Mario Dali: The Super Surrealist Brothers 1

Sometime last week, I was able to wres­tle down and inca­pac­i­tate some free time. My tem­po­rary free­dom from the tri­als of young adult life thus­ly assured, I decid­ed that I would spend my new­found tem­po­ral allot­ment with my absolute favorite thing: video games. Unfortunately, I’ve been real­ly hung up on Dishonored late­ly, stuck at this one part which com­pels me to sneak into a mas­quer­ade ball unde­tect­ed and take out one of the host­esses. Apparently I’d made too much bang­ing and clang­ing and death­noise ear­li­er on in the level, and now none of the City Watch were will­ing to be taken unawares. This boded par­tic­u­lar­ly ill, as I was now forced to choose between some shady, irri­tat­ing save-scumming, or bar­rel­ing through the party, gun and sword ablaze, hop­ing to kill or be killed and anni­hi­lat­ing any sat­is­fy­ing stealth the level would oth­er­wise have afford­ed me.

My frus­tra­tion hav­ing ruled out play­ing games for the time being, I chose to turn next to my sec­ond favorite thing. Unfortunately, it’s pret­ty hard to get hold of an albi­no don­key, a Peloponnesian fire-walker, and a fish­ing pole on such short notice.

My next recourse was to my third favorite thing: talk­ing about games. Ensconced in a brac­ing con­ver­sa­tion about the impact of Mega Man on mod­ern gam­ing, its endear­ing cheesy plot and set­ting, and its almost sub­ver­sive meth­ods of teach­ing new play­ers (I am, after all, a suck­er for a good tuto­r­i­al), I hap­pened to com­pare Mega Man’s mostly-predictable sci-fi set­ting with those of the Mario games. And before I could stop to think about it, my unchecked motor-mouth pro­duced this gem: “Mario is sur­re­al­ist!”

I said it on a whim, but as I thought about it later I began to ask myself – could it actu­al­ly be true? Sure, the Mushroom Kingdom is weird and all – the premise of the plot and back­sto­ry of the games is kinda off as well. Does that real­ly make it sur­re­al­ist?

Well, I think here we need to make like a rushed high-school vale­dic­to­ri­an and seek the sage advice of dear old Merriam-Webster. Quoth the good lady, sur­re­al­ism can be defined as “the prin­ci­ples, ideals, or prac­tice of pro­duc­ing fan­tas­tic or incon­gru­ous imagery or effects in art, lit­er­a­ture, film, or the­ater by means of unnat­ur­al or irra­tional jux­ta­po­si­tions and com­bi­na­tions.” For you stuffy aca­d­e­m­ic types for whom the use of any dic­tio­nary but the OED is anath­e­ma, here ya go. I’ll be back in a jiffy with your freshly-pressed tweed jack­et and a copy of the New Yorker.

Of course we’re all famil­iar with how deep the rab­bit hole of weird­ness goes: Mario Samelastname, the plumber for­mer­ly known as a car­pen­ter for­mer­ly known as Jumpman, and his broth­er Luigi Siblingsfirstname, are down in the New York sew­ers one day. For some rea­son. When, much to their sur­prise, they dis­cov­er a pipe which leads, not to some Brooklyn bach­e­lor pad’s toi­let, but to the Mushroom Kingdom.

The Kingdom is inhab­it­ed by var­i­ous talk­ing ani­mals, veg­eta­bles, and min­er­als (includ­ing, of course, the epony­mous mush­rooms play­ing the role of priv­i­leged major­i­ty). I don’t even need to tell you what hap­pens to the (oddly human) Princess Peach-in-Japan-then-later-in-the-US Toadstool: she is pil­fered away by the nasty Koopa King, who turns the denizens of the king­dom into blocks and leads the Mario Bros. on a wild goose – erm – turtle-chasefrom cas­tle to cas­tle in an attempt to break her free.

Along the way, the broth­ers Mario are aided in their quest by var­i­ous power-ups: mush­rooms which allow them to grow big­ger and rean­i­mate when they die, stars which grant a tem­po­rary invin­ci­bil­i­ty, and the ever-popular Fire Flower, which allows our mus­ta­chioed, coverall-clad dare­dev­ils to release bounc­ing spheres of flame from their closed fists. The few remain­ing Toads (the pre­ferred nomen­cla­ture for the sen­tient ‘shrooms) are being held in the faux-hideouts, to serve as dis­trac­tions from the princess­es’ actu­al loca­tion.

So, all of this is pret­ty strange, biz­zare even. But, is it enough that a work present a vis­age of, as Ms. Webster is fond of putting it, the “fan­tas­tic and incon­gru­ous” in order to be con­sid­ered sur­re­al­ist?

In order to answer this ques­tion, it will be help­ful for us to turn to the open­ing page of the chap­ter of his­to­ry belong­ing to sur­re­al­ism. Andrè Breton, the “founder” (if there could be said to be one) of the sur­re­al­ist move­ment, pub­lished The Surrealist Manifesto with the help of his like-minded peers in order to estab­lish a philo­soph­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion, specif­i­cal­ly regard­ing psy­chi­atric treat­ment. Though sur­re­al­ist art is the philosophy’s lega­cy, Breton’s inten­tion was to engen­der a par­a­digm shift in our think­ing about our own minds, and those of oth­ers.

See, Breton worked in a hos­pi­tal treat­ing (what would now be referred to as) PTSD, using Freudian psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic tech­niques, with par­tic­u­lar­ly heavy empha­sis on those bits involv­ing the role of the uncon­scious mind in con­struct­ing con­scious psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­na and dream the­o­ry. Dreams were thought to be semi­con­scious ema­na­tions which would be able to clue us into the uncon­scious self’s activ­i­ties, and there­fore lend insight into the alle­vi­a­tion of those pesky con­scious symp­toms.

Surrealist art, there­fore, came to be judged by how well the visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a dream­state could be brought to a con­scious fore, and exam­ined by oth­ers, allow­ing us to exam­ine the work­ings of the human sub­con­scious through a cor­po­rate expe­ri­ence of an individual’s inner work­ings.

Pretty heady stuff, to be sure. Does it mea­sure up in the world of mod­ern psy­chol­o­gy? No, though per­haps it should. Regardless, now we have a mea­sure by which we can deter­mine Super Mario’s surreal-ness…osity. Rather than set­ting it up against dis­parate visu­al media on the grounds of its weird­ness (and it’s already tak­ing Princess Peach’s cake in that respect), we’ll have to take a look at how accu­rate­ly the game por­trays a surrealist’s under­stand­ing of the dream­state.

The sur­re­al­ist phi­los­o­phy is based on the idea that con­scious obser­va­tion of the typ­i­fied ele­ments of dream­states can deter­mine what’s going on symp­to­mati­cal­ly (both in indi­vid­ual minds and our own).

Imagine, if you will, the Mario Bros., plumbers extra­or­di­naire, asleep in the Brooklyn flat they share, Bert and Ernie-style. Accept, also, that they ply the same trade (to rough­ly equal effi­ca­cy), get along fair­ly well, and that Mario has a roman­tic inter­est over whom Luigi feels some pro­tec­tive impe­tus, due either to unre­quit­ed affec­tion or “brother’s long-term girlfriend”-syndrome.

You know what? Scratch that. We don’t even have to take that many steps. Let’s just imag­ine that there are two broth­ers who, for cir­cum­stan­tial (and unim­por­tant) rea­sons, find them­selves spend­ing a good deal of time togeth­er dur­ing the day, and then sleep­ing in the same bed­room that night. For our pur­pos­es, that alone will be more than enough.

So, in our hypo­thet­i­cal sce­nario, one broth­er wakes up to the other – um – mak­ing waf­fles, or some­thing. He bursts into the kitchen, eyes wide, pupils dilat­ed, ges­tic­u­lat­ing wild­ly, unaware of the sus­pi­cious breeze being allowed free reign of his trousers by way of his neglect­ful but­ton­ing.

“Dude, I had the weird­est dream last night!”

He pro­ceeds to regale his beloved sib­ling with the details: there they were, plumbers hang­ing out in the sew­ers, except they had the same last name, and one of their names was also their first name for some rea­son. They dis­cov­ered a pipe to a land filled with what were sup­posed to be mush­room peo­ple, except they had all turned into blocks, and if they ate the remains of the peo­ple impris­oned there­in (!) they would get more pow­er­ful some­how.

Starting to get the pic­ture? The more one exam­ines the set­ting, plot, and char­ac­ters of Super Mario Bros., the more plau­si­ble the whole thing begins to look as a pasta-infused night­mare one might have on the loose end of a Saturday night binge.

This is sur­re­al­ism in a nut­shell: imag­ine if one were to actu­al­ly have this dream, and recre­ate it in video game form. Presumably (at least accord­ing to the post-Freudian tenets of the sur­re­al­ists), we’d be able to deter­mine which ele­ments came from where in the real world and how they affect the con­scious psy­chol­o­gy of the sub­ject. Could the mis­match of tropes and shouts-out to var­i­ous well-known gen­res be use­ful as a clue for how the game might be inter­pret­ed? Just how many of these cues and call­backs to the real world are there?

• For one thing, we have the car­toony, borderline-racist Italian stereo­types, exag­ger­at­ed to the nth degree in the game/dream world (Mario’s name actu­al­ly comes from that of a real-life port­ly Italian with whom the Nintendo of America exec­u­tives were famil­iar).
• Several key ref­er­ences, not the least of which being the mush­rooms and their physics-warping attrib­ut­es, come from Lewis Carroll’s well-known Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (a book in which, you’ll recall, the tit­u­lar pro­tag­o­nist awak­ens at the end to dis­cov­er it was all a dream).
• Okay, okay, the Mushroom Kingdom is being ter­ror­ized by a giant frig­gin’ lizard. Remind you of any­thing?
• The Princess her­self is some­thing straight out of a fairy tale, what with her wear­ing pink, being a gen­tle­woman of noble birth amidst a sea of fan­ta­sy crea­tures over whom she rules in a loosely-organized Kingdom. Not the men­tion the fact that she’s con­stant­ly get­ting kid­napped and locked in gener­ic medieval stone struc­tures…

So, what we have here is a hodge­podge of estab­lished fan­ta­sy and expe­ri­en­tial real­i­ty, con­tort­ed and exag­ger­at­ed in just the way we would expect were we to have dreams con­tain­ing these ele­ments. This is a way for us to look at games, even immi­nent­ly pop­u­lar and long-lasting bas­tions of the indus­try like Super Mario Bros., that could help us exam­ine the fan­ta­sy worlds we choose to inhab­it, our moti­va­tions for doing so, and the reper­cus­sions of our day­dream­ing and sub­se­quent con­stant reor­ga­niz­ing and con­flat­ing of our imag­i­nary and real lives.

Or per­haps I’m read­ing too much into this whole thing. Maybe it’s coin­ci­den­tal that Super Mario Bros. just hap­pens to ren­der the para­me­ters of a dream­world for us so per­fect­ly. After all, you might be ask­ing, what about this game in par­tic­u­lar makes it spe­cial and unique? Aren’t many plat­form­ers, just like ani­mat­ed “fam­i­ly” films and car­toons, cre­at­ed from a thick mis­match­ing stew of old and new worlds – fan­ta­sy and real­i­ty – and writ large for our enter­tain­ment, com­posed of memes that we would immi­nent­ly rec­og­nize and iden­ti­fy with in our cul­tur­al mileu?

After all, it’s not like Nintendo of America would later con­spire to make the surrealism/dream con­nec­tions even stronger by re-releasing a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent plat­form game, re-skinning it, and make it out to have all been a dream…

Wait a minute…