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beccatoriaI want to talk about Bioshock Infinite. I'm not sure how to begin. This game has been spectacularly successful, critically and commercially, with good reason, and also subject to some criticism, also with reason, and I'm just, I'm in a weird place with it. It's doing some interesting, difficult things with the narrative, but I can't help but feel that it holds up this dark, uncomfortable mirror, one almost pointedly aimed at the entitlement and violence of these...stubbly, world-weary white, masculine protagonists. How hard it must be for them to watch their wives and daughters brutalised and stolen, to be emasculated, to save them at such personal cost to their honour and self-respect, to make such dark, morally ambiguous decisions. Oh! How this new white man's burden is written in every cocked eyebrow and condescending, sarcastic remark about the way things really are and how they're just passing through and do not want to get involved.
But. Of course. We need a hero, and it must be someone bitterly disinterested with exactly the correct ratio of beard to razor.
Bioshock Infinite constructs a beautiful noose around this idea. It hangs you with it. And then it bends over backwards to hide what it's doing for fear of upsetting you.
The two things that really bothered me were:
1) Daisy Fitzroy.
2) Wounded Knee.
Daisy Fitzroy.
This is pretty simple - it's awful. The game is mixing the metaphor of the American Civil Rights movement with the French Revolution. It's cheap, tacky and insulting.
The game wants to make a point about the underlying senselessness of violence, the tendency of humanity toward excess. With the biblical imagery of baptism and original sin, perhaps this makes sense, this notion that we are all inherently capable of corruption and ugliness.
But it's not a story in a vacuum. Even within the world of the game, the imagery of segregation and racism is played deliberately - it's not intended to be overlooked.
Daisy's sudden shift toward horrifying violence (and yes, it is after they have shifted, no, perhaps we do not know what particular horrors were inflicted upon this version of Daisy; it doesn't really matter, she still represents the liberation of the violently oppressed Black minority vs the White supremacist power structure), is dangerous.
It's a shallow, simplistic "two wrongs don't make a right," argument, smearing the entire revolution by making its leader psychotic. By making her a would-be child murderer it makes her cause seem irredeemable, the notion of armed revolution inexorably linked to excess and atrocities. The fact that America itself was founded on a revolution that did not end in such a way is forgotten so that Elizabeth can fantasize about the revolution of Les Miserables before seeing its horrifying reality.
Because, of course, it is an incredibly important narrative beat for Elizabeth's character - a necessary one. And almost one that works.
"I guess it runs in the family," she lifelessly comments, as she kills Daisy Fitzroy to stop her from murdering the children of her oppressors. "Maybe," she means, "like my father, I am right here, protecting the white power structure with violence. Maybe," she means, "no matter the intention, no matter the reason, the outcome is the same. Daisy Fitzroy is dead, her cause is dead, the Founders endure."
But this isn't the thread we follow. We follow Booker's cynical perspective; we find her home full of gruesome trophies and look, Booker says, there's no understanding that, is there?
What do we learn from this? That fighting your oppressors will turn you into a monster yourself? It was a beautiful opportunity to explore - via Elizabeth's spectacularly astute comment - the way in which the violent nature of revolution stigmatises those in revolt, that argument that no matter how valid the complaint, that wasn't the right way to go about it. Two wrongs don't make a right. Work within the system. Somehow, it puts you on the side of the brutal, violent, sadistic authority. It pulls that trick - "they're both as bad as each other," and suddenly, even though no single instance of provoked retaliation - no matter how horrifying - is the equivalent of generations of institutionalised brutality and oppression. Suddenly Booker's refusal to involve himself becomes a sign of his slick, cool understanding of the world, an indication of his intelligence, rather than a morally lazy, perhaps even reprehensible, position.
And this is important, not just in terms of the way the story functions within our wider, very real world, but also internally, in terms of how we view Booker.
Because this game is about how Booker is not a hero. And if we lose sight of that, it all falls apart.
Wounded Knee.
Booker fought at Wounded Knee.
Let's say we're supposed to take that statement as the horrifying thing it is. Booker probably committed war crimes. Booker quite possibly murdered women and children.
Actually we know he did. If you listen to Comstock's lines during the superficial re-enactment you hear him talking about how he burned teepees with women inside partially to silence rumours about his ethnicity. The Comstock/Dewitt separation takes place after Wounded Knee.
Booker lived the rest of his life in an alcoholic stupor trying to forget what he did, and Comstock found a God that told him it was all right, but they both did it and for the same reasons.
The revelation at the end of the game is genuinely important for that reason - Booker may be allowing himself to be drowned as a selfless sacrifice so that the villain can't live, or to give peace to Elizabeth, or as redemption for his own daughter, but he's also doing it because, in a very literal way, he is the villain. He's not the heroic man dying to make sure his evil universe clone can never come to power. He is, at that moment of his life, a man who deserves drowning. And realises that.
His redemption is allowing himself to be killed. It's biblical in a way that positions him as a saviour, which is potentially problematic, but infinitely less so if it's because he is also the devil he is saving us from, and that is not glamourised. (It can't be glamourised; if it were we'd be back to the burden of lonesome morally ambiguous white boys who are cool because we can sling the term antihero at anything with a gun these days.)
My problem is that I don't think that the devil aspect is clear enough. Like I said at the beginning, I feel like this game does some fantastically interesting shit, and then...papers over it so that it exists on a level that the average douchebro doesn't have to notice.
The true nature of what happened at Wounded Knee is never really discussed in the scope of the game - it's a terrible battle against Native Americans, but there's little in the game itself to distinguish it from any other, "horror of war!" experience. With Fitzroy standing as an example, it's easy enough to float along believing it to be another example of the savagery of all men under duress, rather than deliberately making your protagonist a participant in one of the worst atrocities of the era. Comstock's lines are background flavour and at the time, you are not in a position to appreciate they are also yours. It's also easy to imagine that being filed generally away under, "that was the evil version of me," without truly thinking about when the split occurred. It's a puzzle you can put together, and I fully believe is intentional, but you need attention and context. I don't know the American curriculum, but I do wonder how many of US teens playing this game truly understand what happened at Wounded Knee, or, learning about it from the game, would go and learn about it.
This is Elizabeth's story and Elizabeth's game, but we do not play as her, and she is not featured on the cover. Because having her on the cover didn't appeal to fratboys. That is literally the reason. And given that this industry is the kind of place where a developer has to fight to keep a female character on the front cover, that suddenly sounds less unbelievable.
But that's what I mean - I feel like the whole plot is a process of moving Elizabeth to the back cover so as not to actually challenge any preconceptions.
For all Booker can be seen as a violent rejection of the masculine father-figure out to save his family - to rescue his daughter from the wreckage of his tragic backstory, while maintaining gruff cynicism and a maverick code of honour - as a rejection of shallow appeals to shock moral "relativism" in an effort to convince the player there's a deep point being made... It's also possible to read him as exactly that. Unironically.
And I feel like that's there deliberately, because, for the same reason they moved Elizabeth to the back, they wanted to tell their story, they wanted to get their game out, they wanted it to sell. So like Elizabeth on the back cover - as Levine explains - she's there to learn about when you're already through the door, there to learn about if you care what world your shooter takes place in, not if you just want to stare a the box art on the front and reassure yourself that you are about to take part in an affirmation of your masculinity, chin-down, eyes-up - all of these interesting, and, for this industry, desperately important messages are relegated to subtext.
On the other hand, I don't think that it's SO deeply buried in subtext it's not clearly intentional, which is great. There was a lot about this game, visually and narratively, that I found beautiful.
But it's so fucking frustrating.
What do you do with something that holds up such a thorough and biting mirror to a really pervasive and noxious trope, and then erects a sign right next to telling you not to look because it might make you uncomfortable?
I don't know.
And those are my thoughts...
But. Of course. We need a hero, and it must be someone bitterly disinterested with exactly the correct ratio of beard to razor.
Bioshock Infinite constructs a beautiful noose around this idea. It hangs you with it. And then it bends over backwards to hide what it's doing for fear of upsetting you.
The two things that really bothered me were:
1) Daisy Fitzroy.
2) Wounded Knee.
Daisy Fitzroy.
This is pretty simple - it's awful. The game is mixing the metaphor of the American Civil Rights movement with the French Revolution. It's cheap, tacky and insulting.
The game wants to make a point about the underlying senselessness of violence, the tendency of humanity toward excess. With the biblical imagery of baptism and original sin, perhaps this makes sense, this notion that we are all inherently capable of corruption and ugliness.
But it's not a story in a vacuum. Even within the world of the game, the imagery of segregation and racism is played deliberately - it's not intended to be overlooked.
Daisy's sudden shift toward horrifying violence (and yes, it is after they have shifted, no, perhaps we do not know what particular horrors were inflicted upon this version of Daisy; it doesn't really matter, she still represents the liberation of the violently oppressed Black minority vs the White supremacist power structure), is dangerous.
It's a shallow, simplistic "two wrongs don't make a right," argument, smearing the entire revolution by making its leader psychotic. By making her a would-be child murderer it makes her cause seem irredeemable, the notion of armed revolution inexorably linked to excess and atrocities. The fact that America itself was founded on a revolution that did not end in such a way is forgotten so that Elizabeth can fantasize about the revolution of Les Miserables before seeing its horrifying reality.
Because, of course, it is an incredibly important narrative beat for Elizabeth's character - a necessary one. And almost one that works.
"I guess it runs in the family," she lifelessly comments, as she kills Daisy Fitzroy to stop her from murdering the children of her oppressors. "Maybe," she means, "like my father, I am right here, protecting the white power structure with violence. Maybe," she means, "no matter the intention, no matter the reason, the outcome is the same. Daisy Fitzroy is dead, her cause is dead, the Founders endure."
But this isn't the thread we follow. We follow Booker's cynical perspective; we find her home full of gruesome trophies and look, Booker says, there's no understanding that, is there?
What do we learn from this? That fighting your oppressors will turn you into a monster yourself? It was a beautiful opportunity to explore - via Elizabeth's spectacularly astute comment - the way in which the violent nature of revolution stigmatises those in revolt, that argument that no matter how valid the complaint, that wasn't the right way to go about it. Two wrongs don't make a right. Work within the system. Somehow, it puts you on the side of the brutal, violent, sadistic authority. It pulls that trick - "they're both as bad as each other," and suddenly, even though no single instance of provoked retaliation - no matter how horrifying - is the equivalent of generations of institutionalised brutality and oppression. Suddenly Booker's refusal to involve himself becomes a sign of his slick, cool understanding of the world, an indication of his intelligence, rather than a morally lazy, perhaps even reprehensible, position.
And this is important, not just in terms of the way the story functions within our wider, very real world, but also internally, in terms of how we view Booker.
Because this game is about how Booker is not a hero. And if we lose sight of that, it all falls apart.
Wounded Knee.
Booker fought at Wounded Knee.
Let's say we're supposed to take that statement as the horrifying thing it is. Booker probably committed war crimes. Booker quite possibly murdered women and children.
Actually we know he did. If you listen to Comstock's lines during the superficial re-enactment you hear him talking about how he burned teepees with women inside partially to silence rumours about his ethnicity. The Comstock/Dewitt separation takes place after Wounded Knee.
Booker lived the rest of his life in an alcoholic stupor trying to forget what he did, and Comstock found a God that told him it was all right, but they both did it and for the same reasons.
The revelation at the end of the game is genuinely important for that reason - Booker may be allowing himself to be drowned as a selfless sacrifice so that the villain can't live, or to give peace to Elizabeth, or as redemption for his own daughter, but he's also doing it because, in a very literal way, he is the villain. He's not the heroic man dying to make sure his evil universe clone can never come to power. He is, at that moment of his life, a man who deserves drowning. And realises that.
His redemption is allowing himself to be killed. It's biblical in a way that positions him as a saviour, which is potentially problematic, but infinitely less so if it's because he is also the devil he is saving us from, and that is not glamourised. (It can't be glamourised; if it were we'd be back to the burden of lonesome morally ambiguous white boys who are cool because we can sling the term antihero at anything with a gun these days.)
My problem is that I don't think that the devil aspect is clear enough. Like I said at the beginning, I feel like this game does some fantastically interesting shit, and then...papers over it so that it exists on a level that the average douchebro doesn't have to notice.
The true nature of what happened at Wounded Knee is never really discussed in the scope of the game - it's a terrible battle against Native Americans, but there's little in the game itself to distinguish it from any other, "horror of war!" experience. With Fitzroy standing as an example, it's easy enough to float along believing it to be another example of the savagery of all men under duress, rather than deliberately making your protagonist a participant in one of the worst atrocities of the era. Comstock's lines are background flavour and at the time, you are not in a position to appreciate they are also yours. It's also easy to imagine that being filed generally away under, "that was the evil version of me," without truly thinking about when the split occurred. It's a puzzle you can put together, and I fully believe is intentional, but you need attention and context. I don't know the American curriculum, but I do wonder how many of US teens playing this game truly understand what happened at Wounded Knee, or, learning about it from the game, would go and learn about it.
This is Elizabeth's story and Elizabeth's game, but we do not play as her, and she is not featured on the cover. Because having her on the cover didn't appeal to fratboys. That is literally the reason. And given that this industry is the kind of place where a developer has to fight to keep a female character on the front cover, that suddenly sounds less unbelievable.
But that's what I mean - I feel like the whole plot is a process of moving Elizabeth to the back cover so as not to actually challenge any preconceptions.
For all Booker can be seen as a violent rejection of the masculine father-figure out to save his family - to rescue his daughter from the wreckage of his tragic backstory, while maintaining gruff cynicism and a maverick code of honour - as a rejection of shallow appeals to shock moral "relativism" in an effort to convince the player there's a deep point being made... It's also possible to read him as exactly that. Unironically.
And I feel like that's there deliberately, because, for the same reason they moved Elizabeth to the back, they wanted to tell their story, they wanted to get their game out, they wanted it to sell. So like Elizabeth on the back cover - as Levine explains - she's there to learn about when you're already through the door, there to learn about if you care what world your shooter takes place in, not if you just want to stare a the box art on the front and reassure yourself that you are about to take part in an affirmation of your masculinity, chin-down, eyes-up - all of these interesting, and, for this industry, desperately important messages are relegated to subtext.
On the other hand, I don't think that it's SO deeply buried in subtext it's not clearly intentional, which is great. There was a lot about this game, visually and narratively, that I found beautiful.
But it's so fucking frustrating.
What do you do with something that holds up such a thorough and biting mirror to a really pervasive and noxious trope, and then erects a sign right next to telling you not to look because it might make you uncomfortable?
I don't know.
And those are my thoughts...
no subject
Date: 2013-09-23 03:02 am (UTC)The Wounded Knee thing is something that nagged at me in a way I couldn't quite vocalize. Thank you for putting it into words.
I wish that the POV character was Elizabeth.
Alternately, I wish the parallels between Comstock and Booker were clearer. They're supposed to be the same guy, but I have trouble constructing Comstock from what I know about Booker and vice versa. While it's not quite a "Neat twist, so what" situation, I do wish there'd been more narrative effort to make the reality of their sameness more painful.
I have more thoughts which I may come back and post later.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-23 08:05 am (UTC)(Sorry if this doesn't make sense, I'm on the train and shooting for economy of phrasing)
no subject
Date: 2013-09-24 07:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-09-25 12:46 am (UTC)I'd love to hear any more thoughts you have! But even if not, I'm really glad this made sense and managed to connect on the Wounded Knee thing - it's also nice to hear I'm not the only one it bothered.
I have mixed feelings on Elizabeth as the POV character, because part of me likes that she immediately detaches from you and moves away from and beyond you at the end. I was somewhat frustrated that there was never really a reaction from her that you were her father but then I thought that it sort of made sense given the context and the fact that she'd already worked that out because she was...hooked into the multiverse at that point. She was so far beyond you and it places you back being...this small, lost creature? (Though again, that could be clearer/perhaps wasn't intentional?) And I'm not sure they could have adequately let us "feel" what Elizabeth felt when she started seeing all the road/all the worlds? In some ways her not being the POV character works better.
Except she's so obviously the main character and the genre is in fierce need of more POV characters who are women that, I don't know. I mean, I think I'd be more okay with it if, as you said, the parallels between Comstock and Booker were clearer. That would have made the experiential twist worth having him as the POV character, and also brought home the fact that you may be the protagonist but you're not the hero - you're observing the hero: Elizabeth?
HMMMM. Anyway, yeah. Like you say, so many great ideas, nowhere near enough room to expand on them.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-25 12:50 am (UTC)I'm glad you enjoyed reading this even without having played the game. It's pretty heavily narrative-based as a game, and I think the cutscenes/movie versions of the game are available on YouTube if you're truly curious. Though obviously, it's not the same and is probably a lot more boring than watching an actual movie.
And yes, that makes total sense! It frustrated me so much because I really don't even think that the writers realised the toxicness of the message they were writing. Like I really think they thought they were writing a thoughtful story about racism. It was kind of...awkward. Like the rest of the story I think has a lot of redemptive and fascinating aspects. But this part? Alas. Not at all. :(
no subject
Date: 2013-09-25 12:59 am (UTC)But yeah, I don't like to think it's true either, but increasingly I think it is. I just...there's a really loud, really obnoxious, really oblivious, really entitled side to the gaming audience that I just...don't know how to deal with? I mean, look what happened with Anita Sarkeesian just because she wanted to talk about this crap. It's...depressing, and I'm sure that it's in many ways a monster created by the industry. But by now it's also a monster the industry feels they have to feed. It's a messed up situation, especially at a time when games are developing such interesting potential as story-delivering mechanisms. And instead we're like...fucking arguing over whether chicks are allowed on the cover.
Boo. :(