Up until a couple weeks ago, I’d never played
the original Final Fantasy 7. Of course, I know stuff about it. I knew there’s
a character who dies. I knew there’s music that goes like “hoo wee we-da-wee”. And
I knew about the opening shot. Because even though I had no idea about the broader context
of the story, this? This is electric. And then I played 2020’s Final Fantasy 7
Remake, and suddenly my obsession with the original’s opening shot makes complete sense
to me. Welcome to Midgar, home to a thousand soldiers, a million XP points, and one billion
tons of steel. Welcome to the great rotting pizza, the most literal manifestation of structural
inequity ever put in a game. Welcome to my favorite video game setting in years. In the original game, the first things you
see are stars and Aerith’s face, but in the remake, the first thing you see is infrastructure.
Actually, I take that back; in the remake, the first thing you see is the consequences
of infrastructure. A bird flies over miles of barren land, blasted clean like the surface
of a planet without an atmosphere. It keeps going. Nothing, nothing, and then in the distance,
not clouds but smog. And then, steel beams reach out like grasping tendrils in the haze,
and then suddenly we’re surrounded by it. An almost overwhelming amount of detail, skyscrapers
and trains and highways and people, and the music is about as ominous as it possibly could
be about the whole thing. A group of kids play on a playground until they’re struck
silent by a reactor in the distance. It took me a couple times to understand those
opening seconds of this scene. That desert, that barren expanse. It’s not that Midgar
was, for some reason, built in the middle of a wasteland. It’s that, before we even
see what MAKO power has accomplished, we see its cost. We see, as Barrett would say, that
the world is being sucked dry. But then, almost as quickly we’re in it and that outside
world is quickly replaced in our memories by the absolute density of modernity here.
For a game called “Final Fantasy,” these buildings don’t have much fantasy within
them- but they are...fantastic, aren’t they? We go from an empty world to a gleaming one,
with trains and skyscrapers and cars and it’s all so much that I almost forget that there
are any costs at all, and then that reactor goes off and reminds me all over again. There’s this near-sublime feeling that comes
from just these very opening scenes, of wonder and horror inextricably mixed with each other.
There’s only a few games I can think of that have come close to it- and I’ve already
said a few thousand words on one of them. But what’s fascinating about Midgar, and
what you’re well aware of if you’ve played even a little of the game, is that all this
is just half the city- and far less than half the story. Everything we’re seeing here
is on top of the “plate,” a giant metal disc that all these skyscrapers, train tracks,
and power plants are built on. But we spend most of our time below the plate, in the slums
of Midgar’s undercity. Because Midgar is a Can I show you my favorite part of the Final
Fantasy 7 remake? It’s this part, right here. There’s nothing that happens, really.
It’s not the fantastic combat system, or Tifa Lockheart, or this part where Cloud hits
his sword on a door frame. It’s just opening the door onto this vista and seeing the immensity
of the plate above you, how much it dominates everything below. It is terrifying, like somehow
living immediately below the death star. It’s also beautiful though! I mean the lighting
in this scene alone is just so unexpected, to be blasted with natural light after hours
of darkness and artificial illumination. Like I said in my Mirror’s Edge video, I feel
like I know what temperature this scene is, how welcome the warmth from the sun must feel. That beauty is also temporary though, because
even as I looked up and appreciated the light, I could see the construction happening over
the scant openings that were letting it through. The light was a bug, not a feature. Soon enough,
the entire underside would be sealed up and live in the dark. Because, of course, people aren’t evenly
distributed in Midgar. Rich people live up, poor people live down.
It’s not a new idea. In fact, it’s a terribly well-trodden one, from the mansions and basements
of Parasite to the sci-fi towers and alleys of Blade Runner, to like, real life. One of
my favorite instances of this is also one of the most obviously named- Akira Kurosawa’s
1963 film “High and Low,” which plays out its central conflict through elevation.
Toshiro Mifune as a rich and powerful businessman, living high on a hill, being forced to face
the violence inherent in his position. But, just because Midgar isn’t novel doesn’t
mean the metaphor isn’t powerful. One of the constants in these stories is how elevation-
and thus, class- asserts who is given humanity, and who has to fight for it. In “High and
Low,” Mifune literally looks down on the working class out of his enormous windows
in his elevated mansion and only actually considers them when one threatents his status.
In “Parasite,” the Park family view the poor as interchangeable at best and literal
monsters at worst, oblivious to the suffering they’re complicit in up until the very end.
And in Midgar, the story starts with It’s an assertion from the main cast that,
although they live “under the plate,” they refuse to be sealed over and forgotten
about. On the plate, your right to exist is a given- beneath, it has to be clawed to,
inch by inch. Due to the design of Midgar, residents of
the underside are constantly reminded of their position; the steel sky is the limit, they
can go no higher. Imagine how psychologically devastating it would be to see this ceiling,
all day every day, and know that there were countless structures in place to keep you
beneath it. By contrast, those lucky enough to live above
the plate are never reminded that the bottomside even exists. On top of Midgar, the people
who live underneath you might as well be a myth, they’re so out-of-sight out-of-mind.
At one point, you visit a “midgar museum,” one that includes a 1/10,000 scale model of
the city, and that model literally doesn’t even include the bottom half. Half of the
population, wiped out of perceived existence. What the game does so well is making you confront
all of the city, the top and the bottom, the gleaming towers and the decrepit scaffolding.
You don’t stick to the main streets in Final Fantasy 7, not even close. You will sidle
along rusting edges, stride through million-dollar lobbies, race along empty highways. The game
refuses to make Midgar an abstract concept; through your constant conflict with its infrastructure,
you are forced to reckon with its omnipresence. Once, in Edinburgh, Scotland, I went on a
tour of “Mary King’s Close.” It was a truly lovely ghost tour, but what I found
most fascinating and haunting was what “Mary King’s Close” itself was. Edinburgh was
built on many hills, and around 1500, the incredibly dense construction of the place
meant that buildings went down as much as they went up, sometimes ten or more stories
due to their layers and layers of basements. These basements were, to put it lightly, hellish.
They were small, smokey, cold, crowded, not particularly waterproof, downhill from everyone
else throwing their chamber pots out their window- would you like me to go on? No? Alright. As you can imagine, these basements weren’t
particularly desirable living conditions, and so they were always filled by the poorest
and most socially immobile residents. And one day, Edinburgh decided that it wanted
to move beyond the misery that was inherent in these many-basemented streets. They did
so by simply building on top of them. Mary King’s Close, the tour that I took,
was a series of alleys and rooms that had- of all things- the Edinburgh City Chambers
built directly on top of them. Theoretically, this was meant to drive all the inhabitants
out of the close. In practice, demanding that the least socially mobile parts of your society
up-and-move is a losing proposition. In practice, people remained almost entirely sealed off
from the surface for far longer than planned. And I’m not talking months or even years
here, but decades. The City Chambers were built in 1760, and the last family left the
Close in 1902. More than a hundred years of living and working underground, while the
City Council met directly overhead. Any book written about the underground communities
of Edinburgh, any ghost tour you take, lingers on how absolutely wretched the conditions
were under the streets. I guarantee you, your guide will give a whole spiel on what people
would yell as they were throwing their piss and poop onto the street, and what you were
supposed to yell if you didn’t want to be covered in said piss and poop. They’ll agonize
over how the plague tore through the community, and how bitterly cold it was during the winter.
And all this is true, of course. But I sometimes feel like these descriptions veer into miseryporn,
that we’re all there to just gawk at how awful someone’s life could be. It’s the
same with many fictional depictions of that high/low divide. It’s a really challenging
thing to do, to accurately show all the struggles of poverty, all the ways people are denied
their humanity, without making the whole thing a zoo to stand outside and go “could you
imagine being poor???” And this gets back to what I adore about Midgar,
because even though we see how inequality manifests on a daily basis, it doesn’t feel
like the game is spent wallowing in misery. On the contrary- Final Fantasy 7 often goes
out of its way to show how people are existing and finding joy amid trying circumstances.
Everything from food stands and incredibly detailed little farmers markets, to the clear
pride Tifa takes in her ability to make an...admittedly weird colored cocktail, to this lavishly animated
dance these two kids are doing on a rooftop. Like, look how much detail there is here!
Look how expressive they are! There is no gameplay purpose to this dance, nothing to
take from it except this beautiful feeling of life amongst hardship. This is backed up by the actual environment
as well. There’s this moment when you first see Aerith’s house, and Cloud vocalizes
some extremely out-of-character enthusiasm. “Here’s my house!” “It’s amazing.”
That enthusiasm really makes sense here though, it is amazing. The amount of life that’s
been brought back from the barren rock they were given is such a wonderful VISUAL
METAPHOR for this community that’s determined to
show their humanity, no matter what. (As for why Aerith’s house is this big and she has
so much land while everyone else lives in shacks……..I dunno). There are flowers,
there’s nature, there’s water that’s almost certainly irradiated with some kind
of mako-runoff, but it is still a place with created beauty, despite the best efforts of
the elite to shut them down. Simultaneously though, what this game does
so well is not settling for some blasé moral about the indomitable spirit of the poor.
Because as much as they can, and do, make for themselves, you can’t good-spirits your
way out of the oppression that comes from being a literal underclass. And the game doesn’t
pretend they should. Remember what I said it started with?
In FF7, the explanation we get for the unethical-ness of the power plants that literally encircle
the city is a good, catch-all type reason: they are sucking the life out of the planet.
But when I see these images, of the exhaust from these reactors being shot into the air,
when I see the proximity of working adults and animals and children to them, it’s not
the overarching planetary costs that come to mind; it’s the intimately human ones. There is a stretch of the Texas Gulf Coast
that has not one, not two, but six oil refineries that share a rather dubious distinction- they
each emit more of a chemical called “benzene” than almost anywhere else in the country.
Benzene is a colorless liquid that evaporates very quickly, it’s used to make motor fuels,
plastics, detergents, pesticides. It’s kind of everywhere, and I can basically guarantee
you’ve been exposed to a little benzene. Unless you live on that stretch of the Texas
Gulf Coast. Then, chances are, you’ve been exposed to significantly more than a little. Our normal exposure to benzene comes in trace
amounts from car exhaust, gas stations, cigarette smoke, forest fires- things that, if you’re
forced to spend too long around, you kinda get the sense that “maybe it’s not great
that I’ve been breathing this for so long.” If you live in Port Arthur, Texas, however,
your main exposure site is going to be from the Total Petrochemicals Refinery. It’s
an oil refinery that kicks out about 180,000 barrels of crude oil a day. It’s been refining
oil since 1936. And it takes up a huge amount of land on Port Arthur’s edge. There’s
a certain level of benzene in the air that the EPA considers “actionable”- that is,
a concentration that should be investigated, a concentration that’s cause for concern.
At the fenceline of the Total Chemicals Refinery, the amount of benzene were 148% of that level.
And what’s just beyond the refinery’s fenceline? Well… Port Arthur’s poverty in 2017 was triple
the national average. The majority of people who live there are black or brown, the median
household income is about thirty thousand dollars, and the lung cancer death rate is
off the f***ing charts. If you live in Port Arthur, you’re more than 50% more likely
to die of lung cancer than the US average, and three to six times more likely to suffer
from respiratory, nervous system, skin, and cardiovascular illnesses. This is what I mean when I say you can’t
good-spirits yourself out of being crushed by the upper class. No matter how hard you
work to beautify yourself and your immediate surroundings, there are some ways that being
poor is just a f***king death sentence. And that, shockingly enough, is why I ended
up loving Midgar as much as I did, because it demonstrates both the humanity that cannot
be taken by the elite and the ways that this kind of class structure necessitates fighting
back. It is a hellish manifestation of institutional power, but it is also beautiful and hopeful
and exploding with spirit. Midgar is not a model of city we should aspire
to. In many ways, we’re kinda already there. But I still find the life of this place remarkable,
its grasp of the grand and the intimate equally impressive. The best thing I can say about
it is after spending far too many hours wandering amongst it, I still get the same feeling I
had when first seeing that pull-back, years and years ago. I still feel that electricity.
Man I love Jacob Geller's work, it's so willing to dive into the emotionality of media and revel in what art can make, with a real thoughtful flair.
It's kind of the opposite of crap like cinema sins and whatnot.
I'm sure it's no accident that "Midgard" (with the D added) is simply the Norse name for Earth.