A Formal Analysis of Metal Gear Solid 4



       

        The pre-Briefing scenes of Sunny's cooking blend aspects of Big Boss's and Ocelot's speeches into compact but important clips. They reinforce MGS4's form as the culmination of the Saga's tropes while also representing the development of its narrative. 

Sunny's eggs, in conjunction with the titles of the first four Acts, visually represent all characters named Snake. Liquid Sun's yolks come out slightly flawed while Solid Sun's break immediately, suggesting Liquid Snake's superiority to Solid Snake as a clone. One of the eggs at the start of Third Sun holds two yolks, offsetting the other shell's single yolk, suggesting Solidus Snake's birth apart from Liquid and Solid. Twin Sun's yolks blend into one, suggesting the union of Solid and Liquid into the originary figure of Naked Snake whom MGS3 offered as a blend of both personalities. 

The lyrics of Sunny's songs likewise increase in complexity through compounding sequences, much in the manner that Big Boss describes as the road from zero to one-hundred. She sings, in order, a sequence within a single number (pi), a sequence of separate numbers (the Fibonacci sequence), a list of caustic elements off the periodic table that can combine to make explosives, and, finally, the names of stations along the Nose private line in Japan. Her songs about sequences form a larger sequence, emphasizing a process of culmination and recombination.  

    

The contents of her songs increase in the complexity of their sequences. Taking the visuals and songs of Sunny's cooking sequences alongside Big Boss's and Ocelot's speeches, we find that sets create a motif within MGS4: pi (a foundational set of one dwindling digit), the Fibonacci numbers, periodic elements, a train line, her songs in order, the creation of the Saga's Snakes in order of the games' releases, and Big Boss's set [0, 1, 2, 10, 100]. Through these sets, MGS4 creates an image of inorganic, digital, forward-moving processes undertaken to no end other than to move their sets forward another slot – perhaps as a commercial videogame series might progress to no meaningful end except continuing its existence.

By taking zero “back to nothing,” we might assume that Big Boss effectively ends the Saga once and for all. However, MGS4's final scene suggests forthcoming conflicts within the Saga's fictional universe. MGS4 visits the Saga's end-game trope of an Ironic Twist. Rather than ending on Otacon's and Snake's conversation, MGS4 ends on the images of Sunny's eggs, which she describes as “kind of like the sun.”  

At the end of Act III, Ocelot describes himself, Snake, Zero, Big Boss, and all of their conflicts as “shadows” that cannot be erased so long as the sun exists. MGS4 takes the sun as an image to represent the premise upon which the Saga's culmination builds. 

The well-cooked egg – the sun – the number zero – the cell – all serve as different forms of the same ominous ideograph: a set of images. As no war can end war, the Saga's dying generation leaves Sunny's generation the opportunity to make its own mistakes. Sunny holds the future's possibilities in her hands as Zero and Big Boss had once held those of the Patriots' generation in theirs.
 


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