When promoting the upcoming Her Private Hell at the Cannes film festival, director Nicolas Winding Refn of Drive fame talked about a rare health condition he’d dealt with in the recent past. Wild story to hear, for sure, but one that surely would’ve resonated more with Death Stranding fans.
Refn spoke about how in 2023 he “died for 25 minutes,” an incredible amount of time to be anything nowadays, but dead, especially. It happened because of a very unexpected heart condition that caused fluid to leak into his lungs. That’d be strange for anyone, but Refn is the man who gives his likeness to the character of Heartman in 2019’s Death Stranding, a character who, due to a fictional disease the game calls myocardial cordiformia, is only alive for 21 minutes at a time, then has to go into cardiac arrest before resetting and living normally for another 21 minutes.
Hideo Kojima’s fame as a foreteller is deserved. Despite a highly convoluted plot, Metal Gear Solid 2’s lore showed Kojima’s insight into the world at its best, by showing the man’s awareness that the world would devolve into various echo chambers engaged in discourse of whatever context the powers that be fed them. He and co-writer Tomokazu Fukushima pulled that nearly a decade before Facebook became a big thing, but he’d been in the “predicting serious stuff through games with silly plots” business ever since he thought up algae-based fuel in the original Metal Gear games.
Kojima would further show his powers with Death Stranding, a game about a United States where most people decided to live in isolation, which would come out near the height of the COVID pandemic. The man’s abilities and overall antics have become such a celebrated thing in niche internet circles that comedic-inclined and too-serious conspiracy theorists alike have indulged in wild narratives, such as the one about an indie game made by a scammer definitely totally being a Hideo Kojima game in disguise, or the one about how a wacky-but-definitely-genuine surgeon from real life actually being a character from Metal Gear Solid 5.
Now, Nicolas Winding Refn dying (permanently) from a heart attack wouldn’t have warranted yet another piece about Hideo Kojima’s foretelling powers; that would simply have been a tragedy. It’s the fact that Refn’s heart caused him to die, have him stay in the “shadow realm” for 25 goddamn minutes, then casually come back to live and direct films at least as normal as the ones he’s used to putting out is absolutely wild.
So, one needs to wonder: Is Kojima still just really good at predicting stuff, or has he moved on to straight-up manifesting reality now?
