top of page

Postal is an American Masterpiece.

(Note, this is a rough Draft and if you are reading it, first off, thank you, second off, please be aware that there is a lot of editing and work to be done, so please try not to judge as most of it is still under heavy construction.)

Postal is a dark comedy about Mental Illness, Racism, War, consumerism, class disparity, and feelings of self destruction and suicide. The games and the movie tell the story of the Postal Dude a protagonist that (depending on the game or movie) is either a violent psychopath or a whimsical violent psychopath.

 

The first game has a far darker tone that I am only barely qualified to speak on as I never played it in ernest. The themes of Self destruction and Suicide are more heavy as the game is not as willing to lighten the mood with jokes, showing the player character to be unhinged and only getting worse, that's about all I know. It was one of those games like Duke Nukem that was played in hushed tones or among the rambunctious laughter of latchkey kids.

Postal 2 is a dark comedy about post 9/11 America; the themes it touches on and the very real anger it stems from make it one of the greatest Comedies in the medium. It's core message and feel were also translated into one of the best Video Game adaptations of all time.

One more pitstop on the "Hear me out express": Postal as a series depicts a world where everyone is a hair away from pulling out a gun and shooting someone.  If that in any way is not acceptable as a topic, this is your exit. I am not in any way attempting to make a value judgment on what anyone other than me thinks about the efficacy of dark comedy and the right or wrong of punching down humor. Yes, I speak from a place of privilege, no, this does not mean I condone [ANYTHING] or [ANYONE] [EVER][BACKWARDS AND FOREWARDS IN TIME]. 

 

All that to say: While I do think Postal takes some gross shots at undeserving targets, it is also clearly about something more than just the people it pokes fun at, it is a farce about the ills of American living and while I can't prove that with science or say that validates all of the series more questionable decisions I can vaguely gesture to this art from the first game and say that there is at least SOMETHING more on the menue than "mean humor"

 

You Don't even need eyes to know what this painting is about. 

Now, this is the last stop on the "I'm not trying to offend anyone" express. Postal is a gnarly world and if that's not what you wanna have in your headspace, we can talk about other things in other articles. Until then...

Part 1: Postal 2

Postal 2's world pulls an old video game trick to tone down a lot of it's predecessors edge by making the NPC's "dummies". Idiots who go around saying stupid shit, being radicalized, abusive, antagonistic, racist, dismissive, every -phobic in the book. There isn't anything that makes it "OK because, actually" and that is kind of the point of liking dark humor. It isn't OK; it doesn't come from a good place. That is the point of playing a bad game or telling a mean joke. 

 

Unlike other open world shoot-em ups of the time, progression comes in the context of "getting chores done". Our interactions with the world are made to be more similar to how a player interacts with their own "piece of shit" town. The game encourages the player to see their grievances in the beautifully rendered sandbox and allows the emergent gameplay (a fancy way to say you can go postal for fun in between missions) to come not for a sense of gain, but just for the fun of it. While the game's scripted moments have clear villains, you always get a sense that the hair-trigger town of Paradise, full of Americana-sick assholes is what you really are fighting against every step of the way. Being frustrated with society is such a common and general sentiment that the main character is less of a personality and more of a cipher for the player. When you play as the Postal Dude, your choices are set at a 1:1 value with the players need to cause violent retribution. No one is TELLING you to cut in line at the bank with one well placed sniper shot. No one is going to reward you for not doing that either. The player sets the tone of the game and unluckily for your victims the price of admission to the gun show.  


As an example of the opposite effect: When I play Grand Theft Auto V, the excellent writing and acting causes my personal willingness to butcher innocent people to be portioned to my current in-game character:

 

Michael often makes me think about how I would feel if some criminal murdered MY wife or kids. Even if his personal bar of "do unto others" is... only normal for a person living in Grand Theft Auto V, he has a ember of sympathy.  

Franklin clearly wishes out of the thug life, so that too stops me from going crazy since I don't want to see him fall back into it either. To him, crime is the old way and he wants to do better... sometimes...maybe?

 

Trevor doesn't have this problem because he is almost too cartoonish for me to believe he is a struggling addict and not The Joker from the hit film Suicide Squad. 

 

Postal 2 has a cast of Trevors who run the shops, police, construction, mall security, Chinese restaurant, church etc. so you don't quite feel like you are participating in a simulation of a "mass murder" as much as a particularly violent episode of South Park. 

So, using the trick of filling the world with "dummies" the game tries to shift the tone from "The Earth Hungers" to "You Gotta be fuck'n kidding me". The mental illness The Postal Dude experiences is now a wacky thing that fits in a world where Gary Coleman carries an AR-15 to book signings. Smoking crack isn't a sign of personal degradation as much as a cool thing loners do before they decapitate a cop with a shovel.

There is one theme that continues into the base Game of Postal 2 and that is the crushing of the modern American man by an uncaring and spiteful system of government. 

The Postal Dude is in an unhappy marriage. He clearly suffers from a form of antisocial disorder and no one around him would bother to help if they could. His boss (the games Director, Vince Desi) fires him during a clear economic depression, his town is a vice den courting anarchy daily and they are all armed to the teeth. The way the Postal Dude sees it the world is his antagonist and it will never give him rest. The grotesque human shaped monsters who inhabit Paradise will do everything in their power to stop him from succeeding in any task..
 

As I stated before; Postal 2's true enemy is the system that makes your fellow man your enemy. The bigotry you were taught that makes you mutter a goat joke when you enter the middle-eastern owned shop. The Impatience of waiting in line at an opulent bank that only bothers to pay one teller, the unreasonable nature of mob mentality, the drudgery of menial labor and the shame that comes with lacking higher qualifications. All of these are symptoms of a broken system that allows an entire town to be so economically depressed and so radicalized on the American dream that they can commit mass shootings EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK and then just get back to their lives knowing that they will do it again tomorrow.

To say that none of this was intentional is to believe the truly foolish sentiment that games aren't political. Similarly, to believe every story beat in this game was made without some inherent bigotry is blindness. I am not blind to the Homophobia, the Islamaphobia, the fact there are plenty of punches aimed down. If you cannot take the good with the bad of a work, I understand. That time in America's life may be not so long ago but it was during the heat of an intense cultural shift. I am not good enough at writing (or, again, inclined) to literally write tickets for "bad looks" and I am definitely not qualified to throw stones. 

 

In 2020 we really need more than ever to be able to properly compartmentalize inflammatory humor and what it is a symptom of. We don't, all of us, need to tolerate it, enjoy it or believe it has it's place. However, it is important we do not let it become a weapon that slays us. There is a healthy catharsis in the crossing of lines and there is an unhealthy one too. Choosing to forego the former for the latter is not the path to interpretation. It is a path to dismissal and I again open that path to you because now we have to talk about...

Part Two: Postal The Movie and Postal 2 too. (Note: Everything from here out was part of the original idea of using the preface of "Postal is Not Offensive". That was lame and click-bait and also not true, so please ignore an references to that.

Postal The Movie is a a 2007 film directed by Uve Boll and it is his masterpiece. It is a movie so hateful of Americana and so true to it's source material that it falls ass-backwards into being a literal masterpiece in shit. The movie follows The Postal Dude, a down of his luck schlub who lives in a parody of a midwestern US town with his obese wife who cheats on him and an uncle who runs a death cult.

The genius of this adaptation is the choice to use Kentucky Fried Movie style humor to replace the gameplay. In Postal 2 the "punch line" is often that you can easily turn any situation into a cathartic improv class. The game almost counts on it at some points having The Postal Dude say lines like "Fuck You" or "You gotta be fuckin' kidding me" when a weapon is drawn in certain situations. The movie replaces this with a humor that can charitably be described as : Everyone is a combination of Evil, Stupid and Gross. Since we, the audience cannot deliver the "karmic" blow we instead watch as the towns-folk circle the drain of a nuclear event, their stupidity usually being rewarded with a humorous death/consequences scene; The cop that abuses a handicapped man gets blown up while fucking the protagonists obese wife, Uve Boll himself gets shot in the balls before a firefight breaks out that kills almost exclusively children, a barley hidden cell of stereotypical terrorists suffer death at the hands of a mentally challenged member of Al-queda, or the ultimate prize, BEING BLOWN UP AS OSAMA BIN LADEN AND GEORGE BUSH PRANCE THROUGH A FIELD OF DAISIES!

 

If we want to dismiss the games as "Violence for Violence sake" we CANNOT do the same for the film. Nothing is made in a vacuum and even if you do not like a joke, you can learn something from it's anatomy. Years of humor do not need to be upheld as tradition but they do need to be acknowledged as part of our history. Postal as a series is not just some dumb jokes made by hateful men for the enjoyment and radicalization of one certain group, it is a series of games about the insanity of modern living in America and the dark catharsis of just letting go, it gained a lighter tone with the the second and fourth entry and there is another shift incoming for it's newest game: Postal: Brain Damaged.

 

See, the overall theme of ANYTHING I write should be that all art has a message and a purpose. Even the most base, crass shit you can imagine. Someone had to be compelled to "create" it, that is the deciding factor to if it is art. So as a thought experiment, you can tell me that there does exist art so offensive as to be not worth interpreting. You would probably be right. However the bar for that kind of dismissal is so high that I don't think even the most hateful of poorly crafted games have "nothing to say". Even if the message is "I hate certain things or people" you can use your perspective to learn about what kind of environment allowed that kind of art to be created. You don't even need to do that with Postal because: Even with all the Arab Jokes, bigotry, racism, hatred for authority and disregard for society Postal is Not Offensive, it is a reaction to the machine we are all a part of, a cry of "has everyone here gone insane" followed by the easy catharsis of not caring if they have, because you have too and we can all just be crazy together.

 

Reminds me of one of my favorite moments in all of American Animation. A Duck detective having an anxiety episode onset by an overdose of Americana is making his plea to uncaring psychiatrists: 

"And when you think about it, isn't that exactly the POINT?" he says to the confused doctors, "Parking?" he continues,
 

"And driving, and shopping, and eating, and working? Somewhere, somehow, they all got chewed up and spit back out. They don't taste like living anymore! Don't you see what it's like in this deranged whirring blender of a world? Every day is an agonizing ordeal, like balancing a pot of scalding water on your head while people whip your legs and butt! ...Aaaah, you never forget your senior prom...

 

You think I'm "sick"?! Well the only disease I've got is "Modern Life," a schnutbusting gauntlet of inefficiency and misery that's one long parade of let-downs, put-downs, trickle downs, shutouts, freeze outs, sell-outs, numnuts, nincompoops and nimrods, all making every day as much fun as waxing a flaming Pontiac with your tongue, where even if you do luck into the possibility of some fleeting pleasure, like, say, if some nymphomaniac telephone operator with the muscle control of Romanian mat-slappers agree to a little strip air hockey, it'll be over before it starts, 'cuz some vowel-lacking, feta-reeking cab-jockey slams his checker up your hatchback and the cab is owned by some pinata spanker from a Santeria cult in Xoacalpa who starts shaking chicken bones at ya and gives you a boil on your neck so big, all it needs is Michael Jordan's autograph to make it complete!

 

And even with all this, with ALL THIS, I still drag my sorry butt off the Sealy every morning and stick my face in the reaping machine for one more day, KNOWING when it's time to flash the cosmic card key at those pearly gates, I won't be in the coffin anyway 'cuz some underhanded undertaker sold my heart, pancreas and other assorted Good 'N' Plenty to that same Santeria cult! So does ANYBODY really wonder why ANYBODY is hanging onto sanity by the atoms on the tips of their fingernails while life dirty-dances on their digits, and is it really any wonder that I seem DERANGED??!!"

-Eric Duckman, played by Jason Alexander, 1996

Every part of this rant from the tired yet furious way in which it is delivered to the low punch at people who run the cabs captures so much of what the disillusionment of civilian living in the US can feel like. So again, Postal is Rude, it is an unfair depiction of a lot of people. It is angry, petty and violent. It's movie is gross when it isn't too busy being childishly crass, It's current games are carrying on the spirit while growing with the times, something we are all doing as long as we are alive. However, even if postal is all those things to you, it is not offensive. 

I'm Dwelling in Dystopia and I'm Glad but It's a full time job staying sane and I don't wanna go mad, where the city never sleeps and the day is always dawning and every free space is under an advertising billboard.

                                                                                                                                                    -Akira The Don

  • Twitter Clean
  • White YouTube Icon
  • SoundCloud
bottom of page