, Eli, The Parasites, Quiet — until all we are left with is the Big Boss from Metal Gear 1. In one way, punching the mirror is a materialization and completion of this process of deconstruction.

This is largely responsible for the mission construction of Chapter 2. You are supposed to seek it out: the endings must be unlocked, the goal is unclear. This is to put the player in the mindset of Venom. He is replaying missions he already did; to Venom he is having trouble keeping track of time. The effects of his PTSD are getting worse as time goes on, as he is trapped in the cycle of war. He has become what The Boss warned Snake about back in MGS3 in some of her last words:

“It is our destiny… The one who survives will inherit the title of Boss. And the one who inherits the title of Boss will face an existence of endless battle. “

The Boss also addressed Big Boss’s “fall to evil” that people are always saying is missing in MGSV. Take what The Boss says in MGS3, part of her final words to a young Naked Snake:

“I didn’t raise you and shape you into the man you are today just so we could face each other in battle. A soldier’s skills aren’t meant to be used to hurt friends. So then what is an enemy? Is there such thing as an absolute timeless enemy? There is no such thing and never has been. And the reason is that our enemies are human beings like us. They can only be our enemies in relative terms.”

POST-MISSION — KAZ REMINDS YOU OF THE HOSPITAL

After the mission is over you get a call from Kaz. In it he talks about the hospital for the first time in a LONG time, possibly since the start of the game. To me this speech is a bit ambiguous because it raises the question of if Kaz knows about Venom or not. At any rate, it feels like one of the few times in the game he addresses you as the full “Big Boss”. The reference to “the day you die” should also not go unnoticed:

Kaz: Boss…I don’t know how you do it. I… All I could do was obsess about revenge…doubting my comrades along the way. But even after all we accomplished, the phantom pain never let up. If anything, it just got worse. But you understood that from the start, didn’t you? From the moment you opened your eyes at that hospital. You knew it wouldn’t go away… Yet you’ve been fighting the pain and confronting your phantoms the whole time… Knowing full well the battle would never end… not til the day you die. I respect that now… more than ever. It’s an honor, and a privilege, Big Boss.

After your rescuing in the beginning, Ocelot preps you for the rest of the game by saying it is time to “Let the legend come back to life!” And now here we are 40+ hours later, and Kaz is telling us it will only end in our death. FORESHADOWING!!!

I really feel like “Shining” was very careful thought-out and that it successfully ties a lot of motifs and themes together that are running throughout MGSV. There is much more to be said about many of these themes and motifs and how they are represented throughout the game and not just in these two sequences. Any further observations are welcome!!!

CONCLUSION — ANTI-VENOM???

That’s all I have for now. Needless to say this is all my own personal interpretation and I am not saying this is the only way to read this. There is also a great deal more to go into: at several points in this guide I had to stop myself from delving into A Quiet Exit, which I feel is equally important to providing symbolism and thematic closure to Venom’s story.

At the very least I want to make a note of the fact that Venom is bitten by a snake and then given an anti-venom. Anti-Venom. This isn’t just coincidence that soon, Venom as a unique character is stripped away, with only Big Boss remaining.