In the cultural imagination, air ducts have long operated as means of entrapment and evasion. A valise full of dollar bills moves through motel ductwork in No Country for Old Men; Leeloo shatters her regeneration pod, sprinting through a vent into the city of The Fifth Element; and nemeses are spied through hidden air ducts in a cutscene from stealth game Metal Gear Solid. Air ducts (the passageways that connect and control airflow through a space) and vents (the outlets that allow air into a room) are functional architectural devices, yet they play a more symbolic role in the context of power ‘structures’ – a role this article seeks to uncover, mostly through a reading of space and narrative in Half-Life (first-person shooter video game, 1998).

Galvanised mild steel as a route to heroism

In Isaac Asimov’s 1951 short story C-Chute, civilians are held as prisoners of war when their own spaceship is overrun by Kloros aliens. The story’s hero, a bookkeeper called Mullen, moves through the airlocked chutes and steam tubes to free everyone onboard. In 1962, three prisoners made their escape from Alcatraz (later captured in the movie Escape from Alcatraz) by fashioning drills from vacuum motors and saw blades, using them to enlarge vent holes in their cells, and emerging from the air vents on the roof of the prison. In Die Hard (1988), Bruce Willis’ character John McClane ascends elevator shafts, hoists himself into air ducts, and hides between industrial piping. His deep architectural intuition and agility enable him to outwit the enemy’s more conspicuous violence, ultimately rescuing the hostages trapped in the office block, along with both his frail marriage and the All-American concept of lone wolf bravado (the film abounds in cowboy references – with John McClane sounding a lot like John Wayne).

Alcatraz aside, the notion of a human body eliding capture through air ductwork is a fairly implausible one. Air ducts: 

• aren’t designed to hold human weight

• have sharp 90 degree angles that a human body would find it very difficult to contort around

• are made of sheet metal, very noisy to climb through 

• if the A/C is on, it’ll be very cold or hot

• the average size of an HVAC duct in the US is anywhere from 3 x 7 inches to 35 x 40 inches

• they tend to have tiny fins that guide airflow through the vent, and might be lined with exposed screw tops injurious to the person crawling through
  

Art historian Lotte Eisner has written on the symbolic import of staircases in cinema. In German Expressionist film, Eisner writes, the grand staircase allows a character to dramatically ascend and descend, and thus “assert his dynamism”. In the case of the air duct, the inverse is true: the shaft allows the character to express their nimble agility and stealth cunning. These discreet metal passages locate the protagonist as one who works quietly within or beneath the surface; an invisible hero dismantling a threat from within. This is a powerful, particularly American narrative: an individual, often an underdog, working quietly but triumphantly against a behemoth bigger than themselves.

Half-life & the afterlife of the Cold War

In 1998, Valve launched seminal shooter game Half-Life. The player embodies Gordon Freeman; a silent protagonist and physicist at the Black Mesa Research Facility, a scientific lab inside a decommissioned Cold War missile silo. We first meet Freeman arriving via a lengthy monorail for another day at work at Black Mesa. The prolonged monorail scene that opens the game (pictured above) points to how deep within ‘the system’ we are venturing, and how isolated Freeman will soon be as the game’s narrative unfolds. While scientists and security guards interact with Freeman during gameplay, his character remains completely silent throughout. We see the world of the game through Freeman’s eyes, and he ‘speaks’ only through the player’s actions.

Freeman and his fellow scientists soon encounter a disastrous quantum event termed a Resonance Cascade, which triggers the ‘Black Mesa Incident’ – a rupture in the space-time continuum that enables extra-terrestrials to teleport to, and violently invade, the facility and by extension the earth. Half-Life players have pointed out the parallels between the Black Mesa Incident and Chernobyl, along with the premise of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The rupture and impending invasion of aliens in Half-life taps into a Cold War narrative of impending alien invasion in the form of Communist infiltration.

Like Die Hard, Half-Life revolves around a workspace become nightmare-scape. The Black Mesa facility brims with tunnels, air ducts and shafts that point to the complex fabric of a Cold War world prepared for nuclear strikes and defense. Half-Life surpassed the prevailing shooter games of the 90s by going beyond target-based shooting to incorporate unprecedented spatial navigation, with much of the game centering on environmental puzzles and tool configuration. Freeman/the player must navigate broken elevators, sweeping fan blades, switch sequences and rooms barred by gridded lasers. Yet this emphasis on the labyrinthine Black Mesa complex and its physical obstacles is paired with a distinctly seamless form of game progression. There are no cutscenes, and no lengthy loading screens between each chapter. We move through the game’s chapters with the fourth wall remaining distinctly intact, making Half-Life’s entangled architecture all the more immersive.

Behind the vents scattered throughout the Black Mesa facility, we find weapons Freeman can harness, routes between spaces, and enemies to defeat. At the level of gameplay, these various ducts enable Freeman/the player to shoot aliens, find hidden tools and progress to the game’s next chapters. At the level of the image, they represent personal and political ingenuity, symbolising Freeman’s ability to think ‘outside the box’. More implicitly, the air ducts and discreet passageways point to the government’s creation of such a labyrinthine missile site in the first place. In a sense, the entire game is nestled in the Cold War context, in its knotted underground architecture and climate of secrecy and suspicion. The term ‘half life’ is borrowed from nuclear physics, referring to the time it takes for the radioactivity of a source to decrease by half. The pursuit of nuclear intelligence, and the distribution of disinformation around it, was a source of both secrecy and conspiracy during the Cold War era. That paranoid sensibility is spatially embodied in Black Mesa.

If we can gainfully infiltrate the air vents, we also face the Panopticon-like possibility that someone else is already inside the vent, watching – waiting – for us. In a bureaucratic context, the vents let us know that the corporate system is sprawling, that someone might overhear our complaints, that a room is always connected to another room. In that vein, the Half-Life franchise is punctuated by a character known only as G-Man, described as a "sinister inter-dimensional bureaucrat" who travels seamlessly between restricted spaces. His ability to travel via means not known to us – some other type of invisible air duct – is part of what makes G-Man’s character so ominous.

The intrigue of underground space in Half-Life can be seen across culture. In the early 2000s, the Canada-based zine Infiltration documented urban exploration, filled with accounts that venture through transit tunnels, missile silos, hotel back-entrances, derelict hospitals and hidden mall corridors. Many of these accounts tap into the fascination of a place that once held power, and has now become defunct – while offering the trespasser/reader a chance to see how much of that power remains. Bureaucratic sites become both monotonous and deeply mysterious. Similarly, the ‘Office Complex’ chapter in Half-Life roams an intentionally dull, corporate space replete with desks, vending machines, and a sign that says “WORK HARDER, NOT SMARTER”, all coupled with imminent lethal danger (lurking behind the vents for example).

Where power lies

There is a ghost city buried below Seattle, with many of its storefronts and chambers still intact. After the Great Seattle Fire in 1889, the city was rebuilt entirely elevated by one storey, to address problem of rising tides. The sub-surface city remained accessible beneath, and became a hub for the criminal ‘underground‘ with gambling houses, speakeasies, heroin dens and brothels. The old city was due to be demolished in the 1950s, until preservationist Bill Speidel persuaded the council to designate it a historic district, and later to let him run Underground Tours of the city. Today, stories of hauntings in the underground streets abound (a bank teller, a woman dressed all in white, and several silhouettes have been repeatedly sighted). Seattle’s subterranean city has been tied up with the mud flood conspiracy of Tartaria, which supposes that an earlier trans-oceanic empire has been erased from history as we know it. Underground city tours/speculation, the Infiltration zine and Half-Life all re-emerge us into a repressed past, from which we might gain answers about the state of affairs today. We want these subterranean sites and secret passageways to lead to some fundamental revelation about the nature of clandestine power.

And just that happens in Half-Life, when it transpires that Freeman must not only defeat the alien invaders, but also the US Marines. The Marines arrive at the Black Mesa facility on the grounds of rescuing those trapped inside, only for Freeman to discover that the US government have sent them to kill everyone inside, removing all witnesses to the incident. As the game’s only playable character, Gordon Freeman literally represents the hope of the ‘free man.’ For both Freeman and Die Hard’s McClane, the fight is one of a resilient lone ranger against the institutions we’re supposed to trust.

“I'm not so sure I want to get to the surface.”

- Black Mesa Research Scientist, Chapter 4: Office Complex.

There is now a first-person shooter video game called ‘Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza’, set within the office block McClane navigates and protects. The actual ‘Nakatomi Plaza’ – 212 Avenue of the Stars – stands in LA, and is speculated to have been built largely as a shooting location for Hollywood films. The passageways between fiction and reality, cinema and game, all connect in the Die Hard universe. The Die Hard franchise itself is emblematic of capitalism’s desire to produce and grow, with 5 films and at least 11 spin-off games. The remaking of Bruce Willis/McClane as a playable character points to a cultural appetite for cloning and embodying lone ranger action archetypes.

Freeman is one of those archetypes, like McClane, navigating industrial interiors to battle hegemonic bad guys. In Half-Life, game progression aligns with architectural exploration, and with progressive revelations of the duplicity of the government Freeman works for. As Freeman ventures further through the building that once only represented his 9-5, he increasingly learns that no one is to be trusted, and nor is any facade. Every architectural element becomes a ‘clue.’ Half-Life is its environment (see the Valve game soundtracks, whose sirens and engineered whirs seem the product of the Black Mesa complex itself). The Black Mesa Research Facility is both the game’s hero and enemy. The air ducts in Black Mesa represent the backchannels of power, the inevitable dualism of surface and beneath. In film and gaming, the cultural desire to ‘go beneath’ is rooted in a deep suspicion of corporate and political structures, symbolised in the materials that cover and protect them. Ventilation systems make helpful narrative devices, in that they render the vast interconnections of power and authority as tangible. The air duct offers a symbolic escape from the possibility that power structures are, in reality, more nebulous and intangible, and as such far harder to trace, access and subvert off-screen.

>Katrina Russell

>HVAC Complex