In my dream I am with a woman I intend to seduce away from her boyfriend. Or else she intends to seduce me in spite of her boyfriend. The intentionality is somewhat blurred. She lives in Glendale, which, in my dream is across some great expanse of sparsely populated outskirts and greenery. It is this peculiar shade of green I associate with the Pacific Northwest rather than with Los Angeles. It is certainly no version of Glendale I have ever been to.
We are walking back to my place which is actually my apartment in East Hollywood. I can see it in the distance, just across the river, the Los Feliz bridge small but visible as it abuts Griffith Park. As we make our way closer and closer, however, the distance keeps getting father and farther. Soon we are going through the back rooms of restaurants: shiny stainless steel cabinets gleam with menace. We are creeping over low wooden fences, or hugging the backs of abandoned buildings, overgrown by ivy.
We reach her place, which is not the destination. Her boyfriend could be there after all. And I realize that, no matter whose idea this was, it has soured in my mind. I wait at the bottom of the stairs in their townhouse, the floorplan feeling more familiar than I would like. It's quite a bit like some of the old apartments at UC Irvine graduate housing. I worry that it might in fact be one in particular and I step out onto the patio. I say we should go to my place, but what I really mean is I should leave. I need to leave.
She follows me, even though I am now walking briskly. We seem to be walking up some sort of highland meadow. A great fissure in the earth runs through it, making for a craggy drop into a deep crevasse. At the top of the headlands, there is a forest--perhaps merely a copse of trees. It is thin, mostly bare pines and aspens. She follows me into them and I can see her boyfriend walking near us. He has been following us since the townhouse and we are both aware that the other knows. She, however, doesn't show her cards, or maybe she is oblivious to the scene that is about to commence. As we walk deeper into the trees, the noonday light becomes oppressive through the dappling.
We see that there are burnt trees up ahead and she asks me what caused it. I begin to tell her a story. As I tell it I know it to be an old urban legend. There was an old race of people in these woods. Like faerie folk or elves and they made their home in the forest. As I narrate I can see the events unfolding. The fair folk lived in relative safety in the woods. Only these woods were high up in snow-capped mountains. It doesn't look anything like the Glendale/Santa Cruz/Pacific Northwest that I am currently moving through.
They found some primal power of fire. It is contained in a vaguely bluish chunk of stone and the flames burn dark, nearly black, rimmed with purple and crimson. It helped them light their torches and cook their game. But power fell into the hands of their King, a tyrant who wanted it for himself.
Back in the real world, she and I have reached a log cabin in the middle of the woods. Where the headlands of the chasm went, I have no idea. But I am sure I am not getting to my place anytime soon. The interior is a single room, devoid of furniture save a sink and a wooden table. Some pots and pans hang by a window.
As I think back on the story I am telling we get to a dark chapter. The faerie folk rose up against their king and blinded him for good measure. I can see the king, a sallow, broken, portly creature, blind now with no irises or pupils in his eyes, crouching down to the grass while the other elves debate what was to be done with him. The victory came too late, however. I can see beyond the summit where the council is taking place the rest of the forest is on fire, black smoke pouring into the blue skies.
The fair folk make the decision to leave their world and enter ours. A great purple light envelops the spit of land on which they are debating and it appears in the real world, causing the headland to split, and the burnt grove to appear.
Suddenly, as I realize that we are in the dwelling of one of these elusive creatures, the door bursts open. Standing in the glare from the noon light is the shade of the tyrant king. He is not the broken creature I saw in my vision. He is a smoking shadow in the shape of one of the creatures. His eyes are pits of purple and crimson fire and his mouth is lined with sharp, shadowy teeth. He rushes at us and we bolt from the house. It bursts into flames behind us. The fire is spreading from the forest. And I lose track of the woman I am with. Maybe she is with her boyfriend. I am running from the shadow, moving in daylight, trying to get back to my apartment but the path keeps extending out before me, elongating no matter how quickly I traverse it.
I wake up.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
The Somnambulist's Diary #5
In the dream, my sister and I are traveling through a dream version of Italy. It is a very specific place with stable, dream contours and familiar monuments: a cobblestone square next to a small canal. We quickly leave this familiar part of the world for a series of country roads, like the outskirts of Parma. While the streets are unpaved, there are modern-looking houses lining them and small fields full of wheat or grapes can be glimpsed between them. As it begins to get late, my sister and I stop at a hostel, though it looks like a large mansion.
Inside, it is very strange. It seems to be populated by one family: grandparents, parents, in-laws, cousins though no one under the age of twenty or so. They have a distinctive look, big teeth, small, close-set eyes. They are friendly but there is something off. My sister and I watch TV with them. All the rooms are over-sized and this one is more of a home theater. Old, dilapidated couches sit at odd angles, and my sister and I settle into them, pressed up against the many family members. I am seated next to a very old man with rheumy eyes. He keeps slapping me on the back and pointing at the giant projector screen. There is soccer on it, teams in North Africa.
The bedroom looks like a hostel at least: lots of rows of bunkbeds in an un-adorned white box. In the middle of the night I need to get up and use the restroom but the one I passed by earlier is filthy. I wander out onto the front porch, which, covered by a tarp, extends some twenty feet in front of the house. There is a door that leads into a wing of the house I did not notice before. I open it and find a very modern, well appointed bathroom. The design is Art decco, the furniture is comfortable. And there is a door from the restroom deeper into the new wing.
I open the door and find stairs leading down into a basement rec-room--very well kept and pristine. Compared to the somewhat ramshackle nature of the rest of the house this is also a shock but it makes me uneasy. That's when I see them, glowing eyes in the relative darkness of the rec-room. They come closer, attached to children, horribly deformed, their flesh streaked and scarred and, suppurating keloid flesh hanging in tumorous clumps. They are dressed in nice velvet dresses and tuxedos, crawling on their hands and knees towards me. I scream and run.
The next day, my sister and I are driving around the outskirts still, looking for a place to stay, or our parents, or just trying to avoid going back to the hostel. We are driving by a school and there are a lot of children crossing, It is utter chaos and I am switching gears constantly, cutting a slow path through the crowd. That is when I back up into something. There is a crunch of metal. I get out of the car and see that I have hit a man's bicycle. It is twisted up under my back bunker. The hostel is down the street and I am eager to get away from it, so I approach apologetically. The owner is 7ft tall and sinewy, rail-thin. His face is gaunt and he has gray, stringy hair down to his waist. He is dressed in a clean, red tracksuit. and there is something so threatening in his eyes, so menacing in the clench of his teeth that I start to back away. He raises a wrench in one hand and starts striding towards me. I put my hands over my face and sink to the ground. He walks past me and smashes my rear-windshield with his wrench. Then he bolts, letting out an unearthly howl.
My dad appears at the end of the street and beckons my sister and I to follow him up onto the highway. As we do so, I wake up.
Inside, it is very strange. It seems to be populated by one family: grandparents, parents, in-laws, cousins though no one under the age of twenty or so. They have a distinctive look, big teeth, small, close-set eyes. They are friendly but there is something off. My sister and I watch TV with them. All the rooms are over-sized and this one is more of a home theater. Old, dilapidated couches sit at odd angles, and my sister and I settle into them, pressed up against the many family members. I am seated next to a very old man with rheumy eyes. He keeps slapping me on the back and pointing at the giant projector screen. There is soccer on it, teams in North Africa.
The bedroom looks like a hostel at least: lots of rows of bunkbeds in an un-adorned white box. In the middle of the night I need to get up and use the restroom but the one I passed by earlier is filthy. I wander out onto the front porch, which, covered by a tarp, extends some twenty feet in front of the house. There is a door that leads into a wing of the house I did not notice before. I open it and find a very modern, well appointed bathroom. The design is Art decco, the furniture is comfortable. And there is a door from the restroom deeper into the new wing.
I open the door and find stairs leading down into a basement rec-room--very well kept and pristine. Compared to the somewhat ramshackle nature of the rest of the house this is also a shock but it makes me uneasy. That's when I see them, glowing eyes in the relative darkness of the rec-room. They come closer, attached to children, horribly deformed, their flesh streaked and scarred and, suppurating keloid flesh hanging in tumorous clumps. They are dressed in nice velvet dresses and tuxedos, crawling on their hands and knees towards me. I scream and run.
The next day, my sister and I are driving around the outskirts still, looking for a place to stay, or our parents, or just trying to avoid going back to the hostel. We are driving by a school and there are a lot of children crossing, It is utter chaos and I am switching gears constantly, cutting a slow path through the crowd. That is when I back up into something. There is a crunch of metal. I get out of the car and see that I have hit a man's bicycle. It is twisted up under my back bunker. The hostel is down the street and I am eager to get away from it, so I approach apologetically. The owner is 7ft tall and sinewy, rail-thin. His face is gaunt and he has gray, stringy hair down to his waist. He is dressed in a clean, red tracksuit. and there is something so threatening in his eyes, so menacing in the clench of his teeth that I start to back away. He raises a wrench in one hand and starts striding towards me. I put my hands over my face and sink to the ground. He walks past me and smashes my rear-windshield with his wrench. Then he bolts, letting out an unearthly howl.
My dad appears at the end of the street and beckons my sister and I to follow him up onto the highway. As we do so, I wake up.
Monday, May 13, 2013
Shadows in the Noonday Glare
Given its mythic importance in my mind (as the birthplace of my grandmother and the cultural center of the part of my heritage with which I most strongly identify) I never had a very clear image in my head of Mexico City.
The closest I ever got were conflicting descriptions of a city high atop a mountain, a city built over a drained lake, a city densely populated and overpolluted. None of these came with a clear mental image. Even now that I've been, with my less than thorough investigation of its various districts and barrios, I have only a perfunctory impression of the place. It was not what I expected.
The center of town feels like it could be Manhattan or Milan, with wide crowded streets and austere edifices, many stories tall. But as one spirals out from the Zócalo, a different portrait begins to emerge. The city is green, greener than any American city I have been to, with palms and cactus and stunted, twisted pines growing up, over a d around the buildings. There is a very clear feeling of shadow beneath all those trees, a palpable darkness in the canopy that feels like the mysteries of dense jungle, or, more accurately of bayou, with crepe myrtle and willow obscuring the views of gated courtyards. Though I did not see any, it reminded me most if the eucalyptus forest I remember from my childhood spent in both Woodland Hills and at the LA zoo. The shadows in the trees are equal parts comforting and dangerous.
The buildings arou d which this foliage grows are pleasantly dilapidated with unfinished, unpainted facades and dark tendrils of water stains reaching down their sides. Everything gives off the sense of decay, of once-grandeur, affably sliding into disrepair, passively allowing itself to be reclaimed by the trees.
And then there is the pollution. I am used to LA smog--an oily smear at the edge of the horizon which turns to magic and fire as the sun sets. Here, it takes the form of a luminescent haze. I did not see the sun once in my stay, though the skies were often cloudless. The light is too intense to look upon as it drifts down through the occultation of the trees.
This was most true in the neighborhood of Coyoacan, where Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera lived in their Casa Azúl. My sister described it as New Orleans square at Disneyland, but it is more somber than that, despite the crowds, street vendors and blaring calliope music. The city has a peevish dignity, a feeling of suffering you to be there.
As you leave it, you understand the description of a city in the clouds. You wind down out of large sloping peaks, scores of homes and apartments clinging like lichen to their stones. At the base is unmitigated urban sprawl, an endless field of white drywall, black tangles of wire and gray billboards cryptically displaying only a telephone number. Looking back, the peaks of the mountains, where the city sits, are wreathed in mist and haze, the sky darkening yet still, somehow, glowing like a computer monitor, displaying nothing but quite clearly on.
I was there as a tourist, with all the arrogance of travel--wondering at the lives of people I thought I knew through a moment of eye contact on the street. Looking back, this description is full of that arrogance: wanting to see a thriving ruin instead of a major metropolis whose decrepitude I assume only from the tangle of its foliage and cracks in its paint. In the end, despite my being of Mexican descent, I know nothing about the city or its people and no three day trip could make it so. That was, however, the city I saw, the city whose imagined pristine history, unclear in my mind, was dashed apart by seeing it, alive and real and overgrown by itself.
Monday, April 15, 2013
Infinite Possibilities and Narrative Entropy
I just finished Bioshock: Infinite to mixed results. This whole thing is full of spoilers for those of you who haven't finished it so I suppose that you should stop reading if you intend to play it.
One the one hand, it tells a well-crafted story about absolution and the impossibilities and false comforts of redemption. That part is great. That part is worth experiencing. What is not nearly as well done is the resolution of the game's aesthetic promise and how it fits in, thematically with the original Bioshock. For those of you not familiar with the game series, both present dystopian cities whose well-meaning credos are taken to horrific extremes, undermining the values that built them. The first game centers on an underwater city called Rapture wherein Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy of sacrosanct self interest plays out, resulting in a society of powerful narcissists seeking to destroy one another as the city crumbles around them.
Bioshock's newest entry takes place in 1912 aboard the floating city of Colombia, a monument to late 19th century spiritualism and American Exceptionalism. Led by a mad prophet cast in the mold of Dwight Moody and Mary Baker Eddy, the society presented in the game takes on some of our core beliefs as Americans and does a decent, if ham-fisted job of making American players uncomfortable with the sins of the society they emerged from. That's fair and par for the course. The most revolutionary thing about Bioshock games from a story-telling standpoint is its willingness to make America the badguy. Both Rapture and Colombia are presented as splinter states, but they distinctly American dystopias, not just fueled by our history but by the rhetorical assumptions that we are somehow special.
The Objectivism of the first game is easy to sell as destructive and problematic. Though Ayn Rand maintains a devoted following in some circles, her theories are generally accepted to be a pitifully simplistic fantasy, attempting to justify greed as a moral imperative. It's harder to justify American exceptionalism as toxic and the game settles on fin-de-siecle racism as the symptoms of its disease. There is no room for people of color or the Irish in Colombia and the game showcases a lot of uncomfortable, racist propaganda to prove just how awful a place the city is. Case in point, the images to the right:
Bioshock Infinite banks on the twinge of disgust in our gut seeing these images. We are conditioned to disdain blackface, racial slurs, minstrelsy and institutionalized racism and seeing those images placed side by side with the patriotic is jarring enough (though certainly historically justified) to get people to question whether or not the link is necessary. Portions of the game play out (to great effect) like chapters from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. The game uses the Wounded Knee Massacre and the Boxer Rebellion as object lessons in American arrogance and cruelty. Colombia is the America that took those lessons as unabashed triumphs. Again there is something laudable in all this. I doubt most people are aware of either event and bringing them center stage is a pretty cool way to make a point about the still extant dangers of believing your homeland to be the messiah of nations.
Unforunately, Bioshock Infinite turns away from this plot in order to tell a personal story about the game's protagonist, a former Pinkerton and survivor of Wounded Kneeand the Boxer Rebellion atoning for his sins by trying to save a maiden-in-the-tower heroine who is more than she appears. About a third of the way through, the game essentially becomes a science fiction yarn about multiple dimensions and causal relationships. By the end your hero, Booker DeWitt is revealed to be the race-baiting prophet, Zachary Comstock from a different reality. The heroine is your daughter and solution to the game is to go back to the moment when DeWitt and Comstock diverged (a baptism) and drown yourself. Very complicated, fairly fulfilling but it necesitates a divergence from the coming race war and its shortcuts left me a little bit uneasy.
Much of the plot of the early game revolves around arming an underground movement called (with sophomoric, winking reference) the Vox Populii. It's led by Daisy Fitzroy, the prophet's former housemaid, wrongly accused of the murder of her mistress. Her rebellion in the works is made up of the city's black, Irish and Chinese populations, working to overthrow the yoke of tyranny and topple Comstock's white-washed hegemony. I was pleased to see a woman of color cast in a major heroic role in a videogame. She also manages to be dressed in an outfit appropriate to a revolutionary and not some cleavage revealing ensemble that belies a well developed character. Say what you will about strong women in video games, no matter how well they are being written they are still, more often than not being dressed in equal parts adolescent fantasy and improbable discomfort.
In order for the game to make its point about multiple dimensions and the trouble with rewriting history, it needs to shortchange Daisy Fitzroy. The game shifts abruptly from having you help arm the rebellion to having you shift into another dimension where the rebellion is already going on and Daisy is on the ascendant. With a few lines of dialogue, the ever-dour DeWitt says "The only difference between Fitzroy and Comstock is how you spell the name." This holds up, Daisy proves to be obsessed with murdering the WASP-y children of privilege and, as she is about to slit a child's throat, Elizabeth, the game's heroine, stabs her in the back with a pair of scissors.
From a narrative point of view, it is understandable that we need to see how both sides of a revolution are subject to blind arrogance and cruelty. For DeWitt and Comstock to be equally guilty and problematic, the political situation has to mirror it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely yadda yadda yadda. The only problem is, the Vox Populii and the Colombian Founders are not equally corrupt body populaces. The game is fairly good about discussing the suffering of innocents in times of war, but it makes the mistake of using real historical racism to make the point that anyone can become oppressed. I'm not saying that it is not possible, in some alternate dimension for a woman of color to be a power-mad eugenics advocate, I'm merely suggesting that we are not there yet as a society to look at that critically.
As I said before, Bioshock Infinite is laudable for its focus on the sins American history: for not blaming racism and injustice on the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws alone--for saying, in fact, that the whole idea of American Exceptionalism is predicated on an exclusionary, white, imperialist vision of the world that trampled numerous cultures and murdered innocents to become an international power. In trying, part way through, to claim that the reactionary revolutionaries are equally to blame as their oppressors, is a simplistic distraction from that story. You and your companion kill Daisy Fitzroy halfway through the game and go on to dismantle Colombia, but her Vox Populii, now leaderless take over from the Colombian Peacekeepers as the game's primary cannon fodder villains. It's as though the game is agreeing with Comstock's assessment of the Vox: anarchists can only ever cause anarchy, if you let oppressed minorities take over, they will run everything into the ground. Racist order is shown to be on equal footing with anarchist chaos.
Again, this is not the crux of the plot and I do not believe the game developers intended this. It's an unfortunate byproduct of shunting the politics of the game off to the side once the character exploration and science fiction emerge front and center. It's disappointing that the kickass woman of color is reduced to an empty symbol while white male characters get lengthy explorations, but I also think it shows a misunderstanding of the game's central theme. The moment that splinters Comstock/DeWitt in two different dimensions: turning one into an arch-villain and the other into a reluctant hero is a baptism some years after the Massacre at Wounded Knee: DeWitt (the good version of the protagonist) refuses to be baptized and Comstock takes the waters willingly. The implication (though it is delightfully subtle compared to most of the rest of the game) is that Comstock mistakes baptism for death and resurrection. He refuses to explore his guilt about Wounded Knee and instead believes that he has been reborn as righteous and holy (taking on the new name, Zachary Hale Comstock as a way of killing off the godless Booker DeWitt). DeWitt, on the other hand, suffers and suffers terribly, is consumed by guilt over the events of Wounded Knee and refuses to give in to the righteous justifications that Comstock makes for his actions. It is a surprisingly complicated moral, especially for a shooter: you don't get to start over. The atrocities you committed don't get wased away when you do the right thing. There is no redemption, only a slow arc--longer than your lifespan--towards real justice.
The game fails to give Fitzroy the same treatment because it mistakes DeWitt's original sin. It assumes that faith in absolution is the lapse. The lapse is genocide. Both DeWitt and Comstock participated in it, and just because one man refuses to end his guilt does not make it less real. Daisy Fitzroy does not have the choice to become anything other than a revolutionary. There is no moment in the waters of baptism where she has the option of turning away and, as a result, she cannot be held to the standards of the game's internal morality when it comes to enacting violence.
And maybe that is the problem with combining multi-dimensionality science fiction with politics. Merely by entering into another world where Daisy Fitzroy won her revolution, the game erases the history of oppression that started the revolution in the first place. This Daisy may not be the same as the one you agreed to arm and that, in and of itself is a letdown. A conceit of Bioshock Infinite's multi-dimensional travel is that you can't actually escape your past or wipe the slate clean. Only DeWitt's death solves the problem of Comstock's tyranny--his death before any of his actions are taken. In that model, we have to assume that Daisy is somewhat stable across multiple dimensions and the game's refusal to acknowledge that is just another way in which she is used poorly. Infinity does not mean infinite narrative possibilities. It only proves that entropy is true in stories as well as physics. When there are millions of subtly different revolutions all happening at the same time, it is hard to really care about the outcome of one.
Bioshock Infinite has a lot of great things going for it (don't even get me started on the beautifully Gothic subplot about the death of Comstock's wife, now interred in a glass coffin and guarded by an order of coffin-bearing, raven-wielding zealots). It is a game that seeks to challenge our beliefs about America's relationship with race and our ability to atone for past misdeeds. Unfortunately, as it tries to do those things simultaneously, it ends up undermining and over-simplifying the politics that make it so intriguing to begin with.
One the one hand, it tells a well-crafted story about absolution and the impossibilities and false comforts of redemption. That part is great. That part is worth experiencing. What is not nearly as well done is the resolution of the game's aesthetic promise and how it fits in, thematically with the original Bioshock. For those of you not familiar with the game series, both present dystopian cities whose well-meaning credos are taken to horrific extremes, undermining the values that built them. The first game centers on an underwater city called Rapture wherein Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy of sacrosanct self interest plays out, resulting in a society of powerful narcissists seeking to destroy one another as the city crumbles around them.
Bioshock Infinite banks on the twinge of disgust in our gut seeing these images. We are conditioned to disdain blackface, racial slurs, minstrelsy and institutionalized racism and seeing those images placed side by side with the patriotic is jarring enough (though certainly historically justified) to get people to question whether or not the link is necessary. Portions of the game play out (to great effect) like chapters from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. The game uses the Wounded Knee Massacre and the Boxer Rebellion as object lessons in American arrogance and cruelty. Colombia is the America that took those lessons as unabashed triumphs. Again there is something laudable in all this. I doubt most people are aware of either event and bringing them center stage is a pretty cool way to make a point about the still extant dangers of believing your homeland to be the messiah of nations.
Unforunately, Bioshock Infinite turns away from this plot in order to tell a personal story about the game's protagonist, a former Pinkerton and survivor of Wounded Kneeand the Boxer Rebellion atoning for his sins by trying to save a maiden-in-the-tower heroine who is more than she appears. About a third of the way through, the game essentially becomes a science fiction yarn about multiple dimensions and causal relationships. By the end your hero, Booker DeWitt is revealed to be the race-baiting prophet, Zachary Comstock from a different reality. The heroine is your daughter and solution to the game is to go back to the moment when DeWitt and Comstock diverged (a baptism) and drown yourself. Very complicated, fairly fulfilling but it necesitates a divergence from the coming race war and its shortcuts left me a little bit uneasy.
Much of the plot of the early game revolves around arming an underground movement called (with sophomoric, winking reference) the Vox Populii. It's led by Daisy Fitzroy, the prophet's former housemaid, wrongly accused of the murder of her mistress. Her rebellion in the works is made up of the city's black, Irish and Chinese populations, working to overthrow the yoke of tyranny and topple Comstock's white-washed hegemony. I was pleased to see a woman of color cast in a major heroic role in a videogame. She also manages to be dressed in an outfit appropriate to a revolutionary and not some cleavage revealing ensemble that belies a well developed character. Say what you will about strong women in video games, no matter how well they are being written they are still, more often than not being dressed in equal parts adolescent fantasy and improbable discomfort.
In order for the game to make its point about multiple dimensions and the trouble with rewriting history, it needs to shortchange Daisy Fitzroy. The game shifts abruptly from having you help arm the rebellion to having you shift into another dimension where the rebellion is already going on and Daisy is on the ascendant. With a few lines of dialogue, the ever-dour DeWitt says "The only difference between Fitzroy and Comstock is how you spell the name." This holds up, Daisy proves to be obsessed with murdering the WASP-y children of privilege and, as she is about to slit a child's throat, Elizabeth, the game's heroine, stabs her in the back with a pair of scissors.
From a narrative point of view, it is understandable that we need to see how both sides of a revolution are subject to blind arrogance and cruelty. For DeWitt and Comstock to be equally guilty and problematic, the political situation has to mirror it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely yadda yadda yadda. The only problem is, the Vox Populii and the Colombian Founders are not equally corrupt body populaces. The game is fairly good about discussing the suffering of innocents in times of war, but it makes the mistake of using real historical racism to make the point that anyone can become oppressed. I'm not saying that it is not possible, in some alternate dimension for a woman of color to be a power-mad eugenics advocate, I'm merely suggesting that we are not there yet as a society to look at that critically.
As I said before, Bioshock Infinite is laudable for its focus on the sins American history: for not blaming racism and injustice on the Confederacy and Jim Crow laws alone--for saying, in fact, that the whole idea of American Exceptionalism is predicated on an exclusionary, white, imperialist vision of the world that trampled numerous cultures and murdered innocents to become an international power. In trying, part way through, to claim that the reactionary revolutionaries are equally to blame as their oppressors, is a simplistic distraction from that story. You and your companion kill Daisy Fitzroy halfway through the game and go on to dismantle Colombia, but her Vox Populii, now leaderless take over from the Colombian Peacekeepers as the game's primary cannon fodder villains. It's as though the game is agreeing with Comstock's assessment of the Vox: anarchists can only ever cause anarchy, if you let oppressed minorities take over, they will run everything into the ground. Racist order is shown to be on equal footing with anarchist chaos.
Again, this is not the crux of the plot and I do not believe the game developers intended this. It's an unfortunate byproduct of shunting the politics of the game off to the side once the character exploration and science fiction emerge front and center. It's disappointing that the kickass woman of color is reduced to an empty symbol while white male characters get lengthy explorations, but I also think it shows a misunderstanding of the game's central theme. The moment that splinters Comstock/DeWitt in two different dimensions: turning one into an arch-villain and the other into a reluctant hero is a baptism some years after the Massacre at Wounded Knee: DeWitt (the good version of the protagonist) refuses to be baptized and Comstock takes the waters willingly. The implication (though it is delightfully subtle compared to most of the rest of the game) is that Comstock mistakes baptism for death and resurrection. He refuses to explore his guilt about Wounded Knee and instead believes that he has been reborn as righteous and holy (taking on the new name, Zachary Hale Comstock as a way of killing off the godless Booker DeWitt). DeWitt, on the other hand, suffers and suffers terribly, is consumed by guilt over the events of Wounded Knee and refuses to give in to the righteous justifications that Comstock makes for his actions. It is a surprisingly complicated moral, especially for a shooter: you don't get to start over. The atrocities you committed don't get wased away when you do the right thing. There is no redemption, only a slow arc--longer than your lifespan--towards real justice.
The game fails to give Fitzroy the same treatment because it mistakes DeWitt's original sin. It assumes that faith in absolution is the lapse. The lapse is genocide. Both DeWitt and Comstock participated in it, and just because one man refuses to end his guilt does not make it less real. Daisy Fitzroy does not have the choice to become anything other than a revolutionary. There is no moment in the waters of baptism where she has the option of turning away and, as a result, she cannot be held to the standards of the game's internal morality when it comes to enacting violence.
And maybe that is the problem with combining multi-dimensionality science fiction with politics. Merely by entering into another world where Daisy Fitzroy won her revolution, the game erases the history of oppression that started the revolution in the first place. This Daisy may not be the same as the one you agreed to arm and that, in and of itself is a letdown. A conceit of Bioshock Infinite's multi-dimensional travel is that you can't actually escape your past or wipe the slate clean. Only DeWitt's death solves the problem of Comstock's tyranny--his death before any of his actions are taken. In that model, we have to assume that Daisy is somewhat stable across multiple dimensions and the game's refusal to acknowledge that is just another way in which she is used poorly. Infinity does not mean infinite narrative possibilities. It only proves that entropy is true in stories as well as physics. When there are millions of subtly different revolutions all happening at the same time, it is hard to really care about the outcome of one.
Bioshock Infinite has a lot of great things going for it (don't even get me started on the beautifully Gothic subplot about the death of Comstock's wife, now interred in a glass coffin and guarded by an order of coffin-bearing, raven-wielding zealots). It is a game that seeks to challenge our beliefs about America's relationship with race and our ability to atone for past misdeeds. Unfortunately, as it tries to do those things simultaneously, it ends up undermining and over-simplifying the politics that make it so intriguing to begin with.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
The Somnambulist's Diary IV
My dreams have a false but recognizable geography to them. The street I grew up on figures heavily in many of them and the surrounding neighborhood, skewed by dream logic repeats from dream to dream. Some three blocks down the street from my own block, my dreams consistently feature a dark wood paneled restaurant with hotel rooms above them. No such place existed near my house nor ever did but it is consistently there. So too is a house near the end of the cul-de-sac, always abandoned, always dusty and furnitureless with naked wooden beams, worn and pocked by termites. I mention this because my dream last night featured this stable but non existent neighborhood--a shadow of the Walnut Acres in which I grew up. And the feeling of the unheimlische, not just within the dream, but outside it, is important.
I'm in a minivan, driving north on Topanga Canyon blvd and I hit Ventura. I park behind a gas station and get out on foot. As I walk east, way from my little piece of dream childhood, there is a street faire going on. It is night and people are dining al fresco, strings of light illuminating their laughing faces. People are waiting in line to get into bars and there are little dyed silk tents set up from which people are hawking their wares. I can hear this man I'm about to meet for blocks before I see him. He's no one specific, a douchey frat boy who reminds me of no one so much as Topher Grace though his features are indistinct. He's talking about some girl he intends to seduce to his friend. I'm his friend sometimes. Sometimes it's a third person standing near us.
A woman approaches us. She's a short, brunette with a bob--pretty but features are full of anger. She's wearing a tube top and has a deep red scar across her clavicle. The douchebag points at her, "Hey! Look who it is!" He leans in conspiratorially and says "The last time I saw you, you were all tied up." He gives us a sidelong glance and winks. She leaves in a huff. His friend (not me at this point) gives him a fist bump. I go cold. In my head I have a clear vision of that last encounter. She is naked. Bound at her wrists, ankles, throat and waist by heavy iron manacles. They are in some sort of cave and she is seething. This whole experience walks the very edge of consent and I am seething, somehow enraged with an undercurrent of jealousy. Feeling at all desirous in this situation makes me deeply unhappy and fills me with self loathing. The douchebag pulls a butterfly knife from his white slacks and gives a sharp flick of his wrist. He opens up her flesh near the clavicle the source of the scar.
I come to and am back in my car. I'm filled with a blind rage at this man and his casual leer at the woman he disfigured. I'm driving, white knuckled, my face contorted by anger. I've called the police about this man, I know. He won't hurt anyone else but I have to do something myself. I'm fuming, hyperventilating as I drive around. I start running errands to distract myself. I go to a grocery store to buy a palate of soda. I drop the soda off at the McMansion of a girl I went to high school with. She's having a party and I listlessly shuffle by them. All this time a clinical, detached voice is narrating, as though on a handheld tape recorder "The condition is marked by paranoid delusions. It predicates itself on the desire to take revenge, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence of their folly. In this condition they are doomed to play out their fantasies, disconsolate and immune to all help."
I am looking down on all this. Hearing the psychologist describe my confusion, seeing myself seethe and plot action, despairing as the police tell me I have no evidence. I saw him cut her, I think to myself. I can't bring myself to admit it might all be imagined. I wake up.
I'm in a minivan, driving north on Topanga Canyon blvd and I hit Ventura. I park behind a gas station and get out on foot. As I walk east, way from my little piece of dream childhood, there is a street faire going on. It is night and people are dining al fresco, strings of light illuminating their laughing faces. People are waiting in line to get into bars and there are little dyed silk tents set up from which people are hawking their wares. I can hear this man I'm about to meet for blocks before I see him. He's no one specific, a douchey frat boy who reminds me of no one so much as Topher Grace though his features are indistinct. He's talking about some girl he intends to seduce to his friend. I'm his friend sometimes. Sometimes it's a third person standing near us.
A woman approaches us. She's a short, brunette with a bob--pretty but features are full of anger. She's wearing a tube top and has a deep red scar across her clavicle. The douchebag points at her, "Hey! Look who it is!" He leans in conspiratorially and says "The last time I saw you, you were all tied up." He gives us a sidelong glance and winks. She leaves in a huff. His friend (not me at this point) gives him a fist bump. I go cold. In my head I have a clear vision of that last encounter. She is naked. Bound at her wrists, ankles, throat and waist by heavy iron manacles. They are in some sort of cave and she is seething. This whole experience walks the very edge of consent and I am seething, somehow enraged with an undercurrent of jealousy. Feeling at all desirous in this situation makes me deeply unhappy and fills me with self loathing. The douchebag pulls a butterfly knife from his white slacks and gives a sharp flick of his wrist. He opens up her flesh near the clavicle the source of the scar.
I come to and am back in my car. I'm filled with a blind rage at this man and his casual leer at the woman he disfigured. I'm driving, white knuckled, my face contorted by anger. I've called the police about this man, I know. He won't hurt anyone else but I have to do something myself. I'm fuming, hyperventilating as I drive around. I start running errands to distract myself. I go to a grocery store to buy a palate of soda. I drop the soda off at the McMansion of a girl I went to high school with. She's having a party and I listlessly shuffle by them. All this time a clinical, detached voice is narrating, as though on a handheld tape recorder "The condition is marked by paranoid delusions. It predicates itself on the desire to take revenge, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence of their folly. In this condition they are doomed to play out their fantasies, disconsolate and immune to all help."
I am looking down on all this. Hearing the psychologist describe my confusion, seeing myself seethe and plot action, despairing as the police tell me I have no evidence. I saw him cut her, I think to myself. I can't bring myself to admit it might all be imagined. I wake up.
Monday, February 18, 2013
The Somnambulist's Diary #3
I dreamt, last night, that I was on a snowy promontory, surrounded by men dressed in furs and patchwork armor. We are fending off something horrible that is lurking in the surrounding woods. There are horrid footprints with three toes all around the promontory and I see three of them dragging a sledge on which is the forward half of a bear, frozen intestines dragging behind it. We check its feet but the bear has four toes, not three.
I'm with a woman I love, a woman who doesn't love me. She's pregnant and it's not mine and she shouldn't be here. Not with the things out in the woods, not the with chaos of these men who are getting ready to run from whatever might emerge. We go to her tent and she tells me that I need to help her deliver the baby. I have no idea what I'm doing but she is urgent about it. As I lift up blood-stained furs she's dressed in she begs me not to look at her genitals. I do the best I can, to look away while delivering the baby. As she struggles, I can see shadows on the walls of the tent. Men are shouting and running outside, the thing or things in the woods have arrived and the promontory is unsafe.
When the baby does come it's tiny, misshapen, of indeterminate gender. It's covered in my friend's entrails. Soft, bloody tissues that are seeping into the fur lined floor of the tent. My friend grabs me by the throat, she's pale, her hair has gone white and there are deep bags under her eyes. She tells me I have to take care of her child, to get both of them to safety.
So we leave the tent. There are men torn in half, bleeding out in the snow. I've swaddled her baby in a burlap sack, it disappears among the folds.She's leaning on me, stumbling, leaving a trail of thick, dark blood in the snow behind us as we move forward.
We make it to the woods. the danger is real but we haven't seen it. There are men running past us with torches mad with terror. We come to a village of rope bridges high in the trees. A man is guiding us forward now, telling us to head north for safety. As we move through the village, we can hear an awful keening sound, something like a child's scream or a peacock's wail but shriller and louder. It's the sound of whatever is out there in woods.
It feels like days that we're out there. The sun sets and rises again. My friend is not even walking any more: I'm having to drag her through the snow. Her baby is eerily quiet. We come to a mountain summit and a deep cave yawns in its center. A man in a horned helmet tells us that the only safe passage is down into the caves. It's populated by degenerate troglodytes, things that were once-men, but now see us as enemies. It's horrible, a terrifying trip down into the icy darkness, but it's better than the keening thing slaughtering men up in the woods.
My friend awakens and we stumble down into the dark. One of the once-men finds us sixty paces in. It's face is twisted deformed, blue and black from frostbite. It leads us deeper in, glancing back nervously, chittering and grumbling in its incomprehensible speech. My friend is terrified now, crying, still bleeding, i haven't heard anything from the bundle of burlap in which her newborn child is wrapped. She is wailing and crying and more of the once-men are gathering around us.
As we pass by icy, still ponds deep in the caves, I can see the once-men's reflections. They reflect who they were before the degeneration or perhaps their ancestors. It's unclear. They are men of noble bearing, dressed in green, etched armor, with long moustachios and kind, sad eyes. They speak in high-minded nasal tones and pleasantries, but the words are only echoes, the chittering and slavering of their degenerate selves is what's real.
My friend collapses and I drop the silent burlap bundle to catch her. It lands with a wet noise on the hoarfrost crusted stone. She looks at it, screaning, sobbing, reaching out for it. I wake up.
I'm with a woman I love, a woman who doesn't love me. She's pregnant and it's not mine and she shouldn't be here. Not with the things out in the woods, not the with chaos of these men who are getting ready to run from whatever might emerge. We go to her tent and she tells me that I need to help her deliver the baby. I have no idea what I'm doing but she is urgent about it. As I lift up blood-stained furs she's dressed in she begs me not to look at her genitals. I do the best I can, to look away while delivering the baby. As she struggles, I can see shadows on the walls of the tent. Men are shouting and running outside, the thing or things in the woods have arrived and the promontory is unsafe.
When the baby does come it's tiny, misshapen, of indeterminate gender. It's covered in my friend's entrails. Soft, bloody tissues that are seeping into the fur lined floor of the tent. My friend grabs me by the throat, she's pale, her hair has gone white and there are deep bags under her eyes. She tells me I have to take care of her child, to get both of them to safety.
So we leave the tent. There are men torn in half, bleeding out in the snow. I've swaddled her baby in a burlap sack, it disappears among the folds.She's leaning on me, stumbling, leaving a trail of thick, dark blood in the snow behind us as we move forward.
We make it to the woods. the danger is real but we haven't seen it. There are men running past us with torches mad with terror. We come to a village of rope bridges high in the trees. A man is guiding us forward now, telling us to head north for safety. As we move through the village, we can hear an awful keening sound, something like a child's scream or a peacock's wail but shriller and louder. It's the sound of whatever is out there in woods.
It feels like days that we're out there. The sun sets and rises again. My friend is not even walking any more: I'm having to drag her through the snow. Her baby is eerily quiet. We come to a mountain summit and a deep cave yawns in its center. A man in a horned helmet tells us that the only safe passage is down into the caves. It's populated by degenerate troglodytes, things that were once-men, but now see us as enemies. It's horrible, a terrifying trip down into the icy darkness, but it's better than the keening thing slaughtering men up in the woods.
My friend awakens and we stumble down into the dark. One of the once-men finds us sixty paces in. It's face is twisted deformed, blue and black from frostbite. It leads us deeper in, glancing back nervously, chittering and grumbling in its incomprehensible speech. My friend is terrified now, crying, still bleeding, i haven't heard anything from the bundle of burlap in which her newborn child is wrapped. She is wailing and crying and more of the once-men are gathering around us.
As we pass by icy, still ponds deep in the caves, I can see the once-men's reflections. They reflect who they were before the degeneration or perhaps their ancestors. It's unclear. They are men of noble bearing, dressed in green, etched armor, with long moustachios and kind, sad eyes. They speak in high-minded nasal tones and pleasantries, but the words are only echoes, the chittering and slavering of their degenerate selves is what's real.
My friend collapses and I drop the silent burlap bundle to catch her. It lands with a wet noise on the hoarfrost crusted stone. She looks at it, screaning, sobbing, reaching out for it. I wake up.
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