Anyone who’s played a bit of the madness in one or both of the two big survival horror video series, Resident Evil and Silent Hill, can tell that some planned produciton of psychosis is wandering around behind the scenes to steer the macabre narration and demented visual design, for better or for worse. <p/> Silent Hill is particularly forward and consistent in its dementia, if a little too subtle: every game features a persistent representative quilt and that weaves itself into four-legged mannequins, an apartment that symbolizes a mothers womb (with a tunnel — exiting from the bathroom — that represents the umbilical cord), and a terrible bloody, masculine man with a giant pyramid-shaped head that tries to peel away one particular protagonist’s terrible sordid history by chopping at the protagonist with a giant knife (among other venues of communication). <p/> But while most people can see that screws have been carefully driven into place by the games’ developers, how deep are these games, really? I mean, what exactly is the Resident Evil team trying to say through parasitic Spanish villagers, maddening inventory management, the world’s apparent widespread use of typewriters (and simultaneous shunning of modern computing), and hordes of zombies whose heads explode when kicked? <p/> And how about those Silent Hill-makin’ folks, with their frequent blood rituals, melting walls, chicken monsters and rusty pipe-wielding nurses? <p/> Or is all the innuendo and symbolism just a fantastic sequence of lucky design decisions? Careful philosophy, or careless exhibition? <p/> I can only grasp with buttered fingers at the answer to those questions, but writers Marc C. Santos and Sarah White at Game Career Guide have taken a pretty darn good crack at explaining the depth. More than a crack, in fact: more like a detonated billion-ton nuclear payload. From the article, Saving Ourselves: Psychoanalytic Investigation of Resident Evil and Silent Hill:
In Resident Evil, players and avatars work symbiotically to uphold what Jacques Lacan calls the “symbolic order,” the fragile web of symbols that both shapes and limits our psychosocial experiences. Lacanian psychoanalysis often refers to the discursive constitution of the subject-emphasizing the important role that language plays in the instantiation of psychic order. Lacan’s writing is often dense and cryptic, but we offer the following passage from his essay “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” stresses the symbolic constitution of subjectivity:Hmm. Okay — that’s pretty thick, especially for Resident Evil, which are pretty much idiotic slashers. Maybe a section on Silent Hill is a little less dense (yeah, right):Symbols in fact envelop the life of man with a network so total that they join together those who are going to engender him “by bone and flesh” before he comes into the world; so total that they bring to his birth, along with the gift of the stars, if not with the gifts of the fairies, the shape of his destiny; so total that they provide the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the place where he is not yet and beyond his very death; and so total the through them his end finds its meaning in the last judgment, where the Word absolves his being or condemns it-unless he reaches the subjective realization of being-toward-death. (67)
Silent Hill significance stems from its avant-garde status: it anticipates our familiarity with these conventions and works to subvert them, problematizing our desire for stability and coherence. These subversions work by collapsing the distances between player, avatar, and game unsettling our expectation to retain a clinical distance between the twisted world of our avatars and the sacred normality of our own real world. This is epitomized near the end of Silent Hill 3 when a professorial character inquisitively questions the “enjoyment” that Heather, our avatar, draws from killing the threatening abjections around her. When she responds that she has only killed monsters, Vincent replies with “they look like monsters to you…”A little bit better, but then the second and third pages go into particulars — heavy prose, philosopher name droppin’, etc. — that send an anchor of thought plummeting into a deep, dark sea. <p/> I admit, after a couple of reads I couldn’t make much sense of this article. My knowledge of the Silent Hill games is fairly keen, and as for Resident Evil, let’s be honest here: Resident Evil is a game where you blow up zombies and giant bees with a rocket launcher, not exactly something that Freud would page his mother about.
<p/> But between these articles and my own awareness of the symbolic aspects of the games, either A) these folks are correct, making all I know seem like ID 101, or B) these folks have played the games way too much and have been touched by the very madness their prose strives to describe. Which one? That’s the real mystery. Perhaps the article’s title, Saving Ourselves, alludes to necessary subsequent personal psychoanalisys on the part of the writers. <p/> Anyways, even if the article is brick-heavy with psychological dialogue it does give a lot of keen anecdotes and insights into both games. Try it with beer.
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