This past weekend, I finally got a chance to really dive into Wolfenstein: The New Order. (I know, the game has been out for a while, shame on me.) I think that Jim Sterling put it best when he said that Machine Games iteration on the Wolfenstein formula was one that "likes being clever, but loves being stupid." He meant it as a compliment, and I do as well. The bad B-movie camp of the game is played so straight that one could almost be forgiven for thinking that it is bad writing rather than an intentional design choice. (One look at the game's art book will assure you they knew what they were doing.) That said, I couldn't help but identify a certain, subtle dissonance between the game's story and the Nazi dystopian background of the setting.
One of things that immediately struck me about the game was how over the top, cartoonishly evil all of the villains are. (I know, many real life Nazi leaders were over the top, cartoonishly evil.) I felt like I was encountering another deranged sociopath at every turn, and it felt over done and disingenuous. Was Machine Games worried that I wouldn't get that the Nazis are bad? Why wasn't "They are Nazis" enough of a reason for me to be killing the bad guys? Why did I need elaborate mini-games where I get tested on my Aryan-ness or tortured for laughs? Especially given that Captain B.J. Blaskowicz is about the most Aryan mother-fucker in the entire game. Seriously, he's a blond haired, blue eyed gorilla of a man.
I'm Not Kidding.
The longer I played the game, however, the more I started to notice a strange kind of dissonance in the story telling. For those who don't know, The New Order takes place in an alternate history 1960's where the Nazis won World War II, our hero has spent the past fourteen years in a catatonic state and awakens to discover that not only did the allies lose, the good ol' US of A is no more. For him, the war is still fresh and real. For the rest of the world, certainly most of Europe, the Third Reich has been ruling the roost for almost two decades. He doesn't hesitate for one minute to return to killing every Nazi soldier he can get his hands on, because in the world he knows, that's what a good, red-blooded American soldier does.
Here's the thing: It's been fourteen years since the end of the war in Europe. Twelve years since the United States surrendered. There is no war for B.J. Blaskowicz to return to. He's very clearly told that the resistance doesn't exist anymore. Nobody is fighting. It's over. The Nazis have won and everyone, everywhere, is doing der Guten Tag Hop Clop.
His response is to bust any surviving resistance members out of prison and start the resistance anew. The thing is, all of the members of the resistance are people who have been fighting against or had beef with the Nazis since the war happened. There are no young resistance fighters, they are all old soldiers with old beefs. If you chose to play the Fergus Reid timeline, he'll even call you out on it: "Who's going to take over when we're too old to strap on the holsters?" Even your new girlfriend, Anya, the nurse that took care of you while you were a human vegetable, has old reasons to hate the Nazi's, she had to drop out of college because of the war. But she, at least, has a somewhat fresh reason to be angry... the game starts in earnest after a group of Nazi soldiers "purge" the hospital she works in.
That's where, for me, things start to get strange. During the purge of the asylum, the head doctor and nurse (conveniently, Anya's parents) resist the Nazi soldiers and get shot for doing so. On the surface, this seems like a normal, cold blooded Nazi way of dealing with resistance: Kill them All. The problem is that the follow on dialog between the soldiers paints the incident in a very different light. One soldier asks the shooter, "What are you doing? We weren't supposed to purge the staff!" The shooter responds, in a panicked tone of voice "They attacked an officer on duty!". This is a case where a young, inexperienced soldier reacted to an unexpected threat with excessive force. It's something that comes up in our news all the time, though usually with police officers, and is something that many veteran soldiers and peace officers can identify with: the kid panicked.
Now, you might be tempted to say "But they are still bad, right? They were murdering innocent patients in a mental hospital!" Yes, you're right, that is bad. That is terribly bad and not something I would never condone. But think about this young soldier in context: the morality that says "anyone who is 'subhuman' should be killed" is likely the only morality he has ever known. He, nor any of the soldiers in that scene or most others in the game, know any different. That is their normal. That is the new normal for the entire Earth. What isn't normal is killing innocent civilians, like the Doctor, and that causes the kid to feel panic and remorse.
The disconnect becomes even more strong if you make a point of reading all of the random news clippings scattered around the game levels. In the past fourteen years, the Nazis have more or less eliminated violent crime, they have eliminated homelessness with their new "super" concrete, they have developed clean forms of energy, they have developed technology for cleaning up the radiation damage of nuclear weapons (which the game suggests will make using nukes more reasonable, but who are they using them against, themselves?). The world is not only settling into it's new order, but it is a world which is (in some ways) quantitatively better than the world that actually existed during the real 1960's. Sure, it's a warped and dystopian Nazi world, but it's a world that has peace.
And needlessly high tech knives.
Remember what I said about the resistance fighters all being old hats at hating Nazi's? The thing is that almost all of the crazy, ridiculously evil Nazi leaders you encounter are also old. War veteran old. Original, die hard, we're creating a new world order old. They are the true believers. If you listen to the random bits of flavor dialog between the enemy mooks in the game, they aren't nearly as committed to the cause as their leaders are. They're actually kind of easy to understand and identify with, they are soldiers and police officers who are just trying to live the best lives they can in the fucked up world that they live in, and here you come, old world relic B.J. Blaskowicz, to kill and maim and torture your way through them, trying to win a war that is long over. And to what purpose? Even if the resistance does kill all the Nazis (which isn't even their goal), they wont bring back the world that existed before. They can't.
The (literary) problem with Nazis is that you can't ever have them doing things that are too normal or mundane. If you have a Nazi do normal, mundane, everyday things, people might just catch themselves identifying with them. If you're going to have a Nazi butter toast, they need to butter that toast in the most sinister manner possible: with a bloody dagger, from butter dish made from a human skull, on bread toasted in a crematoria. Because if you don't go to that ridiculous of an extreme to make it obvious that the guy is evil, somebody is going to think to themselves "Hey, I like buttered toast too! What a swell guy!", and the moment they realize that you just "tricked" them into identifying with, nay, liking a Nazi, they will hate you forever.
Or you can make them absurd, so nobody takes them seriously.
The problem with The New Order is that if you think too much about it, the "good" guys start to seem like bad guys and the "bad" guys start to become sympathetic, which is bad, because, you know, they're Nazis. Think about that for a minute, Machine Games made a game with sympathetic Nazis. The reality of the game world may be a grim dark dystopia, but it's a world that is forever changed from the world that was. The soldiers that you so casually kill for no other reason than that they are Nazi's are just people trying to make a living. They aren't monsters. I wonder if that's why they felt the need to so freakishly exaggerate the villains and to do it often, so that we don't make the mistake of identifying with the bad guys. I'd like to give them credit for that level of philosophical subtlety, but it's more likely an unintended side effect of the game's campy-ness.
Afterall, the game only likes to be clever, it loves to be stupid.
