SPEC OPS: The Line - Hearts of Darkness

The Price : £19.99 on steam, though I think I got it from a humble bundle sometime in 2016 maybe? Goes on sale for £3.99. The Total Play Time: 3 hr 21 mins on save file (Achieved 35/50, watched all 5 endings)

The Review:

Yeah, play it, it's pretty good and it goes on sale for like four quid.

My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is vietnam. It's what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money. Too much equipment. And little by little, we went insane. - Francis Coppola on Apocalypse Now

Near the end of Apocalypse Now, a cow is filmed being sacrificed by local tribespeople, people Colonel Kurtz had turned into his own private army. The scene is brutal, ritualistic, and captivating but ultimately it has the razor edge of real life violence that cuts deep into your gut. I think it’s because it is real. Art is Real. It accentuates the horror. The Horror. Years later I came to learn the tribespeople in the film are actual tribespeople. It turned out to be easier to hire an honest-to-god indigenous tribe in the middle of a dense jungle in the Philippines than it was to hire actors and bring them along. The tribe had sacrificed many animals during production though it was only after Eleanor Coppola, a documentary filmmaker, had witnessed one of them that she told Francis Coppola, the director and her husband, to include it in the film. After learning this and watching the ‘making of’ documentary I‘ve come to understand that Apocalypse Now is not just real, it's authentic. It's a genuine product of a harrowing odyssey built on the back of a real one, one that brought everyone who undertook it to their brink.

‘SPEC OPS: The Line’ is alright. It handles like it's not aged too well but it was still more than bearable, especially for a ~4 hour game. The characters are amazing, with Walker, the player's character, feeling exceptionally real. Still, it’s not perfect and while the story is incredible, a few moments undercut the point of it. Moments where your hands were forced one too many times, moments where you are painfully aware you are playing a game. From the shock of having (no choice but…) to bomb civilians with white phosphorus and witness their melted corpses to a few minutes later partaking in a ridiculous and over-the-top on-the-rails shooter segment where you are manically firing a grenade launcher into vehicles, rebels, and civilians, just cus it's kinda cool to watch ‘em explode. It's a very obvious flaw to point out, that a game portraying the horrors of war is uncomfortably comfortable with doling out massive ultra violence for seemingly no other motive than fun. Art is Fun. It’s not a flaw that I really care to talk about either because it’s not particularly deep and it’s far too easy to attribute this sorta problem to top down executive decision making. Where Francis Coppola was able to stake both his reputation from the first two Godfather’s, and (more importantly) several million dollars of his own money to maintain creative control over his project, I’m not too sure corporate America would be so happy to let Johnny Firsttime have an unfiltered run at creating a triple-A military shooter. Johnny Firsttime is actually called Walt Williams (amongst others) in this case and is a pretty interesting person, having written the story for the game. We’ll talk more about him in a bit.

The moments you do get a choice in, however, are fantastic. And grim. In any given situation it’s never made entirely clear what the ‘best’ choice is, nor even if there is one, challenging years of ingrained heroism injected directly into your veins from playing industry standard shooters. Suddenly, you aren’t a hero; the transition feels over the top but the effect it has on your actions is subtle. You, the player, change. When I started the game I refused to shoot the civilians we came across until they started firing first. Even if they were firing out of fear, we were armed soldiers after all, it was still self-defence. That was the water off of my proverbial feathers. I was unruffled and still felt virtuous. But as the story progressed, as the choices got harder, no solution felt good. Worse still, I realised my choices were more and more informed by emotion. I had stopped projecting my power fantasy onto Walker and instead started to relate to him. Where he got angry I got angry, where he was spiralling I was spiralling, where he didn’t know what to do, I was desperately searching for answers that wouldn't lose me our humanity. The artificial lines between ‘sides’ had blown away in the sand and only what I could readily grab hold onto was real. Towards the end of the game, after the over-the-top car chase sequence, I was presented with another choice, an act of mercy. Kill a man about to die a painful death anyway, to spare him his suffering, or walk away. As righteously as I had started out, the decision was frighteningly easy to make. I walked away, listening to his screams as he burned away into nothing. I had become Judge, Juror, and Executioner. Not Walker. Me. Art is Self Reflection.

I liked SPEC OPS and I do highly recommend it (on sale) but after finishing it and doing some research I've been inspired to write something a little adjacent to a direct review. Both Apocalypse Now and SPEC OPS take inspiration from Heart Of Darkness, a story about a few men’s descent into madness as they traverse through hell on earth to find a man who has lost his mind in a wicked embrace of the evil around him. All three stories embody a journey and a reflection of the self. All three reflect the guilt of man through the innocents they destroy. All three seek to make contemporary statements, and challenge the media of the time. In an effort to capture that which Heart of Darkness reveals in a new medium, it is interesting then that both Apocalypse Now and SPEC OPS should be so fraught with their own incredible challenges that embody their own odyssey. I started thinking about the film and the little tidbits I knew about it. How the cow was really killed on camera, that Martin Sheen had a heart attack during production, that Martin Sheen’s mental breakdown scene was him having an actual mental breakdown, that Laruance Fishburne was 14 during filming. Just little bits of context that set it apart from just another Hollywood blockbuster on vietnam. It got me thinking about what it takes to make something like that. It got me thinking about what it takes to make anything really. When reading more about SPEC OPS I found out it was in development hell for five years and that the writer of it, Walt Williams, had written a book, a book I have read in preparation for this piece, about his experiences in the industry. In it he takes an extremely masochistic stance on crunch culture and how suffering is integral to good art. He has since reneged a little, condemning the practice but clarifying its intoxicating nature for people like him, work horses. The more I read, the more I watched, the more I learned, the more I came to ask myself Why Is Art Sacrifice.

“This is why it’s important for writers to suffer, in one form or another. The good must be driven out until only the negative remains: jealousy, pettiness, desperation. And the greatest of these is desperation.” -Williams, Walt. Significant Zero . Atria Books. Kindle Edition.

Throughout his book, which I also highly recommend, it is very clear that William’s relationship with his work is love-hate. He makes constant acknowledgements throughout, for himself and on behalf of other people, that sacrifice is vital to create something you are passionate about, that you really feel something about. It was hard as a creative to take that in because whether I believed in it or not,the sentiment had already deeply moved me. I had suffered, and I had created. When I was most hurting I was creating as much and as often as I could. Journaling, lyrics, poetry, short stories, flash fictions, lore, TTRPG rules, pixel art, pen and pencil drawings, acrylics, coding, learning how to make music, even learning how to contort my body into beautiful and empowering positions (pole fitness). I find myself hard pressed to create when I feel good about myself. It's a truth I am aware of but until now, had not fully accepted. In a memoir / writing guide called ‘On Writing’ by Stephen King, he talked about his reliance on substances to push him along. He talked about how when he stopped doing them, he found it hard to write and initially worried that the writing came from such substances, or the duress they caused. He talked about how it comes to you, slowly, when you do it sober. You can learn it, and do it for yourself, and take all that power back. It was something I recognised but at the time did not relate to because I thought to myself, beyond a few drinks here and there, I do not abuse myself. I don't drink coffee or tea or energy drinks, I’m a vegetarian, I don't like spirits cus I’ve got a shitty stomach and that kind of alcohol really wrecks me. I don't smoke, I've never tried anything stronger than weed, and I don't even like that. I’m no saint, and I am aware of what my vices are but I am fairly pure when it comes to what I put into my body. So it never occurred to me that I could be so in love with being melancholy that I strive to be in that state as much as I can because I achieve the most while in it. I enjoy what I create while I’m sad. When I enjoy it too much, it elevates me, and I become sad that I am too happy and have nothing to overcome. I guess I abuse my own dopamine receptors and idealise sadness. To be happy is easy, to become happy is incredibly hard. To be sad is easy, to become sad is even easier. Years of abusing myself this way has defaulted me to such a state, and even with therapy I still find it a struggle to control myself.

Francis Coppola brought his wife and three young children with him to film Apocalypse Now in the Philippines. They weathered the military, explosions, jungle, heat, rain, typhoons, heart attacks, drugs, breakdowns, and other things alike, to support him. At the same time, he indulged in much of what the jungle had to offer, and seemingly, from the impression I had while watching the documentary, suffered some kind of ego death. While still a larger man, even after losing a lot of weight during filming, I felt he was just sinew on bones, meat and flesh on cold calcium that could flash you a charming smile and convince you to join him on his insane journey. He could do what the worst preachers and best politicians could do. Sell you their vision. It's just, there was nothing there to hang on to. You would not pull him up, he would drag you down. But you would be together, at least. It’s a theme true to both the production of these products, and the products themselves. Just as Coppola and his family joined him, along with all the cast and crew, Willard’s men followed him to the end. Just as it took a team of hundreds five years to make SPEC OPS, just as they suffered together and celebrated together, Walker’s team followed him to the end. The suffering is mutual and it is shared. It is perhaps what makes projects like this possible. Art is Shared. At a personal level, a level you can house within the cradle of your hands, art is not suffering. It can be about suffering, it can come from suffering, it can be despite suffering, but it is not suffering. Of that I am certain. At the scale undertaken by Coppola and Williams however? I will not say there can be no other way, I wish to believe it doesn’t have to be so, but when so much is at stake, livelihoods, not just for you but for your brothers and sisters you create with, their families in turn, you have no choice but to suffer together. To do so is to say Yes, I am right here with you, even if my eyes are hollow and my skin slough. The products they made were and still are brilliant, and they moved on.

While the parallels of these two journeys first inspired this piece, their respective endings are what gave me the closure to finish it. Just as the endings of their product’s stories promote introspection and self reflection in us, Coppola and Williams stepped away from the big scale and focused on the art in the palms of their hands. Where Coppola’s contemporaries , like Lucas and Scorsese, still follow the big budget, Coppola made it clear at the end of the documentary that he felt the future of filmmaking lay in the hands of us. Small scale and personal. He said that his hope was that people who normally wouldn't be making movies are gonna be making them and for once the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever, and it will become an art form. A lot of what he said has come to light, and even though a big budget has its place, it's the access that draws people in. To me, that's what art is. Art is Access. Williams also ends his book on a similar note, seeking to inspire the reader, talking about how the industry goal is to make money but games as an art form still have so much further to go. He encourages us to imagine a video game that inspires us. That explores what it means to be human instead of revisiting how it feels to be powerful; to be hopeful, to imagine all of this, and do it. There is something in how suffering gives you the power to no longer suffer, and the irony of it. There is something in how people who have ‘made it’ then seek to make it better for the rest of us. Art is Hope.