McLuhan: The Next Generation
On Snake and Solid Snake
In the 2003 episode of the second season of Canadian television show Degrassi: The Next Generation (2001-2015), titled 'Hot for Teacher', Mr. Simpson1—known also in his younger days as ‘Snake’—says in a 'Media Immersion'2 class:
Mr. Simpson: The medium is the message. Does anyone know who said that? Marshall McLuhan, the godfather of modern media and communications and did you know McLuhan was Canadian?
(Mr. Simpson keeps talking.)
Sean: Hey. How was your quality time with Ms. Hot Sauce?
JT: Hot and saucy.
Sean: Full report now.
JT: First I did one of these. Oops.
(JT drops his pen on the ground and Mr. Simpson picks it up.)
JT: Then she bent down to pick it up.
Mr. Simpson: JT is this yours?
JT: Yeah.
Mr. Simpson: You want to pay attention? Okay.
JT: Anyways you guys can’t imagine the things I saw.
One of shamanic McLuhan’s many oft-quoted lines is,
Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition.3
This idea is illustrated with reference to Poe’s sailor in “The Maelstrom,” (A Descent into the Maelström) and we are now obliged not to attack or avoid the strom but to study its operation as providing a means of release from it. The maelström has the same conical structure as Dante’s Inferno, to which McLuhan also referenced in terms of the poet’s dream for men united in an inclusive consciousness which might be achieved through a social consciousness electrically ordered.
Surfing became the metaphor for navigating the World Wide Web.
Degrassi Junior High School and Degrassi High School also share a conical structure, and serve as a contemporary illustration of a medieval concept of Hell.
Snake/Archie Simpson passes through circles (grades) of Degrassi in order to evolve into the Virgil-like figure of Mr. Simpson, representing the full temporal span of a human life. Mr. Simpson is however also an avatar of the Virgil-like McLuhan, who migrates constantly across televisual and filmic universes, from Mr. Simpson’s ‘Media Immersion’ class, to his most famous rescue of Woody Allen, to the healthcare of Junior Soprano.
An avatar is a puppet in control of itself.
Snake/Mr. Simpson is trapped in Degrassi until eternity ends, but his role, as computer class mentor and eventual principal, is to teach the children not to attack or avoid the strom but to study its operation as providing a means of release from it. Degrassi’s hellscape of computer paedophiles, bullying, eating disorders, suicide, self-harm, school shootings, the battle of the bands, exams, HIV/AIDS, rape and murder can be survived with recourse to the pattern recognition learnt in Mr. Simpson’s Media Immersion classes on McLuhan.
Solid Snake, hero of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear game series, the avatar you play, is voiced in English by Canadian David Hayter. Solid Snake ages across decades of game releases, representing the full temporal span of a human life. The first eponymously titled game in the Metal Gear series was released in 1987, the same year that Degrassi Junior High began.
Aside from the fact that the 14th Century Divine Comedy was in any case the first video game by way of its levelled structure, the Metal Gear Wiki makes note of Kojima’s intertextual reference to Dante,
Dante Alighieri's narrative poem largely influenced the storyline of Metal Gear Survive. The location Dite, the Charon Corps, and the AI pod Virgil AT-9 are all named after a location and characters from the poem. In addition, Goodluck quotes from the poem and once refers to Virgil as "Beatrice", another character from the poem.
1998’s Metal Gear Solid saw the game move from two to three dimensions. Nevertheless it did retain, across a number of camera modes, a range of perspectival planometric and isometric esque views which emphasise the nature of the video game as an evolution of puppetry—a form that was banned in England from 1469 to 1570 for its associations with witchcraft. There was supposedly, a revival of puppetry that came with the Renaissance, to which the Divine Comedy contributed.
McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media (1964), a game is a machine that can get into action only if the players consent to become puppets for a time. A major game today is that of information overload. To win the game is to recognise oneself as a puppet and become a puppet self-controlled. In Edgar Alan Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelström’, to which McLuhan demonstrated our need for pattern recognition, the need not to attack or avoid the strom but to study its operation as providing a means of release from it relays the possibility of being a puppet self-controlled, someone who studies. McLuhan cited Kierkegaard on the nature of life as a thing which can only be understood backwards despite our living of it forwards. In Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelström’, the descent itself is told by the narrator in past tense. One’s past is self-puppeteered and recognised through narrative.
The Metal Gear Wiki states that after his involvement with ‘FOXHOUND’, Solid Snake went into “semi-retirement in the Canadian wilderness.”
Archibald ‘Archie’ Rupert Simpson.
‘Computer’.