Reading Materials for the Week: “Perils of the Princess: Gender and Genre in Video Games.” – Sharon R. Sherman; “The Other Side of the Valley; Or, Between Freud and Videogames – Kent Aardse; “Love Thy Neighbor? No Thanks!” (chapter in The Plague of Fantasies) – Slavoj Zizek.
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Alice: Madness Returns is a new take on Alice, Through the Looking Glass, taking the Burton-esque of interpretation of Alice’s Adventures (both of Lewis’ novels) to another level completely. Developed by Chinese game company Spicy Horse and released by EA Games, the game draws from American McGee’s Alice. It is essentially a re-make of this game, but with a few twists added and a few tweaks made. For example, the voice actors of American McGee’s Alice have American accents – and, let’s face it, it doesn’t work at all. Whether they’re bad voice actors or they just don’t fit the graphics doesn’t really matter; what matters is that the new voice actors of Alice and her compatriots do work, with British accents that actually fit the characters (visually) they voice. Not only that, but the artistry of the game is phenomenal; much of the character design is visually stunning (the character of Alice, particularly), with a lot of focus on little details. That being said, the game is quite glitchy; but it seems to work well with the content given that we jump back and forth from the interior (imaginary) space of Wonderland to (the real space of) London quite often.
After one has collected enough memories, Alice will come across a waiting wooden door behind which flames flicker. She opens the door and walks into the flames of her past. In this way she continually embraces death, and through this death, the death of memories (that moment of the past where she forgot them). She is trying to embrace the Real through a journey to the deepest recesses of her mind; it involves death, but does not culminate in it. This task gives her a way to touch-base with reality instead, fomenting a trajectory of travel out of these sewing marks as she stitches the Real and the unconscious together. Let us align the past with the present.
Zizek writes:
Here we can see clearly how fantasy is on the side of reality, how it sustains the subject’s ‘sense of reality’: when the phantasmic frame disintegrates, the subject undergoes a ‘loss of reality’and starts to perceive reality as an ‘irreal nightmarish universe with no firm ontological foundation; this nightmarish universe is not ‘pure fantasy’ but, on the contrary, that which remains of reality after reality is deprived of its support in fantasy. So when Schumann’s Carnaval – with its ‘regression’ to the dream-like universe in which intercourse between ‘real people’ is replaced by a kind of masked ball where one never knows what or who is hidden beneath the mask which laughs crazily at us: a machine, a slimy life-substance, or (undoubtedly the most horrifying case) simply the real double of the mask itself – sets Hoffmann’s Unheimliche to music, what we obtain is not the ‘universe of pure fantasy’ but, rather, the unique artistic rendering of the decomposition of the fantasy-frame. (84)
Something has evidently happened at the outset of the game (which opens with one of her therapy sessions) to draw her back into Wonderland, which is now completely changed. When Alice arrives in Wonderland, she serenely and matter-of-factly notes this, as if this disturbingly twisted Wonderland is merely a scientific phenomenon. Emotion has no place here. When the Cheshire Cat points out this change again later on, she immediately refers to the authority of her psychologist: “Doctor Bumby says that change is constructive, that different is good.” Alice has been desensitized by the authoritative psychoanalytic framework she has been forced to view her thoughts through. But her unconscious (in the form of the cat) tells her otherwise: “Different denotes neither bad nor good, but it certainly means not the same.” As we find out at the end of the game, her psychologist is actually responsible for the deaths of her family, and the burning of her home. The purpose of entering Wonderland is her mind’s way of pointing her in the right direction. When Alice comes across the vorpal blade early in the game, she (her consciousness) says “I’ve not come back here looking for a fight.” “Really?” The Cheshire Cat replies “That’s a pity. One’s certainly looking for you.” Alice is thus being called by her own mind to commit masochism in the aim of freedom, murdering the disgusting and dangerous creatures created inside her, out of the external forces that have acted and caused her to unleash hell unto herself. What this yields, Zizek illustrates, is how the framework of reality was originally constructed and how to create a new one.
Aardse’s piece on the ‘Uncanny Valley’, stemming from the writings of Freud and Mori, was inspiring in light of this psychoanalytically based game. Freud (2003) makes a distinction between our perception of familiar things (“heimlich”) and our perception of unfamiliar things (“unheimlich”), to say that unheimlich is necessarily connected as an idea to heimlich. “[A]mong the various shades of meaning that are recorded for the word heimlich there is one in which it merges with its formal antonym, unheimlich, so that that which is called heimlich becomes unheimlich.” (132) Unheimlich, he shows, deals with the removal of something from one’s vision, or at least the sense that something is secret or hidden in the confrontation. I also read recently De Beauvoir’s chapter called “Childhood” in The Second Sex. She talks about the doll that the girl is given as reparation for the fact that she lacks a penis, which, for the little boy, brings him to assume his “subjectivity” “boldly”, given that he easily dominates his fear of castration. “[T]he very object in which he alienates himself becomes a symbol of autonomy.” (293) Thus “the little girl pampers her doll and dresses her how she dreams of being dressed and pampered; inversely, she thinks of herself as a marvelous doll.” (293) Relating this notion to Freud’s discussion of the automaton Olympia in E.T.A. Hoffman’s The Sandman, an interesting idea about the control of a female character emerges. Freud writes: “the theme of the doll Olympia, who is to all appearances a living being, is by any means the only, or indeed the most important, element that must be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere of uncanniness evoked by the story.” (Aardse, 2014, 3) If we consider the mystification of women, then the fact that the game is centered in and around the unconscious mind of this female becomes salient. Alice is a digital woman, and by this definition brings forth the uncanny experience. She is the doll we caress and play with in the absence of a phallus. This brings me to the following questions: When a female plays the game, is it empowering? And when a male plays the game, is it uncanny? It seems to me (on a De Beauvoirian reading), that the female has been given a phallus by utilizing the video game controller. She can do the same as man, now that she has been given the implement she requires. And surely the male feels uncertain at playing the female heroine, as the boys that Sherman interviews affirm. But the male player does not experience this fear of the unfamiliar in Alice, for everything about her speaks of a masculine drive/purpose; yet, the princess is not absent. The male player can feel as though he is the prince saving the princess at the same time, even if it is actually the princess who saves herself.
Alice herself treats the situation with blunt purposefulness; she treats her own (conscious) self like a tool. Could this be connected to De Beauvoir’s penis envy? She recalls a case when a little girl, upon seeing a boy peeing proclaimed “How practical!”; the female at this age has no sexual interest in the penis, but rather in the conceptual phallus constructed around and out of the penis itself. She wants the power of controlling an object in this way. Indeed, Alice herself searches for Law inside Wonderland, concerned about the ethics at play. To what governing system must she adhere in this new, horrifying unconscious? “Changes here are the cause, or their the reflection, or the effect. What’s going on? What are the new rules?” she asks. She is here attempting to find a symbolic language in this world that imposes itself, like the masculine register in place back in London. She (her consciousness) does not yet realize that it is her job – her goal – to re-discover/re-create the symbolic register for herself. She must destroy the creatures that retain elements of the dingy, industrial London she hails from (many of them have pipes spurting oil out of their bodies, for example) in order to be freed. Thus in the masochistic impulse lies a prospective future of pleasure; once again, Alice will be able to inhabit the ‘magic circle’ of her mind as more than a tool, as a subject who plays in the realm of the unconscious…
Other References:
De Beauvoir, S. The Second Sex. (C. Borde and S. Malovany-Chevalier, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.
Freud, S. (2003). The Uncanny. (D. McClintock, Trans.). London: Penguin Books.
Chapter 1 Transcript for Alice: Madness Returns. Accessible from: http://alice.wikia.com/wiki/Transcript:Alice:_Madness_Returns.
