Ties that bind

What anxieties does Shadow of Mordor capitalize on? Allow me to digress briefly, in order to properly paint the context of its key theme.

In one of the many insightful scenes of what might be Judd Apatow’s most underrated movie, This Is 40, the master scriptwriter depicts the allure of the brooding widower trope with more finesse than I’d be able to muster. The male protagonist — a husband and father nearing his 40th birthday — confesses to a friend who’s at a similar stage in life how he sometimes fantasizes about his wife’s death. They both then comment how, in this fantasy, their wives would pass away peacefully and the guys could then use that sob story to score some pity in their newly regained single stud lives — the point of that latent wish isn’t death and loss, it’s about reclaiming something given up long ago.

Apatow’s craftsmanship goes a long way in neutralizing the uncomfortable notion presented in this dialogue. The fact is, there are seeds of egotistic thoughts in the back of our minds that mature, mentally healthy people suppress pretty easily and which on their own don’t actually make anyone evil, though they sure can make us assholes if we let them. The place from which they seep into our consciousness, however, is dark and we’re rightly scared of it: that is precisely what Jung called the Shadow.

With this in mind, let’s consider Talion’s situation how it’s presented at the outset of the game.

In the opening moments of Shadow of Mordor, we guide the protagonist through a tutorial to cross swords with his son, skewer some orcs, then stealth kiss his wife and stealth kill yet more orcs. Repeated use of time-skips to transition back and forth between those tender and violent moments makes the symbolic meaning all but explicit. It can create a jarring sense of disconnect for some players, as the inner censor detects proximity to a transgression that’s too close for comfort. Ironically, it’s the aggravating texture of the sequence that might prevent us from noticing how effectively it primes us for the entire experience.

Let’s examine the intro sequence closely, as we would if it was a movie. At a glance it may look insignificant in the larger scheme of things, but let’s do what’s scarcely ever done when analysing games’ narratives: give creators the benefit of the doubt. Treat them as we would movie directors (after all, Christian Cantamessa² directs movies as well as games); assume the sequence is competently crafted exactly how it should be and that everything has a carefully weighed meaning.

Here’s a YouTube link to the sequence in case you need a refresher:

After a few words introducing us to Mordor, Sauron, and the Black Gate in the shortest time possible, the game starts off with the spirit-form Talion reminiscing about training sword-fighting with his son, Dirhael. This flashback is full of playful oedipal banter, if you can call it that, of the man-and-boy-comparing-swords kind:

Dirhael, the mighty chicken killer. You’ll have to hit harder if you want to best your father. Stay alert, Dirhael, your enemy will not always be as he appears.

Needless to say, the boy’s sword is noticeably smaller than his father’s.

Then, seamlessly, we transition from this:

To this:

Bold stylistic choice, you say?

The Black Gate is under attack by Uruk-Hai now, and after killing a few orcs with his son and escorting him to safety, Talion returns to the spirit realm. “Am I dead?” he asks no one in particular. “You were banished from death,” a flash of light somewhere in his peripheral vision replies. This time, he approaches the lifeless body of his wife, Ioreth, which launches him into another tender flashback. This is the brilliant one.

The infamous stealth kill- I mean stealth kissing tutorial. It caught some flak back in the day for making the unsettling connection between a display of affection to a loved one and silently brutalizing countless bloodthirsty orcs, which we proceed to do with the same motion for the rest of the game. For now, let’s focus on the scene that follows.

“Happy anniversary, my love,” he says, indicating that their relationship is now passing another milestone. Note how even the lighting in the scene follows the motion of Talion giving Ioreth flowers from Gondor, the civilized land to which she wants the family to go. We’re watching a master storyteller at work here, pay attention to details as if it was a Nicolas Winding Refn movie. Trust that nothing is left to chance.

Ioreth: Did you talk to my father? Talion: Yes, I did. And nothing has changed, he’s still very stubborn. Ioreth: I say we go anyway. Talion: Dirhael will not come willingly. Ioreth: There must be a better life than this. Talion: Not now… but soon.

Not very masterful, this dialogue, eh? It flows as naturally as a rhinoceros pulls a carriage, and by this I mean not too well and possibly with casualties. It’s the kind of dialogue we’re used to hand-waving in games as we play. Are you watching closely, though? Why is Ioreth’s father, of all people, so adamant on staying in the Black Gate? Why won’t their son, Dirhael, leave for Gondor with his parents if they go? What’s really happening here?

Look at Talion’s behaviour during that scene. If you were in Ioreth’s shoes, what would you think if your husband’s reaction to a question would be to suddenly pout and look away like a puppy that realizes it really shouldn’t have chewed on that shoe?

Did you talk to her father, Talion? Did you really?

This is the key moment that triggers players to connect with Talion. That it’s so easy to disregard as inconsistent writing makes it all the more powerful.

By the time Shadow of Mordor came out, people for whom the cinematic Lord of the Rings was a formative experience knew all too well what it’s like being grilled by one’s partner about not wanting to do something they feel anxious about. A relationship passes another milestone without going anywhere, held back by our anxieties that taking it to the next stage would cost us who we are. Gondor symbolizes this next stage, whatever it subjectively means to a particular player: going steady, moving in together, marriage, children. Mordor is Talion’s playground as an archetypal single male — he’s a Ranger, a defender of Gondor, would he maintain his sense of self as one of its more domesticated citizens? The Black Gate is the place between those realms where their relationship is stuck until he’s able to commit.

Whether we read into this scene or not, that’s how its message is received on a subconscious level. It’s a key part of a larger scaffolding that enables and encourages players to project their own feelings and problems onto Talion.

The dialogue doesn’t end there. Still in the tender mode, Ioreth says: “I’m just so tired of hiding here.” After another sudden transition to the violent mode during the attack we hear the sound of Talion slicing an orc before silencing his wife by covering her mouth: “Sh, we must hide now or we are both dead.”

Both dialogue and motion emphasize that those characters, and those two worlds represented by visual modes, are in fact in conflict, same as the previous time-jump where Dirhael was swapped for an Uruk with an appetite for Talion’s innards. The tender mode represents the protagonist’s explicit, manifest wish to be with his family, but his fear of commitment wakes the latent, transgressive wish to be free of them, pictured in the violent mode.

If you believe those two visual styles are just an aesthetic tool, consider the cinematography: they’re transitions, not jump cuts. Note that Talion never teleports between them, he simply walks as the world changes modes around him. From tender mode to violent, from explicit to implicit, from conscious to subconscious: he’s walking through dreamlike visions that reflect the two conflicting aspects of his personality. This sequence isn’t arranged into a subliminal message just for the fun of it, it’s exactly how Talion’s traumatized mind sees the events leading to his demise.

How is he traumatized, you ask? Remember that the first in-game shot we see after the short cinematic is of spirit-form Talion: by the time we meet him, he’s already dead. The Black Hand of Sauron, leading the attack on the Black Gate, has captured Talion, Ioreth and Dirhael and executed the Ranger’s son and wife in front of his very eyes. In doing so, he’s fulfilled Talion’s latent and transgressive wish, one born from fears and anxieties and one that the player is likely to at some level share with the game’s protagonist, before finishing him off in kind.

Before that happens, there’s still one last, extremely powerful blow that aligns players with the game’s theme and completes the narrative scaffolding for projection. Ioreth’s final words to her husband are notable, to say the least, in how they would push anyone’s devotion to their partner as close to the breaking point as possible.

We will be together my love! Soon! Forever!

Umm, what part of “till death do us part” don’t you understand?

It’s in that conflicted state of mind that we first see Talion rise as a spirit and start the dream sequence that functions as Shadow of Mordor’s interactive intro.

You might not like where I’m going with this: the entire game might as well just be Talion’s delirium mortis, a twisted dream of a mind dying in a struggle with itself³. Think back on the transitions between scenes of the tender, conscious mode, and the violent, subconscious mode which is the realm of latent desires. Transitions to the tender scenes are soft, calming even. It’s when dialogue prompts anxieties on which the game’s narrative builds its tensions when the jarring, sudden transitions to violence momentarily warp the screen. The featureless spirit realm stands between them like the Black Gate in Talion’s real life, a purgatory for his soul and a crossroads between the two worlds that gnaw at him — in one of them he’s a loving husband and father, in another he’s a Ranger fighting against the scourge of Mordor.

We all know which one he ultimately chooses. The guilt resulting from that decision and caused by Talion’s state of mind in his final moments gives life to a vengeful spirit that embodies the dark aspects of his personality. Celebrimbor’s existence enables Talion to offload the crushing guilt and act out his dark power fantasy of prowling Mordor, freed from familial ties and responsibilities, as the apex predator on a quest for righteous vengeance. It’s an ultimate realization of his latent wish, a reaction to anxiety about leaving this life behind and fully committing to his marriage by finally putting family’s needs before his.

Note how reasons for Celebrimbor’s and Talion’s coexistence make way more symbolic sense than factual one. Frankly, in-universe reasons for a human Ranger to suddenly be brought back as an immortal by the roaming spirit of a dead elf king are absurd. Despite the studio’s insistence on sticking to established Tolkien lore, there are no gravewalkers or undead in Silmarillion — one unbreakable rule in Tolkien’s magical world is that which dies is lost forever, always. On the other hand, the moment Talion comes to terms with the tragic events he’s somehow suddenly relocated to a tower right in the middle of Mordor and Celebrimbor finally appears before him in full grace, suggesting that the wraith’s emergence is connected to the Ranger choosing his preferred version of afterlife. Following this train of thought, Mordor symbolizes Talion’s corrupted psyche which he now has to try and cleanse of darkness as penance.