I’m playing through Final Fantasy VII these days (alongside, y’know, Spider-Man 2 and the ever-present siren song of Destiny 2) for the first time in fourteen years. It’s a lot different approaching it as someone in his thirties versus a guy in his late teens and it’s cool to revisit the story and see some of the things I missed the first go around.
What’s especially striking about playing this 1997 game in 2023 is how prescient it still feels. The conflict the game opens on is one between a group of eco-terrorists and a megacorp. The megacorp, Shinra, uses massive generators to harness the Planet’s energy into Mako. Mako fuels modern life even as its harvesting robs the Planet of energy and kills plants and animals. Shinra, of course, doesn’t care about the ecological impacts — profit and controlling the masses is far more important to them.
It’s not exactly a subtle oil metaphor, and, frustratingly, the notion of people being willing to kill a planet for profit hasn’t aged a day (if anything, it’s grown more dire). I’m at the part of the game where it takes a bit of a turn, some conspiracies get revealed, and stopping the ecocide takes a bit of a back seat. But Shinra and the threat it represents is still there, even if the nature of its ecocide does get a little more fantastical.
Ecocide wasn’t exactly a revolutionary concept in 1997 — this was the age of Captain Planet and healing the ozone layer, after all. But it is remarkable to revisit a work from nearly thirty years ago and realize that we’re still having the same conversation, that the cartoonish capitalist villains are as relevant today as they were back then. As Talking Headssaid, it’s the same as it ever was.
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger and his team have an essay about the publicity image — advertising. In it, they argue that advertising, as it existed in 1972, had a way of warping the way people saw themselves. These advertising images — someone with a new car, new dress, new pack of cigarettes — created a newfound need in the viewer:
The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
The false promise of this envied future still lives today, but it’s spread beyond the artificial realm of advertising to the day-to-day. Social media, in allowing us to share our curated lives, creates this illusion that your friends are out there living their best lives day in and day out, and so if you’re spending your weekend on your couch not doing anything, you’re missing out. See how much fun they’re having? Why aren’t you living a life that makes others jealous? Modern advertising is being subsumed by influencer culture; now people who professionally have those Great Lives can swear by one product or other that, with the implicit promise being that you could live those lives too if you do things just so. All of this could be yours.
In Berger’s opinion, this envy was the result of a society “which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way,” where “the pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless.” The individual can either become “…fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes…” and strive for a full democracy (“…which entails, among other things, the overthrow of capitalism…”) or they can fill that gap “with glamorous daydreams.” Fifty years later, we’re in the same space, the same tensions of the promise of an ideal society and the reality of what is. Within the United States, my generation was promised an American Dream, instead we find it out of reach. That powerlessness that Berger describes is still present, compounded by a hollow promise that’s been dangled in front of us not by advertising but by an entire societal expectation. The idle daydreams of an ideal life you see on Instagram make for an escape from that tension. The other side is a yearning for a societal upheaval that will allow for if not that classic American Dream, then perhaps a new one. As Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic five years ago:
Why would young people feel such revolutionary fervor? Maybe it’s not because Millennials have rejected the American dream, but rather because the economy has not only blocked their path to attaining it but punished them for trying to.
There’s a discussion in media criticism about whether or not something “holds up,” about whether a work that was lauded when it was created is as good now. By the same token, there are works that take on new meaning as time has gone by and society has changed. Ways of Seeing was written fifty years ago, but its arguments about the ‘publicity image” feel all too relevant to contemporary Western existence. The environmental message of Final Fantasy VII may have been what was hip then, but today it feels even more urgent than it did in the late ’90s.
It can be frustrating that works decades old feel as prescient now as they did then, when the malcontents of a piece are still felt today. But contained with them is a decided hope for what’s to come. The heroes do win at the end of Final Fantasy VII and the Planet is saved. Ways of Seeing ends with the simple epilogue “To be continued by the reader…” Berger and the others have said what they wanted to say, now it’s up to the reader to take that and strive for a better world. It’s the same as it ever was, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Essays, Not Rants! 