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Mortal Kombat 11 and Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp

Mortal Kombat 11 and Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp
Mortal Kombat 11 gameplay screenshot

When the first Mortal Kombat game was released in 1992, it pushed the envelope in terms of violence in video games. Outrage ensued. 28 years and several entries later, it is gorier and campier than ever, and so much fun.

American writer, activist, philosopher and filmmaker Susan Sontag wrote, in her widely read 1964 essay, Notes on Camp, which sought to define the then little-explored idea of what “Camp” means exactly:

36. And third among the great creative sensibilities is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalisation of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling.

37. The first sensibility, that of high culture, is basically moralistic. The second sensibility, that of extreme states of feeling, represented in much contemporary ‘avant-garde’ art, gains power by a tension between moral and aesthetic passion. The third, Camp, is wholly aesthetic.

38. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ of irony over tragedy.

The essay, published in point form – literally as notes – is made up of an introduction in five paragraphs, followed by 58 numbered points, through which Sontag proceeds to deconstruct Camp, in human behaviour, in arts and culture, architecture, and in taste.

Much in culture has changed since then, and some of the ways she defines camp have simply become mainstream behaviour. Others, like her views on correlation between camp and homosexuality haven’t aged very well.

Written 28 years before the 1992 release of the first entry of the seminal fighting video game title, the gory, the absurdly violent, the controversial, and oh-so campy Mortal Kombat; there is, of course, no way she could have foreseen the video game industry and included its hyperbolic and arguably campy depictions of brutal violence in her notes.

The year 2020 marks another 28 years since that 1992 release. Last year, April 2019, the franchise released Mortal Kombat 11. So popular was the title that it was reported as the best-selling game across both Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony Playstation platforms for April and May 2019.  By the end of the year, it was the fifth best-selling game in the very crowded multi-billion dollar video game market.

It has all the elements that fans have come to love, with some improvements. The fighting mechanism is better than ever, and the violence is even more graphic, to the point of self-parody. Finally, they’ve toned down the sexist oversexualisation of female fighting characters. Fighting games are also not necessarily known for their great storylines, what with the focus being on fighting. Yet, MK has managed to steep its existence in ever-developing lore.

It’s not exactly literary award-winning stuff, and it borrows heavily from concepts familiar within the fantasy genre. The basic premise is of a universe made-up of eight realms that exist in different dimensions. Key among these are four that seem to always be at war: Earthrealm, Outworlds, Edinia, and Netherrealm. The Elder Gods, who rule over all the realms, were unimpressed by the constant warring and they came up with the MK tournament, where the realms’ strongest warriors do battle on behalf of their realms.

And so with each entry into the series, the game developers add to the rather convoluted story to set up yet another round of blood-soaked fights, raking in billions. By the release of 2011’s MK 9, the developers included a time-travel plot, which rebooted the series timeline, and essentially allowed for a new version of the events of MK I, II, and III, with better graphics. Thankfully, it is not necessary to know the backstory to enjoy the game. And not that games are meant to be…but this is not exactly the realm of high culture.

34. Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn’t reverse things. It doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different – a supplementary – set of standards.

35. Ordinarily we value a work of art because of the seriousness and dignity of what it achieves. We value it because it succeeds – in being what it is and, presumably, in fulfilling the intention that lies behind it.

54. The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste. The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak.

Prior to this latest game, I had never thought to define MK’s over-the-top violence – the dismemberment of head and limb, the stabbing, the pools of blood that follow – as being particularly camp. Then, recently, after a decade of trying to convince my partner to join my gaming sessions, I got him to try out MK. It is now his favourite game, and he has spent many more hours playing the current title than I have.

One of the key defining features of the MK gameplay are the “brutalities” and “fatalities”, extremely graphic moves that can be used to kill or drastically reduce your opponent’s health meter. Each character has their unique set. Exhibit A, a personal favourite: Kitana Kahn, aka Lady Kitana, the 10,000 year old adopted daughter of the Outworld realm emperor, Shao Kahn; and as revealed later in the series, the biological daughter of Queen Sindel and King Jerrod, the rulers of the Eldenia realm, which was conquered and destroyed by her now-stepfather, the emperor Shao Kahn.

Mortal Kombat 11 character, Kitana. Gameplay screenshot.

Her weapons of choice are a pair of razor-edged steel fans and daggers. One of her more brutal moves involves throwing her steel fans at her opponent’s chest, cutting into them. She follows that by throwing two daggers, stabbing just below the collarbone, then she manages a horizontal jump towards her opponent’s chest and sticks the sharp heels of her stilettos deep into their chest. But wait, there’s more. Lady Kitana will have her fill, in blood. She manages to pull out the daggers she previously stuck in the collarbone and she jumps high up in the air and returns with full weight of her body behind the daggers, to stick them in either side her opponent’s neck, before pulling them out as blood sprays and dances across the screen, and somehow sticking them through the back of the opponent’s skull, who, miraculously is still not dead; staggering yes, just a tad dizzy. Being repeatedly stabbed in the neck, chest, collarbone, and skull, might do that to you.

“FINISH HIM!” echoes the voiceover. At this point, Kitana has no choice but to go for the literal jugular. She throws her bladed fans, the first at the neck, and off comes the head. Then at the waist, separating the torso from her opponent’s legs. Then as if dismembering a body into three wouldn’t do the job, for good measure, she throws a dagger at her opponent’s forehead, and it goes right through the skull. Finally, “YOU WIN!” proclaims the voiceover. “ROUND TWO. FIGHT!” and it’s on to the next round, the opponent is back in one piece, sans scars.

Each time, my partner who typically doesn’t enjoy violence in entertainment, and absolutely detests it in real life, would crack himself up with laughter at the over-the-top stylised ridiculousness of the violence. Here you can shoot and decapitate your opponent, but as long as their health meter was not depleted, they could rise, unscarred, to fight another round.

      1. The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’ One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

In 1992, back when video games were considered a family-friendly affair, that first MK release didn’t exactly inspire laughter from parents. In hindsight, those nineties graphics are almost comical in comparison to what is possible today. Nonetheless, moral panic ensued, parents protested. Possibly one of the best and most reasonable things to come out of that was the introduction of the age restriction system in gaming in 1993, which had not existed effectively in video games prior.

Since then, numerous individuals and organisations in different countries have still gone as far as the courts to get the game banned. Others have claimed it could lead to more violence among young people. OK, Boomer.

Fortunately for gaming enthusiasts, the overwhelming body of recent research into video gaming has come to the conclusion that there is no positive correlation between violence in video game violence and violent acts in real life. In fact, research into neuroscience has revealed numerous mental benefits from gaming. As for the outrage, it could be argued that it had the opposite effect. Instead of banishing MK to obscurity, it is now one of the most popular video game titles of all time. Nonetheless, the killjoys have remained committed to their crusade. Up until 2015, the game was banned in Germany for 10 years. The 2019 entry into the series is currently banned in Japan, Indonesia, Ukraine and the People’s Republic of China.

Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric — something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.

        1. To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.
        2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized — or at least apolitical.”

The current video game landscape offers a variety of violent video games, some with far more realistic depictions of violence than MK’s essentially comic-book style depictions of brutality. Think Grand Theft Auto series and even the recent Tomb Raider reboot trilogy. These two I have played and enjoyed. Still, the ridiculousness, the artifice, the commitment (and re-commitment through time travel and other dubious deus ex-machina moments) to its storyline – plot holes be damned, and the kitsch stylisation and choreography of MK’s violence makes it one of the most fun, and most decidedly campy gaming experiences of all time.

      1. The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful . . . Of course, one can’t always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I’ve tried to sketch in these notes. DM/ ML

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