The Cynical and the Dead

11-11: Memories Retold’s Fascinating Bad Endings

We remember World War I as being a bad war. Greedy old emperors saw the weakening of other empires and in spite of signs of their own internal instability, jumped at the opportunity to plunder one another—but then, most histories which remember it this way are those of the empires from whom the nations born in the blood of World War I escaped! Weirdly—thanks to the visionary John Howard—here in Australia we have somehow created a national myth out of it, in spite of Australia still being ceremonially subjugated by the British Empire and fighting as British cannon fodder in one of  Churchill’s most harebrained schemes—that and to keep Australia white. Ever paranoid nincompoops, Australians (or at least Prime Minister Hughesy) believed that it would need the empire to protect its racial purity from the rise of Japan; a price well worth sacrificing seven-thousand surfers on the beaches of Gallipoli—and by sacrifice, Hughesy meant purging the weak in the glorious fire of war to reinvigorate the rapidly degenerating white race!

Conversely, those against the war, or at least conscription, believed the white race needed to stop killing itself so as to be able to protect itself from the increasing economic power of other races. Anyway, so bad was the first world war, a war fought with chemical weapons, suicidal infantry charges and the first major aerial bombing (and gassing) campaigns aimed at demoralising the enemy (killing civilians to teach them to hate the people who claimed they were trying to protect them from those killing them), that it was to be the war to end all wars. In hindsight, we now know the sequel blew the original out of the water!

 But we only remember World War I so negatively because the last generation of national poets were at the forefront of writing its history. Without the poetic potential of chemical and trench warfare (two images that have dominated the imaginary consciousness of war in the “West” for the past 100 years), we would remember the trenches as a sanctuary where soldiers enjoyed relative safety compared to the artillery and sniper and machine gun-fire they faced in open fields—indeed, even in the poetic imagery of the trenches, the greatest danger other than gas is  climbing the trench wall to feed the poppies of No-Man’s-Land (incidentally, the fertilising quality of corpses is an important poetic image of the Napoleonic wars). If it had been left up to the historians, we might look back as fondly at the allies fighting to stop the warmongering Huns as we do at the allies fighting to stop the warmongering Nazis in World War II.

Hell, the true horror of the era might be remembered as the Spanish flu pandemic if the few artists who painted it while the poets were at war were not the last remnants of the bedridden romantics. The eugenic utopias of sterilisation and extermination were delayed by the outbreak of the first world war (though for some, like Prime Minister Hughesy, the war was in and of itself a Eugenic strategy aimed at euthanising weak solders), so it was not until a decade or two after armistice that state sterilisation and euthanasia programs could put a stop to romanticism’s idolisation of the sensitive and the weak!

One of the most interesting things about 11-11: Memories Retold is that the trenches offer a respite more in line with the experience of soldiers than the experience of poets. Although the trenches in 11-11 are filthy, there is a stark contrast between the scenes where one wanders around chatting and playing cards with one’s comrades, and when one leaves the trenches and is at the mercy of artillery and machine gun emplacements. It is here, in No-Man’s-Land, that one also encounters the dying and the wounded. The impressionist-inspired aesthetic directed by Bram Ttwheam of Aardman Animation leaves enough room for the imagination to contribute to the expressiveness of such scenes in a way that a higher fidelity aesthetic would not. The multi-language performances of a cast led by the likes of Elijah Wood and Sebastian Koch are evocative enough that in concert with the aesthetic they take what would otherwise be a rather cartoony war story of a love waiting at home and a rather implausible search for a son missing in action, and elevate it to the level of clunky magical realism.

 But even more impressively, the ending is a fascinating and singular achievement. Usually a game with multiple endings has one good ending that is good in every sense of the word, with the bad (in every sense of the word, too) and alternative (ditto) endings not making much narrative sense. In 11-11: Memories Retold, this scenario is reversed and, fittingly for a war story, all the bad endings not only make narrative sense, but are credible conclusions to the plot.

 Kurt, the German soldier looking for his son, believes that Canadian officer and traumatised alcoholic, Barrett has summarily executed his son as a prisoner of war, and confronts him just as armistice is about to be declared. If Harry—Canadian war photographer under the command of Barrett and friend of Kurt whom he meets on the battlefield, who is hoping to impress a gal back home by sending her kinky dick pics taken in the trenches—chooses to fly a hot air balloon he has built while working on Kurt’s farm as a prisoner of war (I told you it was clunky!) to save his friend Kurt from himself as he seeks revenge against Barrett instead of flying home to his girl, then regardless of which of the several endings you get, the result is bleak.

The best scenario is that no one is killed, but even so: Harry returns home a traitor (he’s lucky he wasn’t executed), the drunkard and war criminal Barrett receives a hero’s welcome and promotion to the rank of Christmas Tree (the promotion of War Criminal to Christmas Tree remains a common PR and obfuscation strategy today), and Kurt is left conflicted about not revenging himself, rather than being relieved he did not! (Just as if he does kill him—which guarantees his own death, meaning he is essentially abandoning his wife and sickly daughter back home—he has still failed to find his son. As they say, revenge doesn’t bring back the dead; but, to be fair, neither does forgiveness!)

 Conversely, if Harry decides to fly home a hero who has escaped Germany, it’s still possible for everyone to survive—even for Barrett to redeem himself by sparing Kurt—but this ending, which would constitute the best one in any other game, is truly perverse. Harry abandons a friendship symbolic of our shared humanity to return home and play war hero to woo a member of the white flower brigade in spite of being disgusted by every minute of his war experience, and Kurt is humiliated by the mercy of the man who murdered his son.

Which, if one thinks about it, is actually the darkest, not to mention most cynical, ending of all. War has rewarded those who knew how to use it (Harry and Kurt) to advance themselves no matter the cost to themselves or others and humiliated anyone silly enough to have been motivated by something other than personal gain: Kurt.